Julian O’Halloran, Reporter, BBC

After studying at Oxford and London Universities, Julian O'Halloran has worked with BBC news and current affairs programmes in both radio and television over several decades. He has worked on Newsnight, Panorama, Assignment, Correspondent, File on 4, and The World Tonight. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, the Gulf and Central America. In China he witnessed the military crackdown against students at Tiananmen Square. He reported on the Velvet Revolution in Prague, the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, and the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and then the dismantling of Apartheid. Just over twenty years ago Julian was first alerted to the scale of the global threat posed by climate change during an interview with one of Mrs Thatcher's favourite ambassadors, Sir Crispin Tickell. Since then he has begun to focus more on energy, the environment and climate change, avidly following the twists and turns of British energy policy. He has followed the nuclear power industry in Europe and the USA and more recently in Asia. Last year, in the wake of the Japan's tsunami and the severe damage at Fukushima, he reported on plans in India to build the world's biggest nuclear power station in an area alleged by some experts to carry moderate to high earthquake risk. Julian has also come back again and again to the challenges facing fossil fuels producers, including in Britain, Europe and the USA. He has followed the dramatic impact of shale gas development on gas prices in America, and he was awakened to the full instensity of the debate over fracking in Britain at the first Shale Gas Environmental Summit in London last autumn.