Environment@Harvard

In December 2009, the nations of the world gathered in Copenhagen,

Denmark, for what had originally been planned as a landmark conference on climate change. The goal was to negotiate a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change,

an agreement that would succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Though expectations fell dramatically as the conference approached, even those diminished expectations proved optimistic after reports emerged of an organizational and political mess. One U.S. climate ne-

gotiator described the meeting to the New York Times as a “snarling, aggravated, cha-otic event.”

By most accounts, the last-minute di-plomacy of U.S. President Barack Obama and a handful of world leaders salvaged at least a commitment to move forward,

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Har vard Univers i ty Center for the Env i ronment

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Environment @ Harvard

Hope in Copenhagen?Economists and scientists reflect on the latest climate accord—and the path forward

by Alvin Powell

U. S.63,800

China48,700

E. U.46,400

Africa10,800

India12,500

Australia4,200

Russia17,600

Canada6,400

Central & S. America11,800

Cumulative Emissions of Carbon Dioxide due to Energy Consumption from 1998 to 2008 (Million Metric Tons)

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with most participating nations “noting” a short, nonbinding accord, providing at least some guidelines for action and cause for hope.

The months since have allowed time for reflection on Copenhagen and on what meaningful action might come next, perhaps as soon as the next such meeting, scheduled for Cancun, Mexico in Decem-ber 2010.

To better understand where these complex issues stand today, the Harvard University Center for the Environ-ment (HUCE) posed questions on the Copenhagen meeting, its implications,

and the best way forward to a handful of HUCE-affiliated faculty members involved in climate change science and policy.

Participants include: Robert Stavins, Pratt professor of business and govern-ment at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and director of the Harvard Proj-ect on International Climate Agreements; Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel professor of capital formation and growth at HKS; Richard Cooper, Boas professor of international economics; James G. Anderson, Weld professor of atmospheric chemistry; Peter Huybers, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences; Steven Wofsy, Rotch professor of atmospheric and environ-mental science; Michael McElroy, Butler professor of environmental studies; and HUCE director Daniel Schrag, Hooper professor of geology.

E@H: Would you characterize Copenha-gen as a success?Robert Stavins: It would have been very unfortunate to achieve what some par-ticipants would have defined as “success” in Copenhagen. That would have been a signed international agreement, glowing press releases, and photo opportunities.

The reason I say “unfortunate” is that there is only one possible agreement that would have met those characteristics. That would have been the Kyoto Protocol on steroids. In other words, more stringent targets for the Annex 1 countries—that’s the industrialized world; no meaningful action by the key emerging economies—China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Korea, Mexico, and a couple of others. That would have meant no emissions reductions globally. It also would have meant no rati-fication by the United States Senate, which would have been just like Kyoto—no real progress on climate change.

There was political grandstanding and a lack of consensus. But at the last minute, quite dramatically, there were direct nego-tiations by key national leaders. This was virtually unprecedented because it’s usually people four levels down in the respec-tive ministries that do the negotiations. That saved the conference from complete collapse and produced a significant polit-ical—not legal, but political—agreement that has been labeled the Copenhagen Accord.

The accord takes a “portfolio of domes-tic commitments” approach—each coun-try essentially commits to do what it has on the books domestically. It addresses two very important deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol. One is it expands the coalition of meaningful commitments to include all the major emitters. And it expands the timeframe of action.

So the Copenhagen accord has both good news and bad news. The good news

“Copenhagen illustrated problems with the process… . About 190 countries are talking, when 20—counting the EU as one—account for 80 percent of global emissions.”

Pratt professor of business and government Robert N. Stavins of the Harvard Kennedy School directs the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements.

Hope in Copenhagen? Economists and scientists assess the successes and failures of the Copenhagen climate conference—and the way forward.

3 Letter from the Director

10 Re-envisioning Sustainability as a Design ArtHUCE director Dan Schrag talks with Graduate School of Design dean Mohsen

Mostafavi about the intersection of sustainability and design principles.

13 Food in the BalanceIn the global battle against hunger, climate change introduces a host of new uncertainties.

20 Implications of a Nuclear RenaissanceIs nuclear power a viable source of energy for the future? Leading policy experts discuss the potential and the pitfalls.

I N T H I S I S S U E


Letter from the DirectorAt a Harvard University Center for the

Environment event six years ago, then Harvard president Larry Summers mused that it would take a long, long time for Washington to take serious action on an is-sue as difficult as climate change. Looking at the current political landscape, those words seem prophetic. During the last presidential campaign, both McCain and Obama sup-ported cap-and-trade legislation as part of a comprehensive energy policy. Today, climate change seems more partisan than ever. Some members of Congress deny that human activities are responsible. Others among our elected representatives think there is no point in taking action unless we are joined at the outset by China and India,

the major greenhouse gas emitters among developing countries. And some merely bend to the influence of the powerful coal and fossil fuel lobbies. The new Kerry-Lieber-man bill, which was intended to be a biparti-san approach to breaking the stalemate, had the wind taken from its sails when Senator Graham, Republican of South Carolina, with-drew his support amidst the bitterness of the health care and immigration debates.

And there is more disheartening news.

Against the backdrop of political wran-gling over climate change, the gulf oil spill reminds us that our energy choices have immense environmental consequences. Whether it is oil drilling in Alaska and Cali-fornia, or offshore wind in Massachusetts and Maine, each energy decision we make is rife with environmental risks and repercus-sions. As I write this letter, oil continues to gush from the seafloor in untold thousands of barrelfuls daily—evidence that even the best science and engineering cannot guar-antee that the energy systems we build will be free from accidents. And the specter of such disasters haunts the future of many new energy technologies that will be im-portant in a low-carbon future, including

nuclear power, carbon capture and stor-age, and shale gas.

The challenge we face is clear: we must essentially rebuild our energy systems to respond to concerns for security, eco-nomic well-being, and the environmental condition of future generations. This will require tough choices and trade-offs. Navigating these difficult decisions takes thoughtful analysis, good technology, and forward-looking leadership.

At that same HUCE event six years ago, Larry Summers said that when action finally did come on climate change, it would come swiftly, and likely

without the opportunity for the careful analysis required to make good policy. He therefore argued for the special role of this University in addressing such grand societal challenges, as Harvard is one of the few places capable of assembling the diverse, multidisciplinary expertise needed to plan the best course of action beyond the short timescale of the next election or quarterly report. This is not to say that Harvard should try to devise solutions without reference to

social and political realities; to the contrary, our efforts are greatly strengthened by our frequent interactions with perspectives from governments and industries around the world. We have an opportunity at Harvard to take advantage of our convening power, of the intellectual strength of our faculty, and of the enormous potential of our students to influence how the country and the world will respond to the energy-climate challenge when it is finally ready to take serious steps to solve the problem.

At the Center for the Environment, we are working hard to live up to Larry’s vision. With a dynamic community of faculty associates from around the University, now numbering almost 250, HUCE has become a hub for all manner of scholarship and education on the environmental challenges we face. Our new programs in graduate and undergraduate education are underway: I am delighted to report that twenty-five doctoral students have completed their interdisciplinary work in the Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment. And our Environmental Fel-lows program—highlighted in this issue—continues to nurture some of the best young minds in diverse areas of scholarship. I am confident that these post-doctoral associates will make great contributions to our environ-mental challenges in the years ahead.

In this issue of Environment@Harvard, you will see a sampling of the efforts around the University in defining and resolving the hard choices that confront us. In our cover feature, my colleagues in the sciences and economics offer their reflections on the best way forward from the Copenhagen meetings on climate change last December. Inside the newsletter we bring you an exam-ination of the impending effects of climate change on global nutrition, as well as an in-depth look at the prospects and obstacles of nuclear power as a clean energy solution. I also talk with Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Graduate School of Design, about the chal-lenges of addressing questions of sustain-ability through novel approaches to design. I hope that these articles give you a sense of the vibrant community that continues to flourish here at Harvard.

With best wishes for the coming summer,

Dan Schrag

“We have an opportunity at Harvard to take advantage of our convening power, of the intellectual strength of our faculty, and of the enormous potential of our students to influence how the country and the world will respond to the energy-climate challenge when it is fi-nally ready to take serious steps to solve the problem.”

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is it provides real cuts on greenhouse gas emissions by all the major emitters. It establishes a transparent framework for evaluating countries’ performances. It initiates a substantial flow of resources to help poor, vulnerable nations carry out mitigation and adaptation.

But there’s bad news. This is certainly not on track for a two degree centigrade, or a 450 parts per million (ppm) stabili-zation of CO2; but neither is any other policy, including a hypothetical Kyoto agreement on steroids. Jeffrey Frankel: My definition of progress is steps toward specific, credible commit-ments by a large number of countries. And in that sense, we actually had some good news. January 31 [2010] was the deadline under the Copenhagen Accord [to specify 2020 emissions targets] and 106 coun-tries responded. Six big, emerging market countries set targets. Many of them are vague about the base year and they clearly resist saying this is a legal commitment—that’s obviously a limitation. The fact that they’re taking this seriously means that Obama’s personal breakthrough there on the last day may indeed lead somewhere. Richard Cooper: It was even worse than I expected it to be. I forecast two years ago that it would fail on substantive grounds. But the process is a throwback to 30 to 35

years ago, which I think is sad for the international community.

The G-77 [the group that rep-resents develop-ing world coun-tries] is unable to negotiate. They get togeth-er ahead of time and decide what their demands are going to be. Once they de-cide what their position is go-ing to be, they find it impos-sible to change, in a give-and-take sense.

E@H: Some have argued that the United Nations process is unworkable and will never lead to a meaningful treaty. What are the prospects for progress going forward?Robert Stavins: Copenhagen illustrated problems with the process under the United Nations, particularly what’s called the United Nations Framework Conven-tion on Climate Change [UNFCCC]. The first problem is the size. About 190 countries are talking, when the 20 largest economies—counting the EU as one—account for more than 80 percent of global emissions. Getting agreements among the full set of 190 countries on anything is difficult. What exacerbates that is that the U.N. culture tends to polarize factions, particularly the industrialized world versus the developing world. And then there’s the UNFCCC voting rule: unanimity is re-quired. It was the lack of consensus on the Copenhagen Accord that led to it being noted, not adopted.

So what are alternative institutions go-ing forward? For the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, this is a major focus of research for the next six to nine months. One possible venue is the Major Economies Forum, an initiative launched by the Bush Administration as the Major Emitters Meeting. At the time, it was lambasted by environmental advo-cacy groups in the U.S. and Europe and by the E.U. as a diversion from the U.N. process. Wisely, the Obama administration

recognized that it made a lot of sense, so they changed its name but kept it. Now it’s called the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. And again, more than 80 percent of global emissions are covered by the 17 participating countries and regions.

Another important potential forum go-ing forward is the G-20. For the most part this has been finance ministers focusing on economic issues, but they think more broadly. It has the advantage of not being the creature of a single nation, which is a limitation of the Major Economies Forum.

I believe it’s too early to write the obitu-ary of the UNFCCC. For one thing, the Kyoto Protocol is going to be with us until 2012. Even more important is that it has a huge constituency, namely a majority of countries in the world—those are the developing countries. They would like everything to stay within the UNFCCC. In fact, they’d like to extend the Kyoto Protocol to become the exclusive focus of negotiations, for clear reasons that are in their self interest. But there is also interna-tional legitimacy for anything under the United Nations versus something that is the creation of a single nation. Jeff Frankel: Copenhagen was pretty dis-couraging. Progress is not possible solely in the U.N. framework because small member nations will obstruct the process. It isn’t just the one country-one vote thing; the WTO [World Trade Organization] is the same way. Technically, one country can hold it up but in that forum they never do. Because the big guys decide what the deal is, then the others take it or leave it and they usually take it.

The important decisions can only be made by a small steering group, as has long been true with multilateral governance. And in the past it’s always the G-7. After years and years of talking about giving major emerging markets a voice and do-ing nothing, suddenly in 2009, the G-20 supplanted the G-7. That means they have representation for the first time. This is good news generally, that big emerging markets have been given a voice in world governance.Richard Cooper: For a variety of reasons, I think this forum cannot negotiate an agreement on climate change, but it’s not going to go away either, because the COP [Conference of Parties to the United Na-tions Framework Convention on Climate Change] are a regular part of the UNFC-

Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel professor of capital formation and growth at the Harvard Kennedy School.


CC process. So I think we need to have a negotiation outside and present them with the outcome of the negotiation. The negotiations have to be sensitive to the interests of the key developing countries and present it to them as, “this is what the deal is.” Dan Schrag: If out of Copenhagen and what President Obama did, we see a move to negotiations between a smaller number of key countries: the U.S., China, India, Brazil, the EU—the G-8 plus a handful—as opposed to all of the countries, I think that’s a positive move because it’s more likely to get something done.

But at the same time no international treaty is going to be useful if people aren’t convinced that this is a serious problem. Nobody’s going to follow through on an agreement if they’re not actually concerned about the problem. It’s too expensive.

Part of me feels like Copenhagen and the whole Kyoto process is almost irrel-evant to the real activity around climate change, which is focused on industry, both in terms of alternative energy—bringing the cost down—and also things like car-bon capture and storage, which means allowing us to still use fossil fuels and not pollute the atmosphere.

Things are happening because com-panies are anticipating regulation. Coal plants: five years ago, six years ago there were 200 coal plants, roughly, in permit-ting. Two years ago, before the economy collapsed, they had almost all gone: banks weren’t taking those sorts of risks. In Detroit, there’s a competition [The Pro-gressive X Prize to get super fuel efficient vehicles]. I have no idea whether they’ll succeed, but it’s a sign of work that’s being done that could be the foundation.

There’s a similarity with the Montreal Protocol with CFC’s [ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons]. That was only agreed to after DuPont developed an alter-native to CFCs. They complained they couldn’t do it until they came up with an alternative, then all of a sudden, the Montreal Protocol followed that.

Two things have to happen. One, people

have to get scared about climate change. And two, the strategy for dealing with it has to look a little bit cheaper and a little bit more doable. Right now it looks awful-ly expensive, it’s not clear who the winner is and you have some of the most power-ful industries in the world campaigning against it.

E@H: How will a meaningful agreement come about?Richard Cooper: First I think there should be bilateral conversations between the United States and China. We are the two elephants in the room and we’re not playing at the moment. We need to have serious, technical-level discussions—with political guidance of course—with the Chinese about what they’re willing to ac-cept and what we’re willing to accept, what we think we can get through Congress.

If it goes reason-ably well, I think we could roll it out in the G-20. I don’t have any ex-pectation that the U.S.-China discus-sions will produce something in time for the Seoul sum-mit. But I think we should get the pro-cess going, because India is going to be a problem. The Indian leadership at the moment is outstanding, but they have the practical political problem of dealing with the Indi-an parliament which is at least as fractious as the U.S. Congress. This is a multi-year process, it’s not something that’s going to happen quickly.Robert Stavins: From a policy perspective, the cliché we often hear about the baseball season applies even more so to internation-al climate policy: it is a marathon, not a sprint.

International climate negotiations are best thought of as an ongoing process, perhaps somewhat like trade talks. Not a single task with a clear endpoint, whether Copenhagen, Cancun, whatever.

E@H: What would we need to happen—scientifically or in the natural world—to change the game and really push things forward at this point?Dan Schrag: There are lots of things you can talk about: A big piece of ice breaking off of Antarctica. You can talk about heat waves, droughts, or floods. My fear is that none of them will ever be clear enough to enough people, especially when there’s a $300 million communications campaign paid for by the fossil fuel industry to con-fuse the issue. By the time people do get scared, it may be too late. That’s my worry.

I think realistically you’re not going to see China and India and any other developing countries commit to serious reductions until they’re, quite frankly, just scared about the consequences of letting CO2 emissions continue. Right now, I

don’t think they’re scared enough. And it’s clear that reducing emissions for them and reducing future emissions will limit their ability to grow their economies, and that’s the focus for them. So it’s a really tough problem. Richard Cooper: If we were to have three really blistering summers in a row, or a

“Two things have to happen. One, people have to get scared about climate change. And two, the strategy for dealing with it has to look a little bit cheaper and a little bit more doable.”

Richard Cooper, Boas professor of international economics.

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serious drought in the plains states that people could analogize with Oklahoma in ‘33 and ‘34—the Dust Bowl—the U.S. dialogue on this would change radically. Honest climatologists will tell you that you cannot really attribute those events to climate change, but it would catch the public’s attention. Peter Huybers: My sense is we’re kind of in this for the long run. As time passes, we expect the climate to change and the evi-dence for that change to become increas-ingly obvious.

Our understanding of ice dynamics is very thin. So an advance in our ability to predict what the cryosphere is doing

[might have an impact], as would an un-derstanding of the feedbacks associated with the carbon cycle in the Arctic tundra. It is my understanding there is a lot of un-certainty there.

If history is a good indicator of what’s to come, we’re going to have incremental progress toward a treaty. Even at the rate of the IPCC reports, every five years—if you’re to measure that in an academic time scale, that’s the amount of time to produce a the-sis. A thesis is likely to present some advance in our understanding, but nothing dramatic.

E@H: Are you concerned about the pace of action? Are there possible ramifications for going slowly on a climate change treaty?

Jim Anderson: My feeling is that China is going to set the pace here, because they recognize they’re going to lose those key snowpack and glacial systems that pro-vide critical parts of their water supply. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 years or 50 years because the conclusion of any public poli-

cy…is exactly the same and you have to start taking very rapid corrective action right now. The minute they make that de-cision, they’ll go wholesale into making these [renew-able] energy systems be-cause they want to sell them interna-tionally.

So the United States has a couple

of choices. We can look back at the twen-tieth century and “drill, baby, drill” and continue with the kind of public policy we had, or we can say, “If we don’t turn around and get moving very quickly and we don’t apply our technology…we’ll be buying all this stuff from China.”

We’ve passed the point of stability—once you get above 350 ppm, which is 50 ppm in the rearview mirror, the glacial ice systems are no longer stable. From that perspective, we have a great deal of dif-ficulty seeing a solution in any cutback in carbon dioxide unless it’s draconian. On our current trajectory, given political momentum…we’re headed for 600 to 700 parts per million in carbon dioxide.

That carries us back 30 million years in history and at that point there was no ice at all in the northern hemisphere. There

was a little bit forming in the Antarctic. It now becomes a question of how rapidly this process occurs. Dan Schrag: At what point will it be too late? The honest answer is we don’t know. We do know there are thresholds in the system: things like the breaking off of the Ross Ice Shelf, which would accelerate the demise of the Antarctic ice sheet; or the melting of the permafrost. But exactly where those thresholds are, we don’t know. My suspicion is we’re not going to know very well until it’s already happening.

It’s possible that maybe 450 or 500 ppm is okay. Maybe it’s not catastrophic. So that’s a reason for optimism. Of course the problem is, if that’s not catastrophic, we’ll probably get to six or seven [hundred parts per million]. Steve Wofsy: Delaying isn’t a very good idea. The discussion shouldn’t just be about climate change. The discussion should be about the whole energy econ-omy of the developed world. What we’re currently doing is unsustainable anyway, it’s bad for the environment, it’s costing us a lot of money, and a lot of things hap-pen in the geopolitical framework that are pretty bad.

The greenhouse gases we put in the at-mosphere stay there for a very long time. They take a long time to work themselves out. Delay is dangerous and it is expensive. Jeff Frankel: My answer to this question has always been the same. There is nothing magic about this year. Or next year. Or any year. But the problem isn’t going to get any easier by postponing it. All the issues will be the same in the future…but just a little tougher.

E@H: Once an agreement is struck, how long will it take before we are technically capable of transitioning to a lower-carbon energy system?Mike McElroy: I think we can make a dif-ference on a timescale of 20 years, and it’s hard to go much faster than that. But we have to make that commitment if we’re going to get there. If we’re serious about

“On our current trajectory, given political momentum…we’re headed for 600 to 700 parts per million in carbon dioxide. That carries us back 30 million years in history and at that point there was no ice at all in the northern hemisphere.”

James G. Anderson, Weld professor of atmospheric chemistry.


it, we can have a different kind of energy system by 2030: a lot less coal, a lot more non-carbon sources. I think it’ll probably be wind, maybe solar will come along. I don’t think nuclear will grow very much. I think we’ll have a transportation system that will be more electrical: plug-in hy-brids, maybe even all-electric cars. Natural gas may be a player in big vehicles, inter-state trucks and buses.

E@H: What would an alternative energy system look like, here or elsewhere around the globe?Jim Anderson: We’re endowed with wind power and solar thermal like no other na-tion on earth. The only other nation with wind power and solar thermal resources that can compare to ours is China.

We have this massive resource, we could completely eliminate our import of petro-leum products by switching to electrified vehicles and removing fuel oil we burn in our homes. We’d have no imports of pe-troleum at all. All of the energy would be generated here, all the jobs created by pro-ducing those systems and installing them would be here.Mike McElroy: The challenge for the United States is to reduce our dependence on coal in the electricity generating sector and to reduce oil in the transportation sec-tor. There are two good reasons to do so. One is the climate issue. The second is the fact that even at $80 a barrel, we’re send-ing $375 billion a year to other countries.

We have a number of alternatives to coal: nuclear, wind, solar. Natural gas is increasingly the fuel of choice, particularly with gas prices dirt cheap.

We’ve done studies on what the poten-tial is for wind in the U.S. as well as in China. The U.S. has abundant sources of wind, particularly in the Midwest down the central part of the country. You can generate that energy at prices that are cur-rently competitive with alternatives. One of the problems with renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar is the intrin-sic variability of the source, and the lack of ability to store electricity.

There are three unconnected grids in the United States: East, West and Texas. We have access to the data on hourly elec-tricity demand in the Texas region for the last few years. So what we’re doing is ask-ing how you would realistically integrate wind into that system, and what are the problems and costs associated with that?

As you go to more wind, the problem you confront is there will be times of the year—in the winter, at night—when there will be more electricity generated than you can use. But there will also be times when you’re short, during the sum-mer, in the day. The way you get around the shortage is by having backup, and that means generally gas. That increases the cost because you have to pay the capital cost of equipment that is staying idle for a significant fraction of the year.

When you have excess, you can produce cheap hydrogen. There are lots of things you can do with it. The first and most obvious is make nitrogen fertilizer. There are other creative things you could imagine doing with it. If you have hydro-gen and CO2, you could make methanol and make fuel to run in automobiles.

If we had a better grid—which should be a serious emphasis—if I was short of electricity in Texas I could buy it from wherever they don’t need it. The chances are pretty high that when the wind isn’t blowing in Texas, it’s blowing in Mas-sachusetts or somewhere else.

E@H: Are there particular research priori-ties that should be set to advance either the science or the policy of climate change?Jim Anderson: What’s really crucial are the feedbacks within the climate structure that control the way heat, thermal energy, is flowing into the major climate reservoirs, the arctic ice cap, and the glacial systems.

We don’t know how rapidly heat is flow-ing into the ocean because we don’t have the observing systems. We don’t know how rapidly the climate structure—determined by temperature, water vapor, and cloud systems—is changing, because we don’t have the observations. We don’t know how the ocean currents are changing in response to recent increases in carbon dioxide because we don’t have the observa-tions. We don’t know how fast Greenland is losing its glacial structure because we don’t have observations there, either.

We don’t know how fast carbon is com-ing out of melt zones in both the Siberian and Alaskan tundra, nor the oceans, be-cause we don’t have the observations. So here we are, with an extremely time-de-

pendent problem that is predictable only if we have these basic pieces of informa-tion on how the system is responding—and we don’t have any of the required observations.

These aren’t expensive observations…we’re not talking about even a minor blip on the economic structure.Steve Wofsy: [In March] there was a Na-tional Academy of Sciences report out on measuring and understanding the sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This report basically asks the question, “If we have a treaty to restrain emissions of greenhouse gases, how well can it be veri-fied?” If you read the material coming out of Copenhagen, you realize that monitor-ing and verification were at the center of the debate between Obama and the prime minister of China.

The NAS panel laid down several parallel approaches. One is to improve self-report-ing mechanisms. Another parallel track is to try to make measurements—either in the atmosphere or proxy measurement of economic activities—that you can use to validate these inventories. The question

Peter Huybers, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences.

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then arises, how well can you do that, and how do you do it?

I speak mostly to the atmospheric measurements. You have three tiers: sat-ellite data that gives you a global picture, very blurry, that sets the framework for everything else. Then you have ground stations and limited aircraft measure-ments in which you can do a better job estimating what’s coming from a region or a country.

The third tier is to actually go hunting where the ducks are. If I identify the larg-est sources in a country, where are they? How many sources do I have to measure if

I want to get, say, 70 percent of the sources? It turns out it’s not that many, perhaps 300. So one of the questions we’re asking right around Harvard is: Suppose I make atmospheric measurements in a big urban area, how accurately can I detect a trend, a change? If someone says we’ve cut our greenhouse gas emissions by five percent, can I check?

We have a sensor on top of one of the buildings in Boston and another in Har-

vard Forest and I am putting one up in Worcester. This is all to ask the question: If you make measurements hour-by-hour, year in and year out at these places, can you detect changes in emis-sions? Emissions have a very strong fingerprint that they leave, but there’s a lot of vari-ability in the atmosphere. So it’s a research question: How accurately can you detect a change? That hasn’t been looked at very much.

The hope is within a year’s time we’ll have results that can help in negotia-tions, that people can really believe in and that can be demonstrated.

E@H: When you think about your children and grandchildren, what kind of world do you think they’ll live in?

Mike McElroy: My grandchildren will live in a world with nine and a half billion people. The increasing disparity between the haves and have-nots, between rich and poor, even within countries, is going to be a challenge.

I also think they’ll live in a world where the winners and losers will be different from what they have been historically. If I were to guess at what future climate is likely to be, I would say that Canada and Russia are likely to be major ben-eficiaries, and I would say the countries in the tropics, the poorer countries, are likely to be the major losers. Countries at mid-latitudes, like the United States and China, will be winners and losers. But the idea that we have warmer winters, open seas, longer growing seasons at high lati-tudes, the obvious places to benefit from that would be the big countries at high latitudes.

You also have to worry here—and it’s not trivial—about the possibility of a catastrophic collapse of some of the ma-jor land-based ice sheets. You can sit back and say maybe that’s 100 years away. But the fact is we’ve been significantly and frequently surprised by how rapidly things are happening, and it is clear we don’t understand very well the stability of large ice sheets. The collapse of the [Larsen] Ice Shelf in Antarctica was not anticipated. And the best one can tell in retrospect is it was not caused by surface warming, it was actually caused by some relatively deep ocean water that was

Michael B. McElroy, Butler professor of environmental studies.

Steven Wofsy, Rotch professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences.

“Climate change is the kind of thing that at any one point in time, never looks like the most important thing. Healthcare or wars or deficits…there’s always a more pressing issue. I think 50 years from now when we look back we’ll say, “Oh my! What did we do to this planet?”


Downriver from many former coal and metal mines, water runs yolk yellow,

lava red and electric green—a stew of heavy metals called acid mine drainage (AMD). Toxic, unsightly, and expensive to clean up, AMD puts vegetation, wildlife, and entire ecosystems at risk. Colleen M. Hansel, assistant professor of environmen-tal microbiology at the School of Engineer-ing and Applied Sciences, hopes to create a cost-effective way to bring these ravaged regions back to life.

Current clean-up methods, Hansel says, involve costly and labor-intensive efforts such as digging limestone-filled pits to neutralize the water’s acidic pH. But the remediators she has in mind are plentiful, highly effective, and work for free. They are microorganisms that metabolize and detoxify iron, arsenic, and chromium, as well as fungi that remove toxic levels of manganese by making reactive minerals. The trick is figuring out exactly how the mi-croorganisms perform these feats and then stimulating or seeding optimal microbial populations in polluted habitats.

“Minerals are nature’s reagents for clean-ing up contaminated surface and ground-water,” says Hansel. “What we try to do is figure out how to use microbes to make the needed minerals—or dissolve them—depending on the nature of the remedia-tion needed.” Hansel became captivated

by the idea that you could use organisms to clean up groundwater in the late 1990s, while studying soil chemistry and mineral-ogy at the University of Idaho; researchers had just discovered that common soil bac-teria such as Shewanella oneidensis could survive miles underground without oxygen or sunlight. “The whole idea that there were little critters living in the soil that breathe metals like we breathe oxygen” she recalls, “ sounded like science fiction.”

Later, while at Harvard, Hansel and col-laborators at Penn State and at a nonprofit group intent on saving Appalachian rivers were surprised to discover that some fungi—multi-cellular microorganisms sporting long root-like tendrils—appear to be even better than bacteria at removing metals from water.

Fungi come in more than 1.5 million spe-cies and are found virtually everywhere, so it is perhaps surprising when Hansel says that “We know essentially nothing about metal-transforming fungi.” Researchers have an even longer way to go to figure out how these organisms work so that they can be used to clean up toxins in the environment. “But considering the magnitude of the problem worldwide,” Hansel says, “it would be great if we could make a magic potion out of a mixed microbial community that we could then introduce into these systems to clean them up.”

—Deborah Halber

F A C U L T y P R O F I L E

Colleen M. Hansel

warmer than it used to be coming into contact underneath. That was enough to trigger a collapse of the sea-based ice. In turn, what does that do to the pinning of the land-based ice? That is a problem that serious people are seriously con-cerned about. Jeff Frankel: While I definitely believe that we ought to take action, I don’t experience the same emotional reaction that many others feel, to be honest. In part, this is because I think that when-ever we try to imagine the Earth as our children and grandchildren will experi-ence it, we always imagine wrong—and wrong in ways that are impossible to anticipate.

It is also because, if we have a general continuation of the peace and prosperity of the last half-century, even in a worst case climate scenario, which would be pretty bad, I think my son and his chil-dren would still probably be better off than if they had lived in the first half of the 20th century (World Wars, depression) or in earlier periods of history. I hesitate to say that, because I don’t want to under-state the problem we face, but it does offer a little perspective.Dan Schrag: I think it’ll be different in many ways that are hard to predict.

One of the challenges of climate change is that thus far, it’s happening slowly enough that we get used to it. So my kids are growing up in New England used to warmer winters, used to being able to plant roses the first weekend in April. If you were here 50 years ago, that wouldn’t be the case.

Mostly, I think many people, especially the more privileged among us, will bungle through it. And I hope my children will work hard to make the world as good a place as it can be. But we’re passing on a stacked deck to them.

I think climate change is the kind of thing that at any one point in time, never looks like the most important thing. Healthcare or wars or deficits or who’s the next Supreme Court justice—there’s always a more pressing issue. I think 50 years from now when we look back—I’m hopeful I’ll live that long—we’ll say, “Oh my! What did we do to this planet?”

I understand this as a geologist. We’re returning the planet to a state it hasn’t been in for tens of millions of years. And every living thing on Earth will be affected.

10 S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 0

Bill Hogan has spent three-and-a-half de-cades as an energy expert, a distinction

he first earned nearly overnight. As just the second person to join the Pentagon’s new Office of Energy and Data Analysis in 1973, Hogan had a modeling and analysis back-ground thanks to his graduate studies in quantitative methods at UCLA, but had zero experience working in the energy sector. During his first few days on the job, the Arab Oil embargo thrust his fledging office into the national spotlight. He experienced the attention firsthand when his boss asked him to take the media heat at a press conference about what the oil interruption would mean to the U.S. “He said, ‘Bill, I think you’re ready,’” Hogan recalls with a laugh.

Hogan left the Pentagon in 1976 and took a job at Stanford University, where he helped start the still-active Energy Modeling Forum, an international working group with representatives from academia as well as the public and private sectors. Two years later he came to Harvard as the director of the En-ergy and Environmental Policy Center at the Kennedy School, and has been there ever since, serving currently as Plank professor of global energy policy and director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group.

A longtime electricity market researcher,

Hogan developed a greater in-terest in environmental issues in 1993 after reading an article by Yale economist William Nordhaus in Science magazine that discussed the creation of economic models to deal with climate change. “That’s when I started really focus-ing on [climate change],” says Hogan. “It became obvious to me pretty quickly how impor-tant it would become.” He has since used the article as the basis for class assignments, asking his students to prepare memos to the President offering a plan that balanced economic realities against desired environmental goals.

Assessing the Obama administration’s plan—an 80 percent reduction in green-house gases by 2050 (now also the stated goal of all G-8 countries)—Hogan says it will require dramatic change in short order. “An 80 percent reduction involves eliminating coal—or finding some way to capture and sequester CO

2 from coal—and eliminating hydrocarbons from the transportation sec-tor,” he says. “This is a grand challenge.” And expanding the solution beyond the borders of the US, Hogan feels is a policy challenge

without precedent. “It’s hard to construct an example of the policy change that we are talking about,” he says. “We have to do many, many things relatively quickly, and get the rest of the world involved.”

But he also believes there are answers. First, there has to be a price for emitting carbon, and it has to be costly enough to affect peo-ple’s choices. We also need to get China and India, he says, to agree to such a policy. And we must find clean-fuel technology that is as reliable and cheap as fossil fuels and make it accessible. “The phrase that is overused but still correct is that it is silver buckshot as op-posed to a silver bullet,” Hogan says. “There is no one solution to all of this.”

— Dan Morrell


William Hogan

Mohsen Mostafavi, who became dean of the Graduate School of

Design (GSD) in January 2008, was previously dean of the College of Architec-ture, Art, and Planning at Cornell. His arrival in Cambridge was a home-coming of sorts: in the 1990s he spent five years at the GSD as an associate professor, and directed the school’s Master in Architecture I program. Harvard University Center for the Environment Director Dan Schrag spoke with Mostafavi on March 31, 2010. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

Dan Schrag: We have talked many times about the gradual transition at the GSD from a concern about buildings to a con-cern about their relationship to the envi-ronment in general. How is that evolving?Mohsen Mostafavi: One of the things that your readers might not know is that unlike some of the other professional schools at Harvard, the GSD has three departments that reflect different profes-sional careers: architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design. They go through separate processes of accreditation, and therefore have an au-

tonomy that doesn’t exist in most of Har-vard’s professional schools. This puts the emphasis on specific disciplines and what one can achieve in terms of depth within a discipline. The challenge is identifying how what you do in one particular profes-sion—or particular discipline—relates to a series of other initiatives that for all intents and purposes are in separate departments.

Another point worth stating is that despite the fact that much of the energy use across the globe is focused on the construction industry, the primary empha-sis—in terms of metrics and evaluation of the repercussions of sustainability—has been placed on single objects, on indi-vidual buildings, and not so much on the larger environmental issues of infrastruc-ture, bridges, and the sustainability of cit-ies. Those two things are not the same.

Part of the challenge when it comes to understanding sustainability in relation

Re-envisioning Sustainability as a Design ArtAn interview with Mohsen Mostafavi


to architecture is that it has a long history. People have been working on making buildings more sustain-able for a long time, but the original pioneers were more like sustain-ability warriors. In England, in my first year of architecture school, one teacher was living in a shared caravan in a parking lot, trying to be sustainable through recycling and actions like this. What people did was very basic, and it had more to do with a moral and ethical com-mitment than with the quality of what they produced as a result of the interrelationship between sus-tainability and design imagination.

Dan Schrag: And aesthetics?Mohsen Mostafavi: And aesthet-ics. Yes. So for a very long time this whole project of design and its rela-tionship to sustainability has been linked to a notion of social good and betterment—values associated with sustainability—but to be honest, devoid of any significant aesthetic value or contribution. In fact, often against any aesthetic value, because the people who did these things tended to produce some horrendously ugly buildings and projects.

Dan Schrag: So basically, they were peo-ple who were trying to reduce the water consumption or the energy consumption of a house as much as possible. And then produced ugly houses.Mohsen Mostafavi: Yes. The technology was fairly rudimentary, and they were try-ing to see how they could sustain them-selves without relying too much on large-scale infrastructure—pursuing a form of independence. It was quite recently that architects began to think about how the relationship between aesthetics and sus-tainability can produce different possibili-ties for architecture.

There are some early examples. The Ma-laysian architect Kenneth Yeang did an early building for IBM in Kuala Lumpur and a series of other buildings where he intro-duced, at least symbolically, the notion of “green” in planted, outdoor spaces on bal-conies and terraces that provides shading—basically taking the typical Western office building but incorporating into that kind of structure the idea of landscape, if you like, and as a result of that, bringing cooling.

Those buildings started the experimenta-

tion with the appearance of the building—the incorporation of sustainability as something that would also have an aesthetic quality. This kind of work pays homage to an earlier London-based project on the study of tropical architecture: the way in which buildings in the tropics, as vernacular architecture, had a certain sensibility and sensitivity toward the environment, in terms of their structure, shading, ventilation, and dealing with the rain—all these kinds of things. This happened after the emphasis in international architecture that design should be the same in many parts of the world.

Dan Schrag: Was the study of vernacular forms a kind of pushback in response to that international hegemony?Mohsen Mostafavi: It was a pushback emphasizing appropriateness to locality. The idea that different locations have dif-ferent climatic conditions to which archi-tecture can respond.

Fast-forwarding to the present, what happened is that we got better at under-standing the metrics of sustainability when it comes to buildings. So now we have LEED certification [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a voluntary program of the U.S. Green Building Council for rating structures on criteria such as energy efficiency, use of recycled materials, and light pollution]. We have this preconception that the sustainability

of buildings can be measured. This is still problematic in some ways.

Dan Schrag: We’ve discussed this with respect to the Zofnass project (a GSD program to develop sus-tainability standards for infrastruc-ture and large-scale development). Mohsen Mostafavi: Metrics provide quantitative figures. They are not deeply rooted in the principles of sustainability. They simply measure the relative performance of buildings, as opposed to the principles behind their modes of design. How can the focus on the object be expanded onto broader issues? The Zofnass program has guided us toward the research that we will do on sustain-ability of infrastructure and sustain-ability of large-scale development.

For the GSD, our strategy is to show that not only architecture, but landscape also, has a history of relationship to sus-tainability and ecology, and that urban planning and design does, too. How can we strengthen those relationships? What are the opportunities for interaction among these different professions, these different practices? The common thread is the emphasis on sustainable infrastruc-ture and the sustainability of large-scale development, especially at the interface of urban planning and landscape.

Dan Schrag: There has been an incred-ible opening up of the Graduate School of Design, an increased engagement with col-leagues around the University, hasn’t there?Mohsen Mostafavi: We are very fortunate to have a number of colleagues who are interested in collaborations, and we actu-ally want to expand on that with future appointments. And we would love to figure out how we can work more closely with engineering. In the past, architec-ture’s engagement with sustainability has led architects to design buildings and then collaborate with structural engineers. The relationship was architecture first, and engineering as something that supports it, literally and metaphorically.

More recently, a number of architects have been working more closely with engi-neers, to the point where the relationship

Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Wiley professor of design.

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“For the GSD, our strategy is to show that, not only architecture, but landscape also has a history of relationship to sustainability and ecology; and that urban planning and design does, too.”

becomes quite blurred in terms of who had what idea at what point. In the work of a number of major contemporary archi-tects, engineering has had a significant role in the formation of architectural ideas and architectural space. I put together a book, Structure as Space, which focused on the idea that certain principles of engineering actually produce new spatial forms.

What’s happening more and more now in architecture—and I think we’re also witnessing it in art practice—is this shift from the structural, to what many people call the thermodynamic approach, whereby design is no longer focused just on the structure, but the whole feel of the building, the atmosphere and the thermal environment, not just in terms of performance—how much insulation it has and so forth—but really at a much more tactile level, dealing more directly with the senses; it emphasizes greater interplay between space and the body. You see this also in the work of a number of artists who are experimenting with atmospheres, the idea of environments that have atmo-spheric qualities. Broadly, the senses are becoming part of the discussion of sus-tainability in the consideration of interiors of buildings that we inhabit.

Dan Schrag: The topic of the first major conference that you organized as dean was ecological urbanism. Why ecological?Mohsen Mostafavi: As teachers we have a responsibility to focus on the development of methods—modes of practice—as much as we do on outcomes. In fact, when I was in London, I set up a graduate program focused on the development of new meth-ods of thinking in relation to urbanism. Later, I decided that the focus on methods in some ways missed opportunities that a broader approach—thinking through the framework of ecology—could provide. I didn’t want the sustainability of the city to be framed solely in quantitative terms.

Dan Schrag: Let’s design the water sys-tems or the air conditioning systems—Mohsen Mostafavi: —and then reduce the energy. We want to be very aware of

efficiency, but what we really want to ask is, could ecological practices, sustainable practices, give us a new mode of thinking? A new mode of addressing the city more broadly? So instead of just focusing on single elements, ecological urbanism could give us a toolkit for imagining new possibilities for urbanism. The conference was a first at-tempt at a more holistic approach, with the idea that the wealth of knowledge that we bring to this should not be solely technical knowledge. We were very keen that sustain-ability and ecology should be seen as a cul-tural as well as a scientific project.

Dan Schrag: One of the goals of the Cen-ter for the Environment is to bring differ-ent parts of the University together. When you get different disciplines to talk to each other, that’s where a lot of new knowledge is created. We’ve been very successful bringing the sciences together with the so-cial sciences, with public policy, with busi-ness and with law. For us, that has been easy compared to connecting with the arts and humanities. The GSD has been more successful at this: at the ecological urban-ism conference, it was Homi Bhahba, director of the Center for the Humanities, who gave the keynote—Mohsen Mostafavi: Yes. Homi Bhabha and Rem Koolhaas jointly—Dan Schrag: And that’s in some ways spectacular.Mohsen Mostafavi: We had people from divinity, history, English, and economics. We had people from almost every part of the University. That led to a book, Ecologi-cal Urbanism—a sort of manual that peo-ple are not expected to read cover to cover, but that covers a range of things that they can refer to from time to time, depending on their interest.

The other thing that is really great about the state of contemporary ecological prac-tice is the link to art. This approach allows architects to look at our urban environ-ments through the lens of their practice, almost as artists—to start seeing the en-vironment not always in practical terms. You want it to be practical, but how can it be more than just practical? How can

everyday elements of our environment be, in a way, twisted? Turned? Represented in a different way when we take elements of everyday infrastructure and show them in a different light? And that’s also an inter-esting way in which art is not just some-thing that’s in the gallery. Art is something that takes place on the street.

Dan Schrag: What are the critical next steps for the GSD? How can HUCE draw on the rest of the University to help you achieve those?Mohsen Mostafavi: Part of it is about giv-ing issues like sustainability a platform and a voice and encouraging people. Our mod-est inroads include, for example, a new cross-departmental course on sustainability taught by associate professor of landscape architecture Christian Werthmann.

But now we have to reflect and ask what it means for architecture. What does it mean for landscape? And what does it mean for urban planning and design?

Dan Schrag: Because at the end of the day you still have those disciplines and profes-sional training that you need to maintain.Mohsen Mostafavi: Absolutely. So go-ing back to what we started with, the fact of the matter is we still don’t know what sustainability and architecture can produce in terms of innovations. We only have cer-tain hints. Very few architects worldwide are turning their work on sustainability into something innovative as far as design excellence is concerned. Again, remember that we want to get away from this idea of sustainability as solely associated with social good and moralistic values. We want to say that sustainability actually produces a kind of limit. This limit is a productive thing and it produces beauty.

Our challenge is to bring that mode of thinking into our design studios and our practice so that people don’t see sustain-ability as a form of hegemony—as a form of fundamentalism promoted by people who are so driven by one principle that they don’t really care about quality. The challenge is, How do we do all of that through design, and how do we strengthen each of our departments so that there are more people who can collaborate? That means we also need people from the rest of the University to bring the cultural condi-tions and the engineering knowledge—so we can all work together in a more collab-orative fashion.


Drought. Floods. Cyclones. Melting ice. Rising seas. The potential con-

sequences of climate change are dramatic and transformative. But how will they af-fect the most basic human activity—feed-ing ourselves? Humans rely on a delicate balance of environmental conditions, re-sources, and social and economic systems to provide food for more than six billion inhabitants on Earth. Even in today’s conditions, the system isn’t perfect: cur-rently, one-sixth of the world lives in hunger, and an even greater proportion lacks the proper balance of nutrients for good health.

“Having a quality diet is something that’s fundamen-tal to health,” says Walter Willett, chair of the Depart-ment of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). “There are really very few things more vital than that.” Yet a grow-ing body of research shows that global agriculture is vulnerable be-cause it is highly sensitive to environmen-tal conditions, which can change rapidly in response to climatic disruption. The yields of the major grains—the largest source of calories for the world’s population—are susceptible to changes in temperature, ground-level ozone, and availability of water, all of which are expected to be negatively impacted by climate change. Increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters, including storms, heat waves, droughts, forest fires, and floods, have the potential to wreak havoc on local harvests. Low-lying coastal areas face a series of threats: rising sea levels, more severe coast-al storms, and the progressive loss of natu-ral coastal barriers (coral reefs, mangrove forests, vegetated dunes, and wetlands). As these areas become inundated, fertile land will be lost and salt water may intrude into fresh water aquifers.

Climate change is also expected to alter the relationships between pests, pathogens, pollinators, and plants; its effect on earth-dwelling microbes, which play a critical role in maintaining soil fertility, remains

unknown. Climate change is likely to alter cloud cover and change the intensity of solar radiation and, therefore, the capacity of plants to engage in photosynthesis, but whether these effects will be beneficial or harmful remains unclear.

Recent research has begun to put some of these issues in focus: a 2009 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicted that, unless significant efforts were made to adapt, higher tem-

peratures would reduce soybean, corn and cotton production in the U.S. roughly 40 to 70 percent by the end of this century. Other studies show that crops grown at elevated concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide contain significantly lower levels of critical nutrients. But while con-cerns are beginning to grow, “there’s been a lag in the realization of how important this is,” believes Sam Myers, an affiliate of the Harvard University Center for the En-vironment (HUCE) and an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Under the auspices of the HUCE, like-minded researchers including Willett, plant physiologist Michele Holbrook, and disaster response and relief experts Michael Van Rooyen and Jennifer Leaning, have joined forces in order to develop a multi-dimensional view of the problem.

The incipient challenges posed by cli-mate change are truly multidisciplinary, and are taking place against a backdrop of environmental disasters that already threat-en global agriculture. Farmland is being lost to urban development or degraded through erosion or a buildup of salt in the

soil; fish stocks are being depleted through overfishing and loss of ecosystems; and habitat loss threatens other wild species hunted for food. Environmental changes also threaten pollinators like honeybees, which are critical for helping certain crops reproduce.

Climate change, in other words, is destabilizing a system already stretched thin. “Think about what it takes to grow crops,” Myers says. “It takes sunlight, soil,

water, seeds, the right range of climate and temperature, protection from pests and pathogens—in some cases it takes pollination. It turns out that every single one of these things may be constrained by climate change.”

Recent events support the idea that new climate pat-terns could harm agriculture. For instance, when Europe experienced record high tem-peratures in 2003, crop yields dropped a devastating 30 per-

cent. Farmers were forced to use more wa-ter, livestock animals became stressed, and fruit and grain harvests suffered. Based on current climate projections, a 2008 study led by David Lobell at Stanford University predicted that several important crops in South Asia and Southern Africa would be critically affected by climate change, threatening populations that already lack secure food sources. In a study published last year, David Battisti at the University of Washington used 23 global climate models to calculate to a greater than 90 percent probability that, by the end of this century, growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will climb to a level higher than the hottest seasonal temperatures on record there.

The industrialization of world agriculture, rather than eliminating hunger, has raised the stakes by dramatically increasing the number of people who rely on its continued success. During the 20th century, the “Green Revolution” in crop production supported a quadrupling of the global population, while the area of farmland only doubled. Criti-cally, the achievement depended on being

Food in the Balance Climate Change and Human Nutritionby Courtney Humphries

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able to control the environment in which crops grew: adding fertilizer to artificially enrich soil, bringing more water in through irrigation, keeping pests and pathogens at bay, and—through intensive breeding—controlling the attributes of plants them-selves. Exported to developing countries, this scientific approach to agriculture vastly improved crop yields. At the time, many people assumed that with improved effi-ciency, hunger would disappear in a matter of years. But instead, populations in most of these regions skyrocketed, canceling out the gains in per capita food production. Because the world’s population is expected to grow to more than nine billion by 2050, many scientists now question whether continued advancements in agriculture can keep pace with demand for food. Simultaneously, the paradigm of environmental control appears to be in jeopardy because of climate change.

Willett, the Stare professor of epide-

miology and nutrition at HSPH, and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is one of those who are concerned. Perhaps the world’s foremost expert on nutrition, he has been instrumental in fur-thering research on the connections be-tween diet and disease through the large-scale Nurses Health Study, and he has worked with industry and governments around the world to raise public aware-

ness of nutrition and to improve access to healthy food.

Willett points out that most people in the world eat a diet that is out of bal-ance—relying too much on staple grains while consuming too few fruits, vegetables, proteins, and plant oils. Research has made clear the connections between diet and disease—whether the deficiency diseases seen in poorer populations or the high rates of heart disease and diabetes found in richer societies. Willett’s research has highlighted the fact that even when food is abundant, people still have difficulty accessing a healthy diet, often resorting to

high-calorie, nutrient-poor fare. This makes the quality of food all the more critical. “To have a more balanced diet will require more resources—more water, land, and energy,” he says. Given these existing challenges, “to be in a situation where the basic food pro-duction has plateaued is very worrisome.”

Willett believes the nutrition community needs to pay more atten-tion to climate change as a serious issue now. Not only is the world’s population climbing, but in areas such as India and China, Willett notes, diets are changing. There is a growing demand for meat; raising livestock requires more grain pro-duction and land than

plant-based diets. Some researchers also worry that global demand for biofuels will further strain the availability of crops for food. “The most troublesome impacts are likely to be in situations where there’s already stress,” he says, including parts of Africa already losing arable land to desert and drought, and India, which is facing a loss of dependable water sources. Wil-lett recently served as an advisor to India’s

Ministry of Health on these issues. In these places, many people “are right at the margin of adequate nutrition.”

The Emergency Room of Global HealthSome climate-related changes will be gradual, while others, including sudden di-sasters such as droughts, floods, and severe storms require a different kind of prepara-tion. Such events have immediate and of-ten life-threatening effects on populations and their food sources. To address these unpredictable but inevitable disasters, HUCE has sought out the expertise of Jennifer Leaning, Bagnoud professor of the practice of health and human rights and director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, along with associate professor of global health and population and director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Michael VanRooyen, who bring a wealth of experi-ence in dealing with crises. He and Lean-ing focus on humanitarian crises, whether caused by human or natural forces. “We’re the emergency room of global health,” VanRooyen says.

Food is at the forefront of concerns when disaster strikes. People displaced from their homes by famine, floods, or wars over natural resources require im-mediate delivery of food aid, and can face long-term problems accessing food, par-ticularly if they relied on farming or fish-ing for part of their diet. “When people are forced to flee, they become much more vulnerable,” Leaning says. For many people, leaving their homes means aban-doning their self-sufficiency. “They have more difficulty fending for themselves and are more dependent on external relief. They congregate where they can find shel-ter and supplies that are delivered from the outside.”

Climate change is expected to make sudden disastrous events more frequent and severe—and will also lead to new crises that develop gradually over time. When land becomes unusable for crops or grazing—through drought, soil depletion, or repetitive flooding—people eventu-ally drift to new places. In Ethiopia, for

“Although the United Nations set a goal of 2015 to halve the number of hungry people in the world, the ranks of the hungry actually grew in 2007 and 2008 because of escalating food prices.”

Samuel Myers, instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Myers is collaborating on an HUCE-funded interdisciplinary study to determine how the loss of key nutrients could affect human nutrition and global public health.


Twenty-five doctoral students were recog-nized at an end-of-year luncheon in April

for the Harvard Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment, an interdisciplin-ary program for graduate students begun in 2009. The “graduates,” many of whom are pictured above, were honored for success-fully completing the course requirements of the Consortium.

Consortium students represent six schools and thirteen departments, giving the program a unique interdisciplinary scope. Any doctoral student at Harvard whose research pertains to energy and has basic science prerequisites may apply for admission to the Consortium; as a result, the Consortium is building a new community of young scholars that benefits from multiple perspectives and pooled ex-pertise. For students like Holly Wasilowski from the Graduate School of Design, “The op-portunity to meet other students working on

energy issues and learn about their research is a highlight of the Consortium.”

Students who are accepted into the Con-sortium take three of four courses: energy consequences, energy technology, and ener-gy policy—or, in a new offering in 2010—en-ergy security. Each course is designed to give doctoral students an introduction to critical aspects of energy issues. Students also par-ticipate in a weekly reading seminar led by rotating faculty from around the university, which provides an overview of the energy field from a wide range of perspectives. Past seminar topics have ranged from human health impacts of climate change to patterns of urban development and carbon dioxide emissions, and from carbon capture and storage to climate change and agriculture. Says Kevin vora from the School of Engineer-ing and Applied Sciences (SEAS), “Friday seminars are an opportunity for students

to hear from leaders in their fields in an informal setting.” Niall Mangan, also from SEAS, concurs: “The seminars are often very conversational, with ample opportunities for asking questions. They have exposed me not just to a wide range of information but also to a breadth of political backgrounds and different ways of looking at energy issues.”

Through seminars and coursework, Con-sortium students become well-versed in the broad, interconnected issues of energy and environment and are able to identify the obstacles, highlight the opportunities, and define the discussion of an energy strategy for the 21st century and beyond. More in-formation about the program, including the online application form, is available at www.energy.harvard.edu.

The Consortium is made possible by gen-erous support from Robert Ziff ’88, along with his brothers, Dirk and Daniel.

Inaugural Consortium Students Honored

16 S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 0

example, parts of the land have gradually turned to desert and the population has moved to more habitable environs. These migrations, even if they are not as sudden as evacuating a flooded area, can provoke humanitarian crises. When people seek out better conditions, VanRooyen says, “they migrate into populations that are already under stress.” Often people move to cit-ies, which puts a strain on those unused to dealing with urban life as well as on the infrastructure of the city itself.

VanRooyen says that the global humani-tarian community is further concerned because climate change will likely lead to conflicts among different populations—manifest, for instance, in battles over dis-appearing farmland and water resources, or as social tensions when one group moves into territory traditionally occupied by another. In areas where governments are stable, he says, these conflicts can often

be resolved through negotiation and politi-cal processes, but in places that are already unstable, mass migrations and competition for dwindling food and water could pre-cipitate hostilities.

All of these situations can disrupt the normal systems for growing, distribut-ing, and purchasing food. Though hu-manitarian groups can provide emergency care, many crises require the long-term follow-up assistance of development or-ganizations that work with local people to develop new systems for providing life’s basic necessities. Leaning says that many international public health groups are now adapting their missions to include climate change in their agendas.

As part of their preparations to respond to climate change disasters, relief organi-zations depend on reliable predictions of what conditions are likely to develop in a given location, and Leaning says HHI is

working closely with climate modelers to identify key problem areas. James Hammitt, HSPH professor of economics and deci-sion sciences, special-izes in developing

quantitative methods for analyzing health and environmental policy issues in order to guide decision-making. His type of expertise is essential in order to translate knowledge about climate and crops into sound policies. But he acknowledges that it’s extremely difficult to predict the exact consequences of climate change, because people will adopt strategies to offset its effects—developing drought-resistant crops, for instance. Environmental policy decisions are also complicated by the scientific uncertainties inherent in pre-dictions of future conditions. But in the meantime, governments must decide on the best policies to enact. One thing is clear, Hammitt says: uncertainty should not prevent action. Although details are difficult to predict, “we know more than nothing about the direction of local shifts,” and this knowledge can help guide policy planning.

Impacts on Plants and NutritionWhile climate change threatens to reduce the total quantity of global food production—either gradu-ally or catastrophically—it also threatens the quality of that food. Humans don’t rely on food solely for its caloric content; they need a balance of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals to support the body’s health. A team of HUCE-affiliated researchers is now focusing on an emerging finding: that climate change may impact the nutritional quality of the food we eat, resulting in crops that provide fewer nutrients for

the same yield. Studies conducted on fields of grain crops grown under higher con-centrations of carbon dioxide have con-sistently shown a drop in levels of protein and other nutrients.

This drop in nutrient levels—on the order of 10 or 20 percent—could pose an important risk to human nutrition in the future. Collaborating in the study of this problem are Willett; Myers; Michele Hol-brook, a plant biologist; and HUCE direc-tor Dan Schrag. The team was recently awarded a one-year Harvard Catalyst Pilot Grant to study how the loss of key nutri-ents, particularly iron and zinc, could affect human nutrition and public health glob-ally. (Catalyst grants are designed to pro-mote innovative cross-disciplinary projects that harness Harvard’s diverse resources to

Barley

Rice

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Reduced protein in crops grown at elevated atmospheric CO2

Source: Daniel Taub, Brian Miller, and Holly Allen/Southwestern University

Chan

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Nutrient Composition: Micronutrient levels in crops grown at elevated atmospheric CO2

Nitr

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Source: Irakli Loladze

Above: Percentage declines in the mean con-centration of essential elements in plants grown in CO2 levels twice those of ambient conditions. Left: A meta-analysis of data showing the per-centage declines in pro-tein concentration under elevated levels of CO2.


Jennifer Leaning, Bagnoud professor of the practice of health and human rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Leaning also directs the Inter-University Initiative on Humanitarian Studies and Field Practice, which oper-ates in conjunction with MIT and Tufts University.

Noel Michele Holbook, Bullard professor of forestry and professor of biology. Holbrook specializes in the physiology of plants.

reduce the burden of human illness.) The team’s first work will be to estimate,

based on available data, says Meyers, “what would happen if these changes occurred even if caloric intake were kept constant? What would be the additional burden of disease?” Answering these questions will require study of the importance of grain crops in providing nutrients to a range of populations; already, the group’s prelimi-nary investigations show that many people receive the vast majority of dietary iron and zinc from crops that appear to be affected by elevated CO2. Women and children are likely to be especially vulnerable to nutri-ent deficiencies because they are not able to access as much meat as adult men do. In their case, the nutrients in staple grains are particularly critical to health.

The next stage of the project will iden-tify gaps in current data that need to be filled to more fully understand the poten-tial impacts. In the developed world, many crop studies are performed on plants that have ready access to water, fertilizer, and good soil. Less is known about how crops in more difficult environments will fare as carbon dioxide levels rise. And few stud-ies have addressed prospective effects on other kinds of staple crops such as cassava, sorghum, and millet, which populations often rely on in times when the food sup-ply is unstable.

Eventually, the team hopes to use their initial studies as a path to launch a longer-term research project to address these gaps in knowledge. “Ultimately,” Myers says, “we’d like to study real-world conditions

with real-world crops.” Willett points out

that the prospect of less nutritious crops is particularly alarming given the number people in the world already suffering the effects of inadequate nutrition. Although the United Nations set a goal of 2015 to halve the number of hungry people in the world, the trend is going the other way: according to the UN World Food Program, the ranks of the hungry actually grew in 2007 and 2008 because of escalating food prices. An even greater number of people world-wide suffer from malnutrition because they lack specific nutrients important for health.

Nutrient-poor crops are likely to exac-erbate the existing prevalence of iron- and zinc-deficiency diseases that take a toll on

health: anemia caused by too little iron in the diet is the most common dietary deficiency disease, leading to fatigue and weakness; zinc deficiency is thought to affect a quarter of the world’s popula-

tion, and can exacerbate diarrhea and other illnesses and even impair growth in infants and children. Protein deficiencies can be devastating to children’s growth and brain development. The toll is measured not only at the level of personal health: by diminishing the productivity of work-ers and placing burdens on health care systems, nutrient deficiencies damage lo-cal economies. And although people in wealthier societies will be less susceptible to both deficiencies and economic disrup-tions, their health could also suffer. “In af-fluent countries, if the amount of carbohy-drates relative to protein in crops goes up, it’s likely to have an effect on heart disease and other lifestyle diseases,” Willett says.

Michele Holbrook, Bullard professor of forestry, brings a different kind of expertise to the HUCE team: a deep understanding of the complex physiological relationship between crops and their environment. Holbrook says the way crops respond to climate change “will affect what people grow and what food they produce in what amounts, which will affect pricing, which then affects what people can afford to buy and eat.” Although broad predictions about crop yields can provide a big-picture scenario about agriculture in the future, Holbrook says that understanding exactly how crops will respond to climate change requires looking more deeply at the physi-ology of plants.

Since individual plants can’t move when conditions change, they respond to envi-ronmental stresses by internally moving

18 S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 0

Michael VanRooyen, associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Growing up about ten miles from Man-chester, England, professor of organ-

ismic and evolutionary biology Paul Moor his back fence opening to fields which led to a national park. “My two favorite subjects when I was in high school were biology and mathematics, and certainly my research has ended up combining those fields.”

The introduction of mathematics into his ecological research began as a graduate student. Interested in animal movement, he worked with a group of wildlife biologists who were tracking the spatial behavior of coyotes in Yellowstone National Park. In an effort to better understand their behavior, Moorcroft began to develop formal scal-ing methods to link underlying models of their movement to their resulting pattern of space use—similar to a process long em-ployed by statistical physicists. “Physicists have always developed equations describ-ing the large scale function of something—say the movement of a fluid—that is ulti-mately derived from an underlying model of how particles of the fluid behave,” says Moorcroft. Applying these types of mathe-matical scaling methods allowed Moorcroft and his colleagues to take measurements of coyote movement behaviors in Yellow-

stone, and from this, to correctly pre-dict their larger spatial distribution on the landscape.

As he began to focus his research on climate change, he saw it as another opportunity to employ formal scal-ing methods the same way he did for coyotes in Yellowstone. “Biologists will measure a few plants and how they grow or they’ll do a small experiment where they subject parts of an eco-system to drought, and then take the knowledge from that finer scale and formally scale it up,” he says. “And if we quantify how these individual plants re-spond at this smaller scale, we can then say how the ecosystem will respond.”

Moorcroft is currently working on a proj-ect funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to determine how climate change and deforestation will affect the Amazon forest. “What our mathematical approach allows us to do is build quantita-tive models of those ecosystems, drawing upon what we know from measurements and experiments at smaller scales,” says Moorcroft. “The question we are being asked is, ‘What are the forests of the Ama-zon going to look like in 40 years?’ And

that’s a question you can’t get at directly through experimentation. You can’t just replicate the Amazon.”

Moorcroft says the fate of the Amazon ecosystem also has important consequences for the region’s climate. “It’s estimated that be-tween 30 or 40 percent of the rain in the Ama-zon is moisture that was put there by the trees of the Amazon,” he says. “That sets up the po-tential for strong feedback: If anything happens to forests of the Amazon writ large, either due to climate change or human deforestation—or more likely both—there are implications for the climate of the entire region.”

— Dan Morrell


Paul Moorcroft

resources around to better suit current conditions. Sitting at a picnic table in a courtyard near her lab at Harvard, Hol-brook points out that the surrounding plants—from the smallest shrub to the tallest tree—are structured to facilitate the movement of water from the soil up to the leaves where photosynthesis takes place. The carbohydrates produced from photo-synthesis must then be transferred to areas where they are most needed. Holbrook’s research focuses on how this internal trans-port takes place, particularly in situations of drought. In the collaborative Catalyst project, “my contribution is to understand the rules or mechanisms the plant uses to control its allocation strategies, so we can then make predictions under these

multifactorial future conditions.”At first glance, it might seem that global

warming is a boon to crops; after all, Holbrook explains, if you put a plant in a greenhouse with plenty of carbon dioxide it will typically grow faster. But in real-ity plants exist in a balance that relies on many factors, and not every plant will respond to environmental changes in the same way. When plants are given abun-dant water and fertilizer, they may be able to take advantage of higher carbon dioxide levels by speeding photosynthesis and growing faster. But if they are limited in resources, they may not.

Holbrook also points out that a faster-growing plant does not necessarily yield more or better food. Often the part of the plant we eat is not the leaves or stems but the reproductive parts—seeds, grains, and fruits—and higher temperatures and green-house gases may not necessarily encourage the growth of these parts. A better question,


“Through our consumption practices in the wealthy world, we are putting hundreds of millions, if not bil-lions, of people in harm’s way. We shouldn’t be doing a global experiment on the world’s food sources.”

2010 Undergraduate Summer Research Award Recipients One of the Center’s most important programs is the annual sponsorship of summer

research opportunities for Harvard undergraduates. This year, 18 students will con-duct research on alternative energy sources, invasive species ecology, climate dynamics, and much more. For more information about the Undergraduate Summer Research Fund, including how to apply, visit http://environment.harvard.edu/student-resources/undergrad-uate-summer-research-fund. Summer research opportunities are made possible by the gen-erous support of Bertram Cohn ’47, and Barbara “B.” Wu (Ph.D. ’81) and Eric Larson ’77.

• Riju Agrawal ’13, “Evaluating Wind Energy Potentials in India”• Annissa Alusi ’12, “Cross-Boundary Water Resource Adaptation”• Max Brondfield ’11, “Urban Metabolism: Quantifying Methane Sources for the Bos-ton Metropolitan Area”• Grace Charles ’11, “Interactive Effects of Large-Mammal Extinction and Climate Change: Experimental Approaches”• Andrew Chen ’11, “Invasive Species Ecol-ogy of M. laetum”• Hannah Horowitz ’11, “Atmospheric Mercury Data Analysis: Seasonal Cycle, Bio-sphere Interactions, and Model Evaluation”• Jennifer Levye ’11, “Water Usage in Are-caceae along a Successful Gradient”• Marianna K. Linz ’11, “Fluorescence of Model Organic Aerosol”• Lillian R. Margolin ’11, “Wind Turbine Siting Based on Ecological Principles” (thesis research)

• John Mussman ’12, “Predicting Occupant Alertness Levels in Daylit Buildings”• Torin O’Brien ’12, to assist professor Paul Hoffman with geological research in Namibia• Mark Piana ’11, “Eocene’s Warm Climate Research and Outreach”• Parijat Samant ’13, “The Reception and Portrayal of Cap-and-Trade” • Richard C. Stanley ’12, “Invasive Species Biology”• Molly M. Strauss ’11, “Participation and Non-Participation in Climate-Change Col-lective Action”• Paul VanMiddlesworth ’13, “Landscape Ecology” • Lauren Xie ’13, “Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health”• Douwe yntema ’11, to assist professor Joyce Chaplin in calculating the energy costs of historical and modern modes of transportation

she says, is: “How does the plant respond in terms of regulating the allocation of resourc-es to the thing we’re going to harvest?”

The prospect of higher temperatures complicates the picture, because additional warmth can promote crop production by encouraging plants to sprout leaves faster early in the season, a critical time for growth of field crops. But high tempera-tures also lead to more water evaporation, and can drive plants to burn more energy through respiration at night. At some point, too much heat becomes harmful. In many regions, climate change will result in drier conditions, which puts constraints on another critical resource for plants. “Drought is already a major limitation on crop production,” Holbrook says, “and the prediction with climate change is that extreme events like droughts will become more prevalent.”

In addition to identifying the conse-quences of climate change for plants, Holbrook is generating knowledge that can help create solutions. Most crops have been bred to allocate their resources toward whatever is going to be harvested, but they do so at the expense of other parts of the plant, like the roots. Balanc-ing these tradeoffs is a challenge in crop breeding. By better understanding the mechanisms that underlie plants’ respons-es to their environment, plant scientists like Holbrook can look at generating new varieties of crops that are better adapted to conditions that might emerge under climate change. For instance, one project in her lab is examining the genotypes of different strains of soybeans to under-stand why some are more efficient in us-ing water. “We can use that information to enhance breeding programs to make

soybeans that are a little more water effi-cient without taking too big a decrease in yield,” she says.

Across a broad range of inquiry, the work of identifying climate change impacts on human nutrition is just be-ginning. HUCE-affiliated researchers, uniting input and expertise from multiple fields to address a cross-disciplinary set of

problems, hope to develop a clear vision of the challenges ahead, and to help in ef-forts to chart a path forward. A complex web of factors is in play: the environmen-

tal conditions needed to transform seeds into harvests; the production of nutri-tious food from crops, and its subsequent distribution locally and throughout the world; the economic systems that allow people to grow their own food or pur-chase groceries at markets; the interaction between what people eat and their health; and the social and political systems and

policies that allow societies to adapt to situations of stress.

While wealthy nations are already begin-ning to contemplate steps they can take to adjust, the brunt of the impacts will be born by developing countries and the world’s poor. The work being done at Har-vard will help clarify what those impacts will be and how best to respond. Myers believes there is a “moral imperative,” to mitigate the effects of climate change. “The people who are going to suffer the worst consequences…are people in the developing world who have had little to do with generating these threats and have fewer resources to adapt to them,” he says. “Through our consumption practices in the wealthy world, we are putting hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in harm’s way. We shouldn’t be doing a global experi-ment on the world’s food sources.”

20 S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 0

A major expansion of nuclear power is essential as a measure against climate change, John Rowe told a Harvard audience in 2008. But the chairman and CEO of Exelon, the nation’s largest utility company, and owner and operator of the largest fleet of nuclear

plants in the United States (who was delivering a Future of Energy lecture sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Envi-ronment), also said that an investment in new plants simply doesn’t make financial sense for a company like his, even after the promise of federal loan guarantees—a position he reiterated earlier this year.

Surprising or seemingly paradoxical positions on nuclear power are not unusual these days. And the complexity of Rowe’s perspec-tive on the subject illustrates the way, all across the spectrum of political opinion, analysts are now looking at the potential benefits and risks of nuclear power with fresh eyes, weighing anew a range of issues, including the need for regulatory and technological safe-guards and the political, social, and economic questions surround-ing the prospects for what many see as a need for a resurgence of the industry—a hoped-for major expansion that is often described as a “nuclear renaissance.”

The new impetus is driven overwhelmingly by one factor: the push for ways of meeting ever-growing needs for energy without using more fossil fuels, which add to the already risky levels of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere and which are vulnerable to disrup-tions in foreign supplies.

The consequence is that after a quarter-century hiatus nationally in orders for new nuclear plants—a period during which globally the number of functioning reactors also leveled off—the first new licensing requests by American companies have been made this year, in the wake of President Obama’s call for loan guarantees for the new plants. But despite that slight bounce, essentially nobody thinks the road ahead for nuclear power will be an easy one.

For a nuclear resurgence to have any significant impact on those concerns, the global industry “really has to grow a lot,” says Matthew Bunn, associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and co-principal investigator at the school’s Project on Managing the Atom. At present, about 4 new plants are being built per year around the world, but to make a significant dent in green-house gas emissions—at best, this would be something on the order of just a tenth of the new energy supplies that will be needed—“we would need about 25 new plants a year from now until 2050,” he says. And relying on that level of new construction as a key compo-nent of a strategy to avert dangerous climate change is fraught with its own risks, he adds: a major disaster at a nuclear plant anywhere in

By David L. Chandler

Implications of a Nuclear Renaissance


the world, whether by accident or terrorism, “would doom any realistic prospect for a major nuclear contribution to the climate problem.”

Bunn thinks a resurgence of nuclear power could indeed play a significant role in reducing anticipated emissions, mostly in the second half of this century, and is worth pursuing for that reason. But he and many others also point to a list of concerns that would need to be addressed to make that possible without creating undue new risks.

The Economic PictureWhen Rowe said it would be too risky for a utility to order a new nuclear power plant today, his conclusion was based on the present economic realities—even in light of the administration’s offer of loan guarantees. But why should it be so hard for a self-professed advocate of nuclear power, and for a company that has exten-sive experience in the area, to justify such an investment?

“Capital costs are huge, and have gone up by about a factor of two in the last few years,” says Bunn. “There are a variety of proposals that could ultimately lead to lowered costs—including a standardiza-tion of designs—but for the time being, the choices available tend to be large, non-standardized, and expensive.”

Butler professor of environmental studies Michael McElroy explains: “The basic prob-lem with nuclear [power] is that it’s a high-risk activity, economically. People remember what happened at Shoreham: It was a major nuclear plant, and it never produced a single

watt because of public opposition and pub-lic concerns about not being able to evacuate Long Island. A lot of money was spent, and the ratepayers had to pay.”

In light of that experience, he says, “imagine a utility making a decision to build a gigawatt plant, which costs about $4 billion. Once you have it, the fuel is cheap. But it’s the capital cost that’s a heavy factor. Given the risk, if you’re going to finance it, what interest rate are you go-ing to demand? Twelve, thirteen, fourteen percent? That makes nuclear power very

expensive.” And that investment is vulner-able in a way that investments in other sources are not, he adds: “it takes ten years to build, and you have to pay for it now, and if there’s an accident that changes public perception, you lose your money. For a CEO [of a utility company], you risk going out in disgrace.” A combined-cycle natural gas plant or a new wind farm are seen as much financially safer and less ex-pensive alternatives, both domestically and in many other parts of the world.

Professor of government Stephen Anso-labehere says that even to those working in the field of nuclear power, “it’s a little confusing as to what the price [of nuclear

generated electricity] really is. There are a lot of factors that come in,” and there is much heated disagreement as to the most accurate ways of estimating the true costs. In general, actual prices based on operat-ing experience are substantially higher than the numbers that are often quoted, even by experts in the field, he says.

“It’s often argued,” Ansolabehere contin-ues, that it’s “because of regulation” that the costs of nuclear power often exceed those of most other sources, he says. But detailed analyses, such as a 2003 study from MIT,

showed “the real driver of cost was the capi-tal costs” of building the plants, because of the long lead times and high degree of perceived financial risk. Similar factors also drastically drive up the price of other large, complex installations, including proposed new combined-cycle coal plants with carbon capture systems, he adds.

For the present, at least, nuclear power remains the most politicized of all poten-tial power sources, and the one with the highest negative public perceptions. In a recent survey, Ansolabehere found that 55 percent of Americans were strongly opposed to having a nuclear plant built within 25 miles of their homes, compared to 45 percent for a coal plant, 26 percent for a natural gas plant, and just 11 percent for a wind power facility.

On the other hand, people are generally much more likely to accept new nuclear plants at sites where they already operate, Ansolabehere found. “If you ask people about expanding at existing sites, the re-sponses are much more positive,” he says. Bearing that in mind, “companies should be much more attentive to the local com-munities, where there is usually a lot of support,” especially when they represent stable jobs in an uncertain economy. “But you’ve got to maintain that.”

During the short-term, the promised

“At present, about 4 new plants are being built per year around the world, but to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions we would need about 25 new plants a year from now until 2050.”

Matthew Bunn, associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-principal investigator of the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom.

22 S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 0

Federal loan guarantees should help, and have tipped some U.S. companies to file applications for new nuclear plants. But those guarantees will only apply to the first few plants ordered. The Nuclear Energy In-stitute, the industry’s trade association, esti-mates that without the guarantees, the life-time cost of a new U.S. nuclear plant would be about $98 per megawatt-hour produced (compared to about $79 for a conventional coal plant), and with the loan guarantees that would drop to about $64 per mega-watt-hour. “It’s not at all obvious that we will have nuclear power that’s competitive after loan guarantees end,” Bunn says.

But that depends partly on how things go for the first few new plants that get built—and on what new alternatives come along, in the United States and elsewhere. For one thing, standardization of plant designs could go a long way toward low-ering costs while increasing safety, many analysts believe.

Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Pro-fessor and the director of the University’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, points out that this is one of the keys to France’s suc-cess with nuclear power, which provides more than three-quarters of that na-tion’s electricity. “One thing they’ve done that I admire is they’ve standardized their design, which means you learn.” One reason that’s important, he explains, is for safety: “Imagine if every airplane was different—dif-ferent engines and different instruments and so on—we’d have nothing like the safety record we have.” Yet in most of the world, that’s essentially the way nuclear plants have been built. Standardization would make it possible to take advantage of the learning

curve offered by monitoring large numbers of identical plants.

Bunn is not entirely persuaded, however. “I think standardization is important, but it’s difficult in a world with several competing vendors. There are seven dif-ferent designs being built now in China, for example, even though China is talking openly about wanting to standardize. Sim-ilarly, in license applications in the U.S., there are quite a variety of different designs utilities are pursuing.”

For the next few decades, Bunn suggests, the vast majority of new reactors built are going to be fairly conventional light-water reactors (LWRs), the kind with which the world industry has the most experience. There are a few advanced designs that promise to be more economical and safer to operate, such as pebble-bed reactors

that never need to be shut down for refu-eling and have no risk of meltdown. But because such approaches are unproven, “It’s going to be very hard to get these things designed, tested, and deployed,” Bunn says. But if such designs prove them-selves, they could become major players in a nuclear revival in coming decades.

Among the new ideas, one that many find especially promising is the concept of much smaller, self-contained, and modu-lar, factory-built reactors that could be shipped to a site fully fueled and ready to go. “Small modular reactors, at the mo-ment, are not competitive,” Bunn says. But that could change quickly if and when they start to be built and deployed in large numbers. Because of their smaller size, they could eliminate one of the big-gest risks for utilities, the need to invest

in huge plants all at once in order to make any use of nuclear electricity production. While tradi-tional nuclear plants have significant economies of scale—they need to be at least a gigawatt in capac-ity to have any chance of being economically com-petitive—the idea is that the smaller plants could counteract the inefficien-cies of smaller size with the greater efficiency of mass-production methods.

“They’re hoping you’ll get economies of produc-tion scale, but it’s a chick-en and egg problem,” Bunn says. “You don’t get economies until you have large-scale production, and companies are unlike-ly to order large numbers until the economies are there.” So the real poten-tial of such reactors lies in the longer term: “I’m a fan of the small modular reactors, but from now until 2050, they’ll only displace a smidgeon of carbon,” he says.

“It’s crazy that we’ve come to a point 60 years after the start of commercial nuclear power with no plan for how nuclear waste will be disposed of.”

Graham Allison, Dillon profes-sor of government and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Allison is an expert on U.S. national security with respect to nuclear proliferation.


The Waste IssueRegardless of whether, and how fast, a nuclear renais-sance takes hold, dealing with the nuclear waste already dis-carded by commercial nucle-ar power operators during the previous half century remains a problem. At the moment, there are few encouraging models. The United States has spent more than two decades, and perhaps $10 billion, developing plans for a single repository to hold all the nation’s high-level nuclear waste at a site called Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but after years of lawsuits by the state, that option has now been taken off the table once and for all—with no replace-ment in sight.

“It’s crazy,” says Galison, “that we’ve come to a point 60 years after the start of commercial nuclear power with no plan for how nuclear waste will be disposed of.” But the issue may be more political than technological.

“There’s a lot of debate,” he says. “Should we put it into granite mines, which are stable, but have a risk of water infiltration? Or in salt mines, where there’s a prima facie case for no water infiltration” since any water would have dissolved the salt? There, the issue is “they close up, so it’s not recoverable,” if a future generation wanted to dig up the radioactive material for use in new plants or for some new pur-pose we haven’t thought of yet. And there are a variety of other feasible options for underground storage.

“This is a debate we really need to have as a country,” Galison says. “We have this waste already, it’s not theoretical. The waste we have is not well secured at the moment, so we have to figure out what to do with that stuff.” And the quantities of waste will be increasing: “There are so many plants already slated for production. It’s not just inevitable, it’s already happening.” Apart from new plants in the United States, China and India are gearing up for major increases, and many other nations are eager to use nuclear energy for the first time.

There are three main concerns about the waste, Galison says: water, theft, and

longevity. Water, he says, is the most sig-nificant worry. “The biggest issue, it seems to me, which is both incredibly simple and incredibly complex, is water. If water gets into a site,” he explains, this “will cause the waste to migrate; and if it gets into aqui-fers, that’s a real danger. To me, that is the number one issue.”

The second concern, he says, is the risk of people trying to dig into the repository to get hold of the waste for the purposes of making weapons: whether in the form of simple “dirty bombs,” or for reprocessing to provide the material for nuclear weapons; and the third is simply the need to keep highly radioactive material sequestered for the thousands of years that it takes for the radioactivity to decline to safe levels—“periods of time comparable to the history of civilization itself,” as Galison puts it.

All of those issues, however, might be moot if the material were stored under-ground in large salt formations. Because the salt would seal itself up around the buried waste, the radioactive material would be virtually impossible to recover —either intentionally or by accident.

And such formations are not subject to water infiltration. Other kinds of geological storage may also offer similar levels of protection.

“It’s a problem, but it’s not a big safety issue,” says Bunn. “You want to put it deep un-derground, where there are only moderate risks.” And it’s important to keep the risks in perspective, he says: “Com-pared to the tens of thousands of people who die every year from the emissions from coal plants, it’s minor.”

The big question is how to get a site chosen and accepted. On this, the track record has not been encouraging. The U.S. is not the only country without a plan. France, often touted as a shining example of an effective nuclear power program, doesn’t have one ei-ther. There, most of the waste

goes to a single reprocessing plant, which produces large quantities of plutonium. Some of that is re-used in power plants, but the majority is just piling up at the reprocessing facility. No long-term storage facility has been identified.

But there is at least one encouraging exemplar out there, Bunn points out: in Finland, a final long-term repository for that country’s nuclear waste has been de-cided on, essentially without controversy. In fact, when the decision was announced as to which of two possible sites would be chosen, there was an immediate lawsuit over the choice—by the community that didn’t get picked.

What did Finland do right? One tack that helped, Bunn explains, is that right at the outset the government made it clear that no community would be forced to accept a storage facility. That made it easy for communities to investigate the pos-sibility, without fear that a permanent re-pository would be sited there against their will. In addition, planners decided early on to locate the site near an operating nuclear plant, where there is already an

Peter Galison, Pellegrino University professor and director of the Harvard University Collec-tion of Historical Scientific Instru-ments.

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on-site spent fuel pool. So the choices facing that community were to keep the waste stored on the surface, or have it buried deep underground. “That’s a no-brainer,” Bunn says.

Galison says “the attempt to find a rational and well-engi-neered disposal site is essential.” And those who oppose such a fa-cility on environmental grounds need to be realistic about what the alternatives are. “It’s not robins in an untouched meadow versus a nuclear disposal site. It’s a current unregulated mess ver-sus something protected against leaks.” Getting it right is mostly a matter of how it gets decided at this point, he says. “You have to have an open enough, clear enough process, not secretive decisions. I don’t think this is impossible. It’s complicated, but it’s necessary.”

Accidents and attacks When it comes to thinking about the potential risks associ-ated with nuclear power, most of the public’s attention—from the release of the movie “The China Syndrome” through the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986—focused on the possibility of a major accident such as a meltdown of the reactor core.

Most people probably overestimate that risk, Bunn suggests. The risk was always low, and nuclear plants “are safer today than in the past,” he says. But what of the push for greatly increased numbers? “At the current risk rates, if we have three or four

times as many plants, that’s still a signifi-cant amount of risk,” he says. On the other hand, newer designs, including passive cooling systems and other advanced safety measures, may help to drive risks down.

“It seems to be true that we as a people express more fear about technologies that seem to be unfamiliar, exotic, or that we don’t understand,” says James Hammitt, professor of economics and decision sci-

ences at the Harvard School of Public Health. This seems to be the case with nuclear power, he points out, even though it rep-resents some 20 percent of the nation’s generating capacity and has been around longer than the lifetime of the average person.

People also react differently to a single large event than to a large number of smaller ones, as with the inverted im-pressions people tend to have about the risks of airplanes ver-sus cars. “To the extent we’re fearful of low-probability seri-ous outcomes,” Hammitt says, “if you compare nuclear with coal and other fossil fuels, I’m quite certain that burning coal is having serious health effects on people; but it’s very hard to estimate the low chance of some really catastrophic event at a nuclear plant.” So people are weighing “the certainty of lots of deaths and illnesses, against the uncertainty of a probably small, but probably very serious outcome.”

If the risk of accidents is over-estimated, the opposite may be true for the risk of attack. Even in the post-9/11 era, it’s a possibility that gets relatively little serious attention. But Graham Allison, Dillon pro-fessor of government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at HKS, has been studying the is-sue for years. He says the risk of terrorist exploitation of nuclear power and its by-products, though real, also needs to be put into proper perspective. First, he explains, it’s important to realize that even an all-out attack on a nuclear plant poses no danger of a nuclear bomb-like explosion. Still, “if an aircraft were to crash into it, especially into the most vulnerable components, then that’s like a ‘dirty bomb’ on steroids. You’d have dispersal of a lot of radioactive mate-rial, including quite nasty materials. That would spook people for a long time, and have local health effects.” Because of that possibility it’s essential for all nuclear plants to have “reasonable precautions against any reasonable threats,” he says.

But as deadly as such an attack may sound, he says, “To put it in perspective, if I

James K. Hammitt, professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We as a people express more fear about technologies that seem unfamiliar, exotic, or that we don’t understand,” Hammitt says in reference to public attitudes about nuclear power.

Source: Matthew Bunn/Harvard Kennedy School of Government

30

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01991-2006 Required 2008-2050

Gig

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Capacity of Nuclear Plants Added per Year

Between 1991 and 2006, only four Gigawatts-electric of nuclear gener-ating capacity was added anually. Six times that amount would need to be added each year between now and 2050 to make a significant im-pact on greenhouse gas emissions.


“If I compare the threats of an attack on a spent-fuel pool with the threat to chlorine tankers that are on the rails, or the chemical facilities that are in many cities, the chemical risks are greater. In an advanced industrial society we live with lots of very dangerous stuff.”

compare the threat of an attack on a spent-fuel pool with the threats to chlorine tankers that are on the rails, or the chemical facilities that are in many cities, the chemical risks are greater. In an advanced industrial society we live with lots of very dangerous stuff.”

A much more serious concern regarding nuclear material, Allison says, is prolifera-tion. There are many risks associated with the production and disposal of nuclear fuel—in particular with the facilities that produce the fuel for the reactor, and the facilities that extract plutonium from nuclear waste. Nuclear weapons can be made from either enriched uranium, or plutonium. “Enriched uranium is made by putting it through an industrial process, including centrifuges, like vast washing machines that spin at the speed of sound to concentrate Uranium 235 (U-235),” he explains. For use in a nuclear power plant, the uranium is enriched to a level of 4 or 5 percent U-235. To make a bomb, U-235 is typically enriched to about 90 percent, but in both cases the enrichment takes place in a similar facility. “With a little re-piping, you can produce 90 percent. So if any state that decides to build nuclear plants also decides to build a fuel-production facil-ity” explains Allison, “it’s a straight step to a nuclear bomb.” Likewise, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to separate out plutoni-um, as France does, produces material that can be used to run nuclear power plants, but also to make bombs.

Allison notes that while a facility de-signed to produce reactor fuel could, in principle, be diverted to make weapons material, that’s not the likeliest scenario. Instead, the expertise and technology de-veloped for such production may be used to build a similar, hidden, much smaller facility for producing bomb-grade ura-nium or plutonium.

Bunn says that “every country that has launched a nuclear weapons program since nuclear power became available has acquired some crucial elements from com-mercial nuclear power, either as a fig leaf,

or as a way to build up infrastructure and expertise. So, for example, Pakistan sought to buy a big reprocessing plant from France. In later interviews, they said ‘we never intended to use the French plant to produce weapons material, but rather to use that knowledge and expertise to build a smaller facility’” to make the material for

bombs. In short, he says, “The prolifera-tion concerns are broader and more com-plex than is often portrayed.”

Nuclear fuel security in nations that have not previously had nuclear power could also present inviting targets for nations or terrorist organizations bent on obtain-ing weapons material. “There, the issue is whether the required infrastructure will be in place” to assure control of the fuel and waste, Ansolabehere says.

But efforts are underway to address the range of proliferation scenarios, by bring-ing existing weapons-grade material under strict international control, and providing a system so that countries that want to build nuclear power plants can get their fuel, and

get rid of their waste, through internation-ally monitored supply chains.

In a Future of Energy lecture in 2008, Anne Lauvergeon, head of Areva, France’s largest nuclear power company, said that her company is already building com-pletely self-contained reactors that compa-nies or countries can order without hav-ing to get involved in fuel production or disposal. The reactors would remain sealed for their operating lifetimes and the fuel-ing and disposal would be handled by the company. “The fact that we can deliver the whole plant, with the fuel cycle, without any possibility of proliferation, and take back the waste and recycle it, is absolutely key,” she said. “It’s a precondition for us to sell new reactors.”

Similarly, Abu Dhabi recently entered into an agreement to buy four nuclear plants from a South Korean company. But in the process, Allison says they signed a contract “saying that for the lifetime of those plants, they will buy their fuel from an outside supplier, and ship their spent fuel back to them.” That not only provides security, but it also just makes sense, he explains. “In terms of economics, the potential of enriching your own uranium makes no sense unless you’re operating

Professor of government Stephen Ansolabe-here says that of all energy sources, nuclear power has the one of the highest negative public perceptions.

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The Center for the Environment warmly welcomes the incoming group of En-

vironmental Fellows who will arrive at the center this fall. The new fellows will be joining a group of remarkable scholars starting the second year of their fellowships. Together, the Environmental Fellows at Harvard form a community of researchers with diverse back-grounds united by intellectual curiosity, top-quality scholarship, and a drive to understand some of the most important environmental challenges facing society. The Center also congratulates the outgoing Fellows (class of 2008-10) as they prepare to embark on the next stage of their careers. For more informa-tion on the Environmental Fellows program, including how to apply, visit http://www.envi-ronment.harvard.edu/grants/fellows.

Incoming Fellows: Class of 2010-12

Daniel A. Barber (Ph.D. Columbia University) is an architectural historian analyzing affini-ties between the history of architecture and the emergence of environmentalism in the 20th century. As a Ziff Environmental Fellow, Daniel will work with Charles Waldheim at the Graduate School of Design to pursue a research project that complements his dissertation. Tentatively titled “The Invention of Thermal Comfort: Climate Science and the Globalization of Modern Architecture, 1933-1963,” the project explores the multifaceted proliferation of climatic architectural strategies at mid-century, and in particular research on “thermal comfort”—the internal climatic conditions of the built environment. The concept developed as part of an interest in the formal aspects of passive ventilation and heating

strategies, and was quickly subsumed into the global proliferation of mechanical heat-ing, ventilation, and air conditioning systems by the end of the decade. The project reveals empirical and conceptual relationships be-tween architectural research, climate science, and the global emergence of political, eco-nomic, and cultural concern for environmen-tal conditions.

Elizabeth Landis (Ph.D. University of Wiscon-sin) is a materials chemist who is interested in applying surface chemistry to solar energy collection and storage. At the University of Wisconsin, Beth developed methods for attaching molecules to vertically aligned carbon nanofibers and studied the electronic properties of the resulting interfaces. This work demonstrated the suitability of the nanofibers for use in fuel cells and for energy storage. As a Henson Environmental Fellow, Beth will work with Cynthia Friend in the De-partment of Chemistry and Chemical Biology to study how surface layers of titanium diox-ide can be doped to change and control the optical properties of the material. This work will focus on tuning this abundant metal ox-ide to harvest solar energy.

Alexander (Zan) Stine (Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley) is a climate scientist inter-ested in how to separate natural signals of cli-mate variability from human-induced changes in the observational record. As a Kernan Broth-ers Environmental Fellow, Zan will work with former Environmental Fellow (now assistant professor) Peter Huybers in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences to understand changes in the response of tree growth to temperature during the last century. Because tree-ring growth is correlated with temperature at many locations, early tree-ring records have been used to infer the temperature history of the Earth before the advent of the thermom-eter. However, in the late 20th century many of these tree rings ceased to track temperature, suggesting a large-scale change in the way the terrestrial biosphere responds to climate, and calling into question tree-ring based recon-structions of past climates.

Rich Wildman (Ph.D. California Institute of Technology) is an environmental engineer whose interests also include chemistry and oceanography. As a French Environmental Fel-low, Rich will work with James Shine in the Har-vard School of Public Health to study the trans-

Environmental Fellows Prepare to Take (and Make) Their Mark

Ziff Environmental Fellow Rafael Jaramillo Receives Young Investigator AwardHUCE congratulates Rafael Jaramillo, a Ziff Environmental Fellow (2009-11), on receiving the 2010 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. The award, given by the Advanced Photon Source (an office of science within the U.S. Department of Energy), recognizes Jaramillo for furthering understanding of itinerant magnetism and for his contributions to the study of quantum matter at high pressure using synchrotron x-ray diffraction. As an environmental fellow, Jaramillo works with professor Shriram Ramanathan (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) on the problem of controlling electron transport across thin oxide barriers—a problem with broad relevance to future generations of solar cell technologies.

50 reactors.” So the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is developing a system of guarantees for any country that wants nuclear power: to provide them with a fuel supplier, along with a backup

supplier, and as a further backup the IAEA itself, which plans to maintain its own supply of fuel.

That would address the biggest con-cerns, both of the U.S. and other industri-

alized nations and of the countries seeking nuclear power. “The Iranians have used [the lack of a reliable source of fuel] as an excuse,” for their centrifuge program, Allison notes. Under the planned system,


Conferences and WorkshopsPromises and Challenges of Develop-ment and Conservation in the AmazonMarch 10, 2010Co-sponsored with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, this event featured presentations and com-mentary by Arnóbio “Binho” Marques, Governor of the State of Acre, Brazil; Jorge Viana, Former Governor of the State of Acre, Brazil; Roberto Mangabeira Un-ger, Pound professor of law (HLS), and former Minister of Strategic Affairs for the Brazilian government; and HUCE faculty associate John Briscoe, (SEAS, HSPH) and former World Bank Country Director for Brazil.

The Environmental Turn in Literary and Cultural StudiesApril 8, 2010Co-sponsored with the Humanities Cen-ter at Harvard, this colloquium on the field of “ecocriticism” featured HUCE faculty associates Lawrence Buell (Dept. of English and American Literature and Language) and Karen Thornber (Dept. of Comparative Literature), along with Ursula Heise of Stanford University. Among other questions, participants in the dialogue considered the value of in-terdisciplinary collaboration between the arts and humanities and the social and natural sciences.

Ongoing SeriesThe Future of Energy The Future of Energy is an ongoing lec-ture series focused on finding secure, safe, and reliable sources of energy to power world economic growth. The spring series opened with Aubrey McClendon, chair-man and CEO of Chesapeake Energy. McClendon championed the potential of natural gas as a major source of clean en-ergy for the U.S., arguing that the combi-nation of abundant reserves and improved extraction techniques puts the domestic supply of natural gas on par with Saudi Arabian oil reserves. The Center also host-ed David MacKay, chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change in the UK. MacKay addressed the limitations of solar and wind power, and suggested that renewable energy sources alone cannot adequately replace conven-tional fossil fuels in meeting the world’s energy demands. Returning the focus to domestic energy consumption, Kristina Johnson, U.S. Under Secretary of Energy, detailed the steps needed to accomplish the ambitious goal of reducing fossil fuel use from 80 percent to 20 percent of U.S. energy use by the year 2050. The final lecture was delivered by Marvin Odum, President of Shell Oil. Odum echoed MacKay’s view that it will take a mix of sources to meet future energy demands, emphasizing that renewable sources will

Environment w HarvardA sampling of the spring semester’s events

last resort, as a way to “make sure it’s nuts for a nation, that it economically makes no sense,” he says, to make or reprocess their own nuclear fuel.

Will this plan work, and make possible a major worldwide expansion of commercial nuclear power without adding to the risk of nuclear terrorism? “There are optimists and pessimists,” Allison says. “The optimists say we will revitalize the nuclear order. Pessimists say the trend lines are negative, and the amount of energy required to bend them is too large.” In other words, political forces may, or may not, make it possible to implement international controls over the way nations initiate or expand their use of nuclear power.

The outcome is far from guaranteed,

and it will take serious effort on the part of the United States and the international community to make the proposed system work, Allison says. Still, “I would say most days I get up as an optimist.”

But the need for international agree-ment is growing fast, as the pressures for a rapid expansion of nuclear power contin-ue to mount. Faced with the twin threats of climate change and the risk of shortages of the most readily available fossil fuels, most energy experts agree that foreclosing any option for energy production would not be prudent for the United States or the world as a whole. As Michael McElroy puts it, “I think we should be pursuing every reasonable, practical, economically feasible option.”

port, degradation, and toxicology of chemical contaminants during water reuse. Since reser-voirs are the centerpiece of many water reuse strategies, Rich will focus his research on trace organic pollutants in reservoirs that receive highly treated wastewater intended for future consumptive use.

Outgoing Environmental Fellows: Class of 2008-10

Etienne Benson (Ziff Environmental Fellow) will join the Max Planck Institute for the Histo-ry of Science in Berlin, where he will continue his work on the history of endangered species science. Etienne’s first book, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife, will be published this fall by Johns Hopkins University Press.

William Boos (French Environmental Fel-low) will join the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University as an as-sistant professor, where he will continue his work on tropical climate dynamics.

Susan Cameron (Kernan Brothers Environ-mental Fellow) will join the University of Flor-ida as an assistant professor in the Depart-ment of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation.

Mauricio Santillana (Henson Environmen-tal Fellow) will begin a new postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he will continue his research in atmospheric chemistry. Mauricio will also teach a graduate course in applied mathematics in the fall.

Alex Wissner-Gross (Ziff Environmental Fel-low) will serve as chief scientist of Enernetics, Inc., a research and development company he co-founded in 2007 that is leading the convergence of physical and digital worlds.

Shengwei Zhu (Ziff Environmental Fellow) will return to China where he plans to join the faculty of the Architecture and Urban Planning School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology—one of the top ten schools in the country.

which was kick-started with a $50 mil-lion donation from Warren Buffet and matched by pledges for another $100 million by from various national govern-ments, the IAEA will provide the fuel of

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supplement—but not supplant—fossil fuels. The Future of Energy lecture series is made possible with generous support from Bank of America. Lectures can be viewed online anytime at http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/video.

Biodiversity, Ecology, and Global Change Each semester, the Biodiversity lecture se-ries brings top scholars in the fields of biol-ogy and ecology to Harvard. In addition to giving their main presentations, speak-ers join students in the Harvard Ecology Journal Club for an informal lunch. This spring, the Center hosted visits from Ste-phen Long, University of Illinois at Urba-na-Champaign; Bryan Grenfell, Princeton University; Mercedes Pascual, University of Michigan; and Mary Power, Univer-sity of California-Berkeley. Video of their presentations, as well as past lectures from this series, is available for viewing online at http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/video. Biodiversity, Ecology and Global Change is generously supported by Bank of America.

Science & Democracy Lecture SeriesOn April 1, Arundhati Roy delivered her lecture, “Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain? Field Notes on Democracy,” to a packed house at the Graduate School of Design. The Center co-sponsors this popular lecture series with the Program on Science, Technology, and Society.

Upcoming EventsQuantum Effects in Biological SystemsJune 17-20, 2010Organized by Alán Aspuru-Guzik (Dept. of Chemistry

and Chemical Biology) and co-sponsored by HUCE, this three-day workshop will focus on the discussion of non-trivial quantum phenomena in biological sys-tems. The interdisciplinary nature of the program will bring together experts in chemical physics, biology, physics, and quantum information. For more informa-tion, visit http://quebs2010.wordpress.com.

Frontiers of Renewable Energy Sciences and Technologies (F.O.R.E.S.T)September 30–October 1, 2010Organized by Shriram Ramanathan (SEAS) with lead sponsorship by HUCE,

the workshop seeks to explore scientific frontiers in pure and applied sciences and device engineering in areas poten-tially connected to energy technologies. A poster session for students and post-docs will follow the presentations on September 30. Early reg-istration is recommended; for more information, visit http://www.energy.harvard.edu/events/forest.

Harvard UniversityCenter for the Environment24 Oxford StreetCambridge, MA 02138www.environment.harvard.edu

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The Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) encourages research and education about the environment and its many interactions with human society. By connecting scholars and practitioners from different disciplines, the Center seeks to raise the quality of environmental research at Harvard and beyond.

Environment @ Harvard is a publication of the Center for the Environment

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