From Water to Air; Scientific Pathways towards a Clearer, Cleaner Future.
Daniel Schrag
Director of Harvard University Center for the Environment
Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology & professor of environmental science and engineering, Harvard University
Talk Title — Climate change and a clean energy transformation: Will it bring cleaner air for all?
“Transforming our energy systems to address the growing threat of climate change has huge potential to transform our experience of urban environments through cleaner air and water. But the re-engineering of our energy systems also raises major questions about equity and cost that must be addressed if political support for such efforts will be sustained over the coming decades.”
Daniel Schrag
Daniel Schrag is Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering at Harvard University where he serves as director of the Center for the Environment. He also co-directs the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. A graduate of Yale University, he received a Ph.D. in geology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. His research focuses on climate change over the broadest range of Earth’s history as well as on energy technology and energy policy. He is currently seeking an understanding of how tropical ocean dynamics relate to decadal climate variability and climate prediction, as well as developing new ways to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With Paul Hoffman, he developed the Snowball Earth hypothesis that Earth experienced a series of extreme glaciations that may have stimulated a rise in atmospheric oxygen and the proliferation of multicellular animals. He is interested in how we can use climate events in the geologic past to understand current climate challenges. He has been a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute for the past nineteen years and currently co-chairs its Science Board. With John Marshall, Schrag co-founded the Potential Energy Coalition, a non-profit organization that harnesses the best minds from the marketing and advertising world to communicate the risks of climate change to Americans. From 2009 to 2017, he served on President Obama’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), contributing to reports to the President on a variety of topics including energy technology and national energy policy, agricultural preparedness, climate change, big data and privacy, the use of forensic science in criminal justice, and STEM education. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1999, he was named by Technology Review as one of the one hundred young innovators for the next century and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000.
