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Abstract: Clean energy provides a number of benefits at scales from household to village to city and region. An unrealized and under-appreciated opportunity is to transition conflict regions from external fuel supply chains to local, clean and unpolluting energy. The benefits of this transition include local energy security to shared benefits from sustaining local generation capacity, which we term 'peace through grids'.  

Speaker bio: Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL; http://rael.berkeley.edu), and was Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from 2007 - 2015.

He was appointed by then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in April 2010 as the first energy fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative. He began service as the Science Envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016, but resigned over President Trump’s policies in August 2017. He has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy

Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (BA 1984) and Harvard (MA 1986; PhD 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Kammen helped found over 10 companies, including Enphase that went public in 2012, Renewable Funding (Renew Financial) a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) implementing company that went public in 2014. Kammen played a central role in developing the successful bid for the $500 million energy biosciences institute funded by BP.

During 2010-2011 Kammen served as the World Bank Group’s first Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. While there, Kammen worked on the Kenya-Ethiopia “green corridor” transmission project, Morocco’s green transformation, the 10-year energy strategy for the World Bank, and on investing in household energy and gender equity. He was appointed to this newly created position in October 2010, in which he provided strategic leadership on policy, technical, and operational fronts. The aim is to enhance the operational impact of the Bank’s renewable energy and energy efficiency activities while expanding the institution’s role as an enabler of global dialogue on moving energy development to a cleaner and more sustainable pathway. Kammen’s work at the World Bank included funding electrified personal and municipal vehicles in China, and the $1.24 billion transmission project linking renewable energy assets in Kenya and Ethiopia.

He has authored or co-authored 12 books, written more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, and has testified more than 40 times to U.S. state and federal congressional briefings, and has provided various governments with more than 50 technical reports. For details see http://rael.berkeley.edu/publications. Dr. Kammen also served for many years on the Technical Review Board of the Global Environment Facility. He is the Specialty Chief Editor for Understanding Earth and Its Resources for Frontiers for Young Minds.

Kammen is a frequent contributor to or commentator in international news media, including Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. Kammen has appeared on ‘60 Minutes’ (twice), NOVA, Frontline, and hosted the six-part Discovery Channel series Ecopolis. Dr. Kammen is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society. In the US, he has served on several National Academy of Sciences boards and panels.

Abstract: We live in a world where the risks from a changing climate are clear. New research highlights the magnitude of the risks and the benefits of rapid, ambitious action. We also live in a world where the technologies for addressing climate change, for limiting the amount of climate change that occurs and for dealing as effectively as possible with the changes that cannot be avoided, are increasingly mature, affordable, and rich with co-benefits. In many ways and in many places, progress in deploying solutions is dramatic. But worldwide, progress is much slower than it needs to be, if we are to avoid the worst impacts. We need to find a global accelerator pedal for climate solutions. Key enablers include steps to level the economic playing field, government investments to drive down the costs and risks of technology solutions, and novel mechanisms to spur international collaboration.

Speaker Bio: Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. His research focuses on climate change, ranging from work on improving climate models, to prospects for renewable energy systems, to community organizations that can minimize the risk of a tragedy of the commons. Field was the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, a position he held from 2002 to 2016. He was co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2008-2015, where he led the effort on the IPCC Special Report on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”  (2012) and the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014) on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. His widely cited work has earned many recognitions, including election to the US National Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Research Award, and the Roger Revelle Medal.

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Dr. Forbes chairs the Steam Engineering Companies of Forbes Marshall, India’s leading Steam Engineering and Control Instrumentation firm. 

Dr. Forbes was an occasional Lecturer and Consulting Professor at Stanford University from 1987 to 2004, where he developed courses on technology in newly industrializing countries. He received his Bachelors, Masters and PhD degrees from Stanford University.

Dr. Forbes is on the Board of several educational institutions and public companies. He is the Chairman of Centre for Technology, Innovation and Economic Research in Pune. He has long been an active member of CII and has, at various times, chaired the National Committees on Higher Education, Innovation, Technology and International Business. He was President of CII from 2016-2017.

About the Colloquia:

In 2016, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in collaboration with the Stanford Center for South Asia, launched a series of public lectures to broaden our understanding and discussion of contemporary India — its enormous domestic potential and problems, its place in the region and the world, and the ambitious agenda of the new Modi administration. Building on the strong engagement of those issues from across the university community and beyond, we are continuing the series, with generous support from the U.S. India Business Council, in the 2017-2018 academic year. We will  draw business, political, diplomatic and academic experts from the U.S. and India to explore topics including India’s innovation economy, India-China relations, India’s pivotal role in global health, and U.S.-India relations. 

This Colloquia is co-sponsored with 

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