Governor Talk with Ed Conway
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Our June Governor Talk will be given by Ed Conway on his new book 'Material World'.
We are in the early stages of a new industrial revolution (and energy transition) – an attempt to replace fossil fuels with renewable alternatives. Around the world, many countries – most notably the US and China – are also treating this revolution as an opportunity for industrial strategy, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies at companies promising to make green technology in their territory. They are also competing with each other to obtain the minerals we will need to build out these new technologies, from copper and cobalt to lithium and even rare forms of sand. Having spent the past three years travelling the world and investigating the economics – past and present – of some of these materials, Ed will be presenting his thoughts on this.
About the Speaker
Ed is economics and data editor for Sky News (joining in August 2011), covering major UK and international economics, business and political stories. During the early stages of the 2008 banking crisis, he was the first to reveal the Bank of England's plans to create additional money through quantitative easing, and to warn of the funding gap in the banking system which later led to the collapse of Northern Rock.
He is also economics columnist for The Times, and has been one of the longest-running economics editors in UK journalism, having started covering the sector in 2003. Prior to joining Sky, he was economics editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, where he was also a weekly op-ed columnist, and economics correspondent at the Daily Mail.
He was educated at the Oratory School, a Roman Catholic boarding independent school for boys in the village of Woodcote in Oxfordshire, followed by Pembroke College, Oxford, where he took an MA in English, and after having worked for several years, gained a Fulbright Scholarship to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in the United States where he took an MPA (a master's degree in Public Administration).
Ed is the author of the book on Bretton Woods, The Summit: The Biggest Battle Of The Second World War – Fought Behind Closed Doors (Little, Brown, 2014) and an economics guidebook, 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know (Quercus, 2009). His latest book – Material World (2023) traces the history of humanity using the six raw materials that have shaped the modern world- sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium.
Please note this event is exclusive to our Corporate Members.