Panel Discussion: Global Solution or Country Specific Solutions? Chair: Ed Nell, Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research. Hirofumi Uzawa, Social Common Capital Research Tokyo. Ernst U. von Weizsaecker, International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. Nathaniel Keohane, Walker Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund. Charles Komanoff, Carbon Tax Center.
For two days, academics from around the world, government officials, and policy analysts examined the economic issues associated with carbon emissions, climate change, and emission regulation. The conference offered important lessons on how to enact effective climate change policy despite the United States fragile economy and the post-Copenhagen tensions between developed and developing countries.
Bio
Nathaniel Keohane
Nathaniel Keohane is Director of Economic Policy and Analysis. Dr. Keohane oversees EDF's analytical work on the economics of climate policy, and helps to develop and advocate the organization's policy positions on global warming.
His academic research has focused on the design and performance of market-based environmental policies.
Charles Komanoff
Charles Komanoff is widely known for his work as an energy-policy analyst, transport economist and environmental activist in New York City. He "re-founded" NYC's bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives in the 1980s, co-founded the pedestrian-rights group Right Of Way in the 1990s, and wrote or edited the landmark reports Subsidies for Traffic, The Bicycle Blueprint, and Killed By Automobile.
Earlier, Komanoff gained prominence for deconstructing the disastrous economics of nuclear power as author-researcher and expert witness for states and municipalities across the U.S.
Ed Nell
Ed Nell is Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research.
Hirofumi Uzawa
Hirofumi Uzawa is an economist, professor emeritus of Tokyo University, and a member of the Japan Academy.
Uzawa majored in mathematics at University of Tokyo, and went on to its graduate school, obtaining a doctorate in Mathematics. He went to study Economics at Stanford University in 1956 with Fulbright fellowship, and became an assistant, then assistant professor, and then associate professor at Stanford. He was assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and professor at the University of Chicago, and later assumed the position of professor of the Department of Economics at Tokyo University in 1969. He also taught at Niigata University, Chuo University, and United Nations University.
Uzawa is currently serving as senior fellow at the social, commonness, and capital research center of Doshisha University. He held the position of the chairman of the Econometric Society from 1976 to 1977. He became a member of the Japan Academy in 1989. He has been row in Japanese Culture Merit in 1983, and won the Order of Culture in 1997.
Uzawa initiated the field of mathematical economics in postwar days and formulated the growth theory of neoclassical economics. This is reflected in the Uzawa two-sector growth model and the Uzawa condition, among others.
Ernst U. von Weizsäcker
Ernst von Weizsäcker joined the Bren School as Dean in January 2006. Previously, he served as the policy director at the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development, director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy, and president of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy. He is a member of the Club of Rome, a global think tank devoted to improving society, and he served on the World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalization. Later, he became a member of the Bundestag, the federal parliament of Germany, where he was appointed chairman of the Environmental Committee. He has also served as a professor of interdisciplinary biology and was the founding president of the University of Kassel in Germany.
Von Weizsäcker has authored several influential books on the environment, including Earth Politics and Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use.
Increase in the global average surface temperature resulting from enhancement of the greenhouse effect, primarily by air pollution. In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasted that by 2100 global average surface temperatures would increase 3.2–7.2 °F (1.8–4.0 °C), depending on a range of scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, and stated that it was now 90 percent certain that most of the warming observed over the previous half century could be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities (i.e., industrial processes and transportation). Many scientists predict that such an increase in temperature would cause polar ice caps and mountain glaciers to melt rapidly, significantly raising the levels of coastal waters, and would produce new patterns and extremes of drought and rainfall, seriously disrupting food production in certain regions. Other scientists maintain that such predictions are overstated. The 1992 Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change attempted to address the issue of global warming, but in both cases the efforts were hindered by conflicting national economic agendas and disputes between developed and developing nations over the cost and consequences of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
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