The Road from Copenhagen

The Road from Copenhagen
Feb 05, 2010

Video hosted on MIT TechTV

About the Speakers

Ernest Moniz

Moderator: ERNEST MONIZ Director, MIT Energy Initiative Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Co-director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment

Ernest J. Moniz has served on the MIT faculty since 1973. He was Under Secretary of the Department of Energy from October 1997 until January 2001. He also served from 1995 to 1997 as Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President.

At MIT, Moniz was Head of the Department of Physics and Director of the Bates Linear Accelerator Center. His principal research contributions have been in theoretical nuclear physics, particularly in advancing nuclear reaction theory at high energy.

Moniz received a B.S. degree in physics from Boston College, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Athens and the University of Erlangen-Nurenburg. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Humboldt Foundation, and the American Physical Society and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Moniz received the 1998 Seymour Cray HPCC Industry Recognition Award for vision and leadership in advancing scientific simulation.

Rob Stavins

ROBERT N. STAVINS Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, Chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Program in Public Policy and the Doctoral Program in Political Economy and Government, and Co-Chair of the Harvard Business School-Kennedy School Joint Degree Programs.

Stavins' research has focused on diverse areas of environmental economics and policy, including examinations of: market-based policy instruments; regulatory impact analysis, innovation and diffusion of pollution-control technologies, environmental benefit valuation, policy instrument choice under uncertainty, competitiveness effects of regulation, depletion of forested wetlands, political economy of policy instrument choice, and costs of carbon sequestration.

Stavins received his B.A. in Philosophy at Northwestern University, an M.S.in Agricultural Economics at Cornell University, and Ph.D. in Economics Harvard University.

Michael Greenstone

MICHAEL GREENSTONE 3M Professor of Environmental Economics, MIT Department of Economics, Research Associate National Bureau of Economic Research

Michael Greenstone is the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings.

His research is focused on estimating the costs and benefits of environmental quality. He has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act and examined its impact on air quality, manufacturing activity, housing prices, and infant mortality to assess its costs and benefits. He is currently engaged in a large scale project to estimate the economic costs of climate change. Other current projects include examinations of: the benefits of the Superfund program, the economic and health impacts of indoor air pollution in Orissa, India, individual's revealed value of a statistical life, the impact of air pollution on infant mortality in developing countries, and the costs of biodiversity.

He is a member of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of EPA's Science Advisory Board and his research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, and EPA. In 2004, Professor Greenstone received the 12th Annual Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in the Field of Health Economics. He is currently an editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics from Swarthmore College.

STEPHEN ANSOLABEHERE Professor of Political Science, MIT, Professor of Government, Harvard University

Stephen Ansolabehere studies elections, democracy, and the mass media. He is coauthor (with Shanto Iyengar) of The Media Game (Macmillan, 1993) and of Going Negative: How Political Advertising Alienates and Polarizes the American Electorate (The Free Press, 1996). Ansolabehere is also a member of the Cal Tech/MIT Voting Project. which was established in 2000 to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened the 2000 US Presidential election.

Ansolabehere received a B.S. in Economics and B.A. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

EDWARD S. STEINFELD Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT

Edward Steinfeld is an associate professor of political economy in the MIT Department of Political Science. Steinfeld directs the MIT China Program (MISTI), and co-directs the MIT Industrial Performance Center's China Energy Group. His research focuses on the political economy of development, with a particular emphasis on contemporary China.

Much of Steinfeld's current research focuses on the growth, regulation, and performance of China's energy sector. Decisions being reached in that sector today exert tremendous influence over a variety of global environmental concerns, everything from climate change to natural resource depletion. Such decisions, however, are exceedingly complicated, often involving multiple actors and dense interactions between new technologies, burgeoning markets, diverse commercial strategies, and new regulations.

While at MIT, Steinfeld has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and a variety of both public and private sector organizations. Steinfeld currently serves as a director of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

He received a B.A. ('88) in Government from Harvard University, a M.A.('93)and Ph.D.,('96) in Political Science from Harvard University.

Jake Jacoby

HENRY D. JACOBY Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management Co-Director, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, MIT

Henry "Jake" Jacoby studies policy and management in the areas of energy, natural resources, and the environment, writing widely on these topics, including five books. He is a former Chair of the MIT Faculty, and former Director of the Harvard Environmental Systems Program, former Director of CEEPR, and former Associate Director of the MIT Energy Laboratory. He currently serves on the Scientific Committee for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program and on the Climate Research Committee of the U.S. National Research Council. His current research is focused on economic analysis of climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation, and the integration of this work with the natural science of the issue.

Jacoby received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957, an M.P.A. in Public Administration from Harvard University in 1963, and a Ph.D. in Economics, also from Harvard University, in 1967.

John Sterman

JOHN STERMAN PHD '82 Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management and Engineering Systems Director, System Dynamics Group, MIT

John D. Sterman's research includes systems thinking and organizational learning, computer simulation of corporate strategy, and the theory of nonlinear dynamics. He is the author of many scholarly and popular articles on the challenges and opportunities facing organizations today, including the book Modeling for Organizational Learning, and the award-winning textbook Business Dynamics.

Sterman's research centers on improving managerial decision making in complex systems. He has pioneered the development of "management flight simulators" of corporate and economic systems.

Sterman has twice been awarded the Jay W. Forrester Prize for the best published work in system dynamics. He won a 2005 IBM Faculty Award, and the 2001 Accenture Award for the best paper of the year published in the California Management Review (with Nelson Repenning). He has five times won awards for teaching excellence from the students of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was named one of the Sloan School's "Outstanding Faculty" by the 2001 Business Week Guide to the Best Business Schools.