Biography of Harry Braun, Sustainable Partners International

Harry Braun

Harry William Braun III is an analyst, author and CEO. He was born in Long Beach , California on November 6, 1948. His father was a sales representative and his mother was focused on raising Harry and his older sister Kathy. After a brief stay in California , Harry spent the next 16 years living in various locations in the Denver , Colorado area. Harry 's family moved to Scottsdale , Arizona in 1965, where he graduated from Coronado High School in 1967. Harry then worked at a number of jobs in order to put himself through Arizona State University (ASU) where he received a Bachelor's degree in history and education in 1971. Harry's undergraduate work was in the social and physical sciences, and it was during his period that Harry began to focus on the serious nature of the global environmental problems, as well as the remarkable progress that was being made in the areas of molecular biology and knowledge in general.

Harry was highly influenced by Professor Albert Bartlett's papers on exponential growth, and The Closing Circle , by Barry Commoner, Future Shock , by Allan Toffler, and Utopia or Oblivion by Buckminister Fuller, who all warned that due to the exponential growth in knowledge and the exponential nature of the global environmental problems, the human community aboard Spaceship Earth was rapidly heading towards either utopia or oblivion. The other significant book Harry read in college was The Immortalist , by Alan Harrington , who predicted the coming era of designer genes that would be able to switch-off the biological mechanisms of aging and disease. As a freshman in Air Force ROTC, Harry supported the war in Vietnam , but by the time he was a sophomore, he had changed his view when he learned that the U.S. government falsified intelligence data to justify the invasion of Vietnam , which then resulted in the mass-murder of literally millions of innocent people.

Harry continued to do graduate work in evolutionary biology and anthropology at ASU, and he received a teaching position at Thunderbird High School in Phoenix in 1972 where he taught both anthropology and history. He was drafted in that same year, but before his physical exam was scheduled, the new Secretary of Defense (Melvin Laird) dissolved the draft, which allowed Harry to continue teaching. But the Earth Day events only increased his and many others awareness of the critical nature of the global environmental problems, and it was increasingly clear to him that the most serious environmental problems were related to our use of fossil and nuclear fuels for energy. It was particularly disheartening to Harry that the vast majority of highly-educated physics professors and nuclear engineers were confidently assuring the general public that they did not need to worry about the nuclear wastes, and that nuclear power plants were the answer to our reliance on the rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. When they ran out of uranium, they would simply build breeders that would usher in the Plutonium Age. While Harry was no nuclear scientist or engineer, he knew enough about basic biology and science to know that plutonium is one of the most toxic substances ever created; it was very difficult to handle and store; and it would remain lethal for over 250,000 years. As Harry continued to study the issue in more detail, it was clear that the existing highly-secret nuclear waste storage facilities were already leaking and out of control, including the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado that was only a few miles from where he lived for many years.

Harry was highly impressed with Edward Thorndike , a professor of physics at Harvard University who wrote in his book, Energy and Environment, that "Increasingly, scientists and engineers are being called upon to give advice here; few of them, however, have adequate knowledge that extends beyond their own areas of specialization." It was a nice way of saying that in the current exponential knowledge explosion, we are typically being informed by highly specialized individuals who know a great deal about very little. But as professor Thorndike wrote: "It is the very nature of environmental and energy problems that there are extensive interconnections, and a broad knowledge of the "big picture" is at least as important as a detailed knowledge of any one aspect of it." Harry was also impressed by the observation that truth and insight is not typically found in bits of information or scientific facts, but in the order and the patterns that one choose to make with them.

While the overwhelming majority of energy experts dismissed the large-scale use of solar and wind technologies, Harry wanted to investigate the matter for himself. It was not very long before he found a number of brilliant scientists and engineers who were convinced that nuclear power plants were not needed because many of the renewable energy technologies could be mass-produced to make hydrogen from water, which could then be used as a pollution-free fuel that was safer than gasoline -- and hydrogen was inexhaustible. The experts Harry found included William Heronemus, a graduate of the Naval Academy who then served as a naval architect before he retired from the Navy and became a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Professor W.H. Avery, a professor of engineering and Director of the Ocean Energy Programs at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. These individuals and their colleagues, along with other engineering teams at Carnegie Mellon University , Lockheed, TRW and Grumman, had all prepared detailed designs for sea-based, solar-powered ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) systems that could be easily be mass-produced in existing shipyards on a scale to displace all fossil and nuclear fuels. In addition, Professor Heronemus developed the concept of multi-array "Windships" that could also be used for large-scale hydrogen production.

In 1975, Harry gave a presentation on his research to Jay O'Malley, the Chairman of the Board of the O'Malley Companies, a 100-year old building materials supply and real estate firm with its headquarters in Phoenix . Jay and his staff were impressed with Harry's work, and he was subsequently offered a position as an energy analyst to help evaluate potential solar products that could be sold in O'Malley's chain of retail stores. Harry accepted the position and spent the next several years working with Tom Bird, O'Malley's chief engineer, on a comprehensive analysis of the solar and hydrogen energy options and vendors who manufactured solar thermal, photovoltaic, and hydrogen production systems. In 1980 Harry became a member of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy (iahe.org), a peer-review scientific and educational organization. After reviewing Harry 's work in 1981, T. Nejat Veziroglu, a professor of engineering at the University of Miami who has served as President of the IAHE since its inception, invited Harry to serve as an advisory Board Member of the prestigious organization, which has hundreds of Ph.D-level chemists and engineers from over 82 countries.