EIEE Seminar-Webinar

Title: Food for thought at the intersection of climate and public policy

Speaker: Ken Caldeira, Senior Scientist (Emeritus), Carnegie Institution for Science, Climate Energy Lab

Abstract:

This talk will present a full meal of recent, and still unpublished, research that may be of interest to people working at the intersection of climate and public policy.

As an antipasto, I will present recent work detailing the global distribution of energy use.

For the primo piatti, I will present a stylized analysis related to air conditioning, economic development, and global warming. This study addresses the question: If current relationships between per-capita GDP, cooling-degree days, and air conditioning adoption were to continue into the future, would projected economic growth be sufficient to shield country-level populations from future increases in hot weather?

For the segundi piatti, I will present a stylized analysis of the sensitivity of climate damage to country-level mean temperature increases as a function of per-capita-gdp and county-level mean temperature. This analysis confirms the unsurprising perspective that climate change poses the greatest threat to poor people living in hot places.

For the dessert, we will take a brief excursion into examination of the predictive skill afforded by projecting technology learning (or experience) curves into the future.

This talk will describe a sample of the kind of stylized studies we have been doing in our research group, aimed at providing food for thought and discussion.

 

Register in advance.