Academic Conferences

Tsinghua Forum

Speaker Bio

Professor Daniel Kammen is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the Chair Professor of Energy and Resources, and Director of the Environmental Policy Center at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Professor Kammen is also the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at Berkeley (RAEL; http://rael.berkeley.edu), and served as director of the Berkeley Sustainable Research Center from 2007 to 2015.

Professor Kammen is a lead author of multiple reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was one of the recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. As a lead author for the IPCC report Climate Change 2007, he contributed to an assessment of human-induced global warming. In 2010, Professor Kammen was appointed the first Energy Fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative, and in 2016 he was appointed Science Envoy for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. He has also served as an energy policy expert and advisor to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Professor Kammen received his education in physics at Cornell University (B.A., 1984) and Harvard University (M.A., 1986; Ph.D., 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Before moving to UC Berkeley, he was an assistant professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and chaired the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program. Professor Kammen has helped establish more than ten companies, including Enphase, which went public in 2012; Renew Financial; and a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) implementation company that went public in 2014. He has made world-class contributions to climate change, new energy deployment and impacts, and energy policy research. He has published more than 400 papers, with over 18,000 citations and an H-index of 65.

Talk Abstract

To avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change, countries around the world pledged at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80%-100% within three decades. Although countries are accelerating the green energy transition across science, technology, economics, and policy, there is still a considerable distance to go before this target can be achieved. Professor Kammen's talk will explore innovative pathways for advancing these goals globally. Particular attention will be paid to the benefits of ending the damaging China-U.S. trade war. Professor Kammen argues that every country can gain significant benefits from leadership and collaboration in the green energy revolution.

Journal Seminar

Speaker Bio

Shanshan Zhang holds a Ph.D. in energy economics and policy from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She previously served as an assistant professor at the School of Humanities, Economics and Law at Northwestern Polytechnical University. She is currently a scientific editor at One Earth, the flagship Cell Press journal, in its Beijing office, where she is responsible for energy- and city-related topics. Her work focuses on advancing interdisciplinary research on energy innovation, urban development, climate change, and related fields, and on bringing together scientific insight to develop solutions for the major challenges posed by environmental change.