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Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop (2011)

Chapter: Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
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B
Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants

PLANNING COMMITTEE MEMBERS

John Weyant came to Stanford in 1977, primarily to help develop the Energy Modeling Forum. Weyant was formerly a senior research associate in the Department of Operations Research, a member of the Stanford International Energy Project, and a fellow in the U.S.-Northeast Asia Forum on International Policy. He is currently an adviser to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. His current research is focused on global climate change, energy security, corporate strategy analysis, and Japanese energy policy. He is on the editorial boards of The Energy Journal and Petroleum Management. His national society memberships include the American Economics Association, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, Econometric Society, International Association of Energy Economists, Mathematical Programming Society, ORSA, and TIMS.


Marilyn A. Brown is a professor of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously, she was the interim director of the Engineering Science and Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). During her 22 years at ORNL, Brown researched the impacts of policies and programs aimed at advancing the market entry of sustainable energy technologies and led several energy technology and policy scenario studies. Prior to serving at ORNL, she was a tenured associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she conducted research on the diffusion of energy innovations. She has authored more than 150 publications and has been an expert witness in hearings before committees of both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. A recent study that she co-led, Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future, was the subject of two Senate hearings, has been cited in proposed federal legislation, and has had a significant role in international climate change debates. She serves on the boards of directors of several energy, engineering, and environmental organizations, including the Alliance to Save Energy and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, and she serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Technology Transfer. Brown is a member of the National Commission on Energy Policy. She has a Ph.D. degree in geography from Ohio State University and a master’s degree in resource planning from the University of Massachusetts.


William D. Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He completed his undergraduate work at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on the faculty of Yale University since 1967 and has

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

been a full professor of economics since 1973. Nordhaus lives in downtown New Haven with his wife Barbara, who works at the Yale Child Study Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is on the research staff of the Cowles Foundation and of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a member and senior advisor of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C., since 1972. Nordhaus is a current or past editor of several scientific journals and has served on the executive committees of the American Economic Association and the Eastern Economic Association. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts and was the first chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He was the first chairman of the newly formed American Economic Association Committee on Federal Statistics. In 2004, he was awarded the prize of Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association. From 1977 to 1979, he was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to 1988, he served as the provost of Yale University. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences, including the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, the Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, the Committee on National Statistics, the Committee on Data and Research on Illegal Drugs, and the Committee on the Implications for Science and Society of Abrupt Climate Change. He recently chaired a panel of the National Academy of Sciences; this committee produced a report, Nature’s Numbers, which recommended approaches to integrate environmental and other non-market activity into the national economic accounts. More recently, he has directed the Yale Project on Non-Market Accounting, supported by the Glaser Foundation. He is the author of many books, among them Invention, Growth and Welfare, Is Growth Obsolete?, The Efficient Use of Energy Resources, Reforming Federal Regulation, Managing the Global Commons, Warming the World, and (joint with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook Economics, whose eighteenth edition was published in the fall of 2005. His research has focused on economic growth and natural resources, as well as the question of the extent to which resources constrain economic growth. Since the 1970s, he has developed economic approaches to global warming, including the construction of integrated economic and scientific models (the DICE and RICE models) to determine an efficient path for coping with climate change, with DICE-2007 completed in the spring of 2007. Nordhaus has also studied wage and price behavior, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, productivity, and the “new economy.” His 1996 study of the economic history of lighting back to Babylonian times found that the measurement of long-term economic growth has been significantly underestimated. He returned to Mesopotamian economics with a study in 2002 of the costs of a war in Iraq. Recently, he has undertaken the “G-Econ project,” which provides the first comprehensive measures of economic activity at a geophysical scale.


Karen L. Palmer is a senior fellow and associate director for electricity in the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at Resources for the Future (RFF) in Washington, D.C., and the director of RFF’s Electricity and Environment Program. Palmer specializes in the economics of environmental regulation of the electricity sector and the cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency programs. Her most recent work has focused on renewable energy and controls of multi-pollutants and carbon emissions from electrical generating plants. She has done extensive work analyzing different aspects of policy design for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. She is co-author of the book Alternating Currents: Electricity Markets and Public Policy, published by RFF Press in 2002. Palmer previously served as an economist in the Office of Economic Policy at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. She received a Ph.D. degree in economics from Boston College.


Richard Richels is senior technical executive for global climate change research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. He has served on a number of national and international advisory panels, including committees of the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Research Council. Richels has served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He also served on the Scientific Steering Committee for the U.S. Carbon Cycle Program. He currently serves on the Advisory Committee for Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, the U.S. government’s Climate Change Science Program Product Development Advisory Committee, and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Climate Research Committee, as well as on the Panel on Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change for the NAS study on America’s Climate

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

Choices. Richels received a B.S. degree in physics from the College of William and Mary in 1968. He was awarded an M.S. degree in 1973 and a Ph.D. degree in 1976 from Harvard University’s Division of Applied Sciences, where he concentrated in decision sciences. While at Harvard he was a member of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center.


Steven Smith’s research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute focuses on long-term socioeconomic scenarios and the interface between socioeconomic systems and the climate system. His research interests include aerosols, non-CO2 greenhouse gases, the carbon cycle, biomass energy, energy technologies, and land-use changes. His recent research concerns the role of non-CO2 forcing agents in policy scenarios, including sulfate aerosols, black carbon, and non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Model development efforts include implementing in the MiniCAM framework emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases and aerosols (sulfur-dioxide and carbonaceous aerosols). At the Joint Global Change Research Institute, Smith is part of the team that has developed ObjECTS, a new object-oriented modeling framework. Prior to joining PNNL in 1999, Smith worked with T.M.L. Wigley as a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and he was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. He also has served on the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society, as well as on the Executive Committee of the APS Forum on Physics and Society.

SPEAKERS AND DISCUSSANTS

Geoffrey Blanford is a program manager for EPRI’s research on Global Climate Change Policy Costs and Benefits. The program conducts analysis of the economic and environmental implications of domestic and international climate policy proposals, with an emphasis on the principles of efficient policy design, the role of technology, and the value of R&D. Blanford’s research activities include development and application of integrated assessment modeling to address issues such as technology policy and international climate agreements. He holds a Ph.D. in management science and engineering from Stanford University.


Rick Duke is currently deputy assistant secretary for climate policy at the Department of Energy. Previously, as the director of the National Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC’s) Center for Market Innovation he built a team of a dozen professionals dedicated to working with government and corporate leaders to accelerate investment in global warming solutions. Prior to joining NRDC, Duke was an engagement manager at McKinsey, where his projects included managing the firm’s first global greenhouse gas abatement “cost curve” study for the European Union utility Vattenfall. He has also worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, managed a small renewable energy company in Honduras, and consulted for the International Finance Corporation. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, where his doctoral work focused on the economics of public investment in clean energy.


Jae Edmonds is a chief scientist and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute, a collaboration with the University of Maryland at College Park. His research in the areas of long-term, global energy, technology, economy, and climate change spans three decades and has produced several books, numerous scientific papers, and countless presentations. He is one of the pioneers in the field of integrated assessment modeling of climate change. His principal research focus is the role of energy technology in addressing climate change. He is the chief scientist for the Integrated Assessment Research Program in the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. He has been an active participant in all of the major assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.


Allen Fawcett is a senior economist in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Climate Economics Branch, which is responsible for developing and applying EPA’s economic models for domestic and international climate change policy analyses. Currently, Mr. Fawcett is conducting economic analyses of the leading climate change legislative proposals in the U.S. Congress using a suite of models including the Applied Dynamic Analysis of the Global Economy model (ADAGE) and the Intertemporal General Equilibrium Model (IGEM). He also helped to

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

coordinate the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum 22–U.S. Transition Scenarios Subgroup. Allen joined the Environmental Protection Agency in 2003 after receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics from the College of William & Mary.


David L. Greene is a corporate fellow of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a senior fellow of the Howard H. Baker, Jr., Center for Public Policy, and a research professor of economics at the University of Tennessee. He is an author of more than 200 publications on transportation and energy issues; an emeritus member of both the Energy and the Alternative Fuels Committees of the Transportation Research Board (TRB); and a lifetime national associate of the National Academies. He is a recipient of the TRB’s Pyke Johnson Award, the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Barry D. McNutt Award for Excellence in Automotive Policy Analysis, the Department of Energy’s 2007 Hydrogen R&D Award, and the International Association for Energy Economics’ Best Paper Award for his research on the rebound effect, and he was recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for contributions to the IPCC’s receipt of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. in geography and environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University.


Howard Gruenspecht is the deputy administrator for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). He has worked extensively on electricity policy issues, including restructuring and reliability, regulations affecting motor fuels and vehicles, energy-related environmental issues, and economy-wide energy modeling. Before joining EIA, he was a resident scholar at Resources for the Future. From 1993 to 2000, Gruenspecht served as director of economic, electricity and natural gas analysis in the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Policy, having originally come to DOE in 1991 as deputy assistant secretary for economic and environmental policy. His accomplishments as a career senior executive at DOE have been recognized with three Presidential Rank Awards. Prior to his service at DOE, Gruenspecht was a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (1989-1991), with primary responsibilities in the areas of environment, energy, regulation, and international trade. His other professional experience includes service as a faculty member at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University (1981-1988), economic adviser to the chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission (1988-1989), and assistant director, economics and business, on the White House Domestic Policy Staff (1978-1979). Gruenspecht received his B.A. from McGill University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1982.


Hillard Huntington is executive director of Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum, where he conducts studies to improve the usefulness of models for understanding energy and environmental problems. In 2005 the forum received the prestigious Adelman-Frankel Award from the International Association for Energy Economics for its “unique and innovative contribution to the field of energy economics.” His current research interests are modeling energy security, energy price shocks, energy market impacts of environmental policies, and international natural gas and LNG markets. In 2002 he won the Best Paper Award from the Energy Journal for a paper coauthored with Dermot Gately of New York University. He is a senior fellow and a past-president of the United States Association for Energy Economics and a member of the National Petroleum Council. He was also vice-president for publications for the International Association for Energy Economics and a member of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Energy Data. Previously, he served on a joint U.S.-Russian National Academy of Sciences panel on energy conservation research and development. Mr. Huntington has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the California Energy Commission. Prior to coming to Stanford in 1980, he held positions in the corporate and government sectors with Data Resources, Inc., the U.S. Federal Energy Administration, and the Public Utilities Authority in Monrovia, Liberia (as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer).


Mark Jaccard has been a professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, since 1986—interrupted from 1992 to 1997 while he served as chair and CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission. His Ph.D. is from the Energy Economics and Policy Institute at the University of Grenoble. Internationally, Jaccard has been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (currently, for the special report on renewables), the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

Development (co-chair of task force on sustainable use of coal), and the Global Energy Assessment (convening lead author for sustainable energy policy). His research and applied focus is on the design and application of energy-economy models, especially for assessing the cost and effectiveness of climate policies.


Dale W. Jorgenson is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. Jorgenson has been honored with membership in the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1978), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969). He was elected to fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1982), the American Statistical Association (1965), and the Econometric Society (1964). He was awarded honorary doctorates by Uppsala University (1991), the University of Oslo (1991), Keio University (2003), the University of Mannheim (2004), the University of Rome (2006), the Stockholm School of Economics (2007), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2007), and Kansai University (2009). Jorgenson served as president of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 2000 and was named a distinguished fellow of the AEA in 2001. He was a founding member of the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy of the National Research Council in 1991 and served as chairman of that board from 1998 to 2006. He also served as chairman of Section 54, Economic Sciences, of the National Academy of Sciences from 2000 to 2003 and was president of the Econometric Society in 1987. Jorgenson has conducted groundbreaking research on information technology and economic growth, energy and the environment, tax policy and investment behavior, and applied econometrics. He is the author of 246 articles in economics and the author and editor of 32 books. His collected papers have been published in 10 volumes by the MIT Press, beginning in 1995. His most recent book, Information Technology and the American Growth Resurgence, co-authored with Mun Ho and Kevin Stiroh and published by the MIT Press in 2005, represents a major effort to quantify the impact of information technology on the U.S. economy. Another MIT Press volume, Lifting the Burden: Tax Reform, the Cost of Capital, and U.S. Economic Growth, co-authored with Kun-Young Yun in 2001, proposes a new approach to capital income taxation, dubbed “a smarter type of tax” by the Financial Times. Jorgenson was born in Bozeman, Montana, in 1933 and attended public schools in Helena, Montana. He received a B.A. in economics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1955 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1959. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Harvard faculty in 1969 and was appointed the Frederic Eaton Abbe Professor of Economics in 1980. He served as chairman of the Department of Economics from 1994 to 1997.


Ray Kopp is the director of the Climate Policy Program at Resources for the Future, a leading non-partisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C., that has pioneered the application of economics as a tool to develop more effective policy about the use and conservation of natural resources. Kopp is an expert on climate change and energy issues. His current studies focus on U.S. domestic greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation policy, U.S. foreign policy as it pertains to international negotiations on climate change, and deforestation and degradation in tropical countries. His expertise has influenced the design of state and federal policies as well as those of foreign governments. Kopp also has a long-standing research interest in cost-benefit analysis and techniques for assigning value to environmental and natural resources that do not have market prices. He has assisted numerous governments, intergovernmental organizations, and private entities conducting damage assessments for environmental claims. He was a consultant to the state of Alaska on the Exxon Valdez oil spill and to the United Nations Compensation Commission on the monetary value of environmental damage caused by the 1991 Gulf War.


Molly K. Macauley is a research director and senior fellow at Resources for the Future. Her research expertise includes the economics of new technologies, the value of information, space economics and policy, and the use of economic incentives in environmental regulation and other policy design. She has frequently testified before Congress and serves on numerous national- level committees and panels, including the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board, the Climate Working Group of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Earth Science Applications Analysis Group of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She also served as a lead author on a project under the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. She was selected as one of the National Space Society’s “Rising Stars,” and in 2001 she was voted into the International Academy

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

of Astronautics. She has received awards from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration for her research. Macauley has published widely and has also served as a visiting professor in the Department of Economics at Johns Hopkins University.


Richard H. Moss is a senior research scientist with the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland, a visiting senior research scientist at the Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center, and a senior fellow with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). He has served as director of the Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program/Climate Change Science Program, vice president and managing director for climate change at WWF, and senior director of the U.N. Foundation Energy and Climate Program. He also directed the Technical Support Unit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) impacts, adaptation, and mitigation working group and served on the faculty of Princeton University. He was a coordinating lead author of Confronting Climate Change and Realizing the Potential of Energy Efficiency, led preparation of the U.S. government’s 10-year climate change research plan, and has been a lead author and general editor of a number of IPCC assessments, special reports, and technical papers. Moss remains active in the IPCC and currently co-chairs the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis. He serves on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ standing committee on the “human dimensions” of global environmental change and on the editorial board of Climatic Change. He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006, a distinguished associate of the U.S. Department of Energy in 2004, and a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program in 2001. He received an M.P.A. and a Ph.D. from Princeton University (in public and international affairs) and his B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Moss’s research interests include development and use of scenarios, characterization and communication of uncertainty, and quantitative indicators of adaptive capacity and vulnerability to climate change.


Nebojsa Nakicenovic is a professor of energy economics at the Vienna University of Technology, deputy director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and director of the Global Energy Assessment (GEA). Among other positions, Nakicenovic is a member of the United Nations Secretary General Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change; a member of the Advisory Council of the German Government on Global Change (WBGU); a member of the Advisory Board of the World Bank Development Report 2010: Climate Change; a member of the International Council for Science (ICSU) Committee on Scientific Planning and Review; a member of the Global Carbon Project; a member of the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) Expert Panel on Sustainable Energy Supply, Poverty Reduction and Climate Change; a member of the Panel on Socioeconomic Scenarios for Climate Change Impact and Response Assessments; a member of the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) Steering Committee; and chair of the Advisory Board of OMV Future Energy Fund (Austrian oil company). Nakicenovic holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and computer science from Princeton University and the University of Vienna, where he also completed his Ph.D. He also holds an Honoris Causa Ph.D. degree in engineering from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Among Nakicenovic’s research interests are the long-term patterns of technological change, economic development and response to climate change, and, in particular, the evolution of energy, mobility, information, and communication technologies.


Gregory Nemet is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He is also a member of the university’s Energy Sources and Policy Cluster and a senior fellow at the university’s Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy. His research and teaching focus on improving understanding of the environmental, social, economic, and technical dynamics of the global energy system. He teaches courses in international environmental policy and energy systems analysis. A central focus of his research involves empirical analysis of the process of innovation and technological change. He is particularly interested in how the outcomes of this line of research can inform public policy related to improvements in low-carbon energy technologies. His work is motivated by a more general interest in issues related to energy and the environment, including how government actions can expand access to energy services while reducing their environmental impacts. He holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in energy and resources,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

both from the University of California, Berkeley. His undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College is in geography and economics.


Richard Newell is the administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. He is on leave from his position as the Gendell Associate Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Previously he served as the senior economist for energy and environment on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He also spent many years as a senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), an independent, nonpartisan environmental and resource economics research institution in Washington, D.C. He has published widely on the economics of markets and policies for energy, the environment, and related technologies, particularly alternatives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving other energy and environmental goals. Prior to his confirmation, Newell was a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a university fellow of RFF, and he served on several boards, including those for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the journal Energy Economics, the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and the Automotive X-Prize. He has served on several National Academy of Sciences’ expert committees related to energy, environment, and innovation. Newell holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in environmental and resource economics. He also holds an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a B.S. in materials engineering and a B.A. in philosophy from Rutgers University.


Edward S. Rubin is a professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a chair as the Alumni Professor of Environmental Engineering and Science, and he was the founding director of the university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies and the Environmental Institute. His teaching and research are in the areas of energy utilization, environmental control, technology innovation, and technology-policy interactions, with a particular focus on issues related to coal utilization, carbon sequestration, and global climate change. He is the author of more than 200 technical publications and a textbook on engineering and the environment. He is a fellow and member of the ASME, a past chairman of its Environmental Control Division, a recipient of the AWMA Lyman A. Ripperton Award for outstanding achievements as an educator, and recipient of the Distinguished Professor of Engineering Award from Carnegie Mellon. He serves on advisory committees to state and federal agencies and on various committees of the National Academies, including its Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, and is serving on the congressionally mandated study “America’s Climate Choices.” He was a coordinating lead author of the 2005 Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He also serves as a consultant to public and private organizations with interests in energy and the environment. Rubin received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the City College of New York and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University.


Brent Sohngen is a professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in environmental economics from Yale University in 1996. Sohngen conducts research on the economics of land use change, the design of incentive mechanisms for water and carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and nonmarket valuation of environmental resources. He developed a global timber and land use model that has been widely used to assess the implications of climate change for forested ecosystems and forest product markets and to assess the costs of carbon sequestration in forests, including reductions in deforestation. The model has recently been expanded to account for agricultural production and markets. Sohngen has written or co-written 31 peer-reviewed journal articles, 45 monographs, and book chapters. He has been published in a variety of journals, including the American Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Ecological Economics, and Climatic Change. He co-edited a special issue of Climatic Change in 2006, addressing adaptation to climate change.


David Victor is a professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the school’s new International Law and Regulation Laboratory. Looking

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×

across a wide array of issues from environment to human rights, trade and security, the laboratory explores when (and why) international laws actually work. Most recently, Victor served as director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he was also a professor at Stanford Law School. Previously, he directed the science and technology program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York, where he directed the council’s task force on energy co-chaired by Jim Schlesinger and John Deutch and was a senior adviser to the task force on climate change chaired by governors George Pataki and Tom Vilsack. Victor’s research at Stanford and the CFR examined ways to improve management of the nation’s $50 billion strategic oil reserve, strategies for managing investment in geoengineering, and a wide array of other topics related to technological innovation and the impact of innovation on economic growth. His research also examined global forest policy, global warming, and genetic engineering of food crops. His books include Natural Gas and Geopolitics (2006), The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming (2001; second edition 2004); Climate Change: Debating America’s Policy Options; and Technological Innovation and Economic Performance (2002, co-edited with Benn Steil and Richard Nelson). Victor is the author of more than 150 essays and articles in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers, such as Climatic Change, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Nature, New York Times, Science, Scientific American, and Washington Post.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
Page 35
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
Page 36
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
Page 37
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
Page 38
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
Page 39
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members, Speakers, and Discussants." National Research Council. 2011. Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13023.
×
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Models are fundamental for estimating the possible costs and effectiveness of different policies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There is a wide array of models to perform such analysis, differing in the level of technological detail, treatment of technological progress, spatial and sector details, and representation of the interaction of the energy sector to the overall economy and environment. These differences impact model results, including cost estimates. More fundamentally, these models differ as to how they represent fundamental processes that have a large impact on policy analysis--such as how different models represent technological learning and cost reductions that come through increasing production volumes, or how different models represent baseline conditions.

Reliable estimates of the costs and potential impacts on the United States economy of various emissions reduction and other mitigation strategies are critical to the development of the federal climate change research and development portfolio. At the request of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Academies organized a workshop, summarized in this volume, to consider some of these types of modeling issues.

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