Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that Rebecca Dell will deliver our June research seminar, “Making Stuff is Baking the Planet,” on Wednesday, June 17, from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM in the Hogan Hall A-level Conference Room, at 2910 Broadway.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract: Making and processing the physical stuff around us—that is, mining, manufacturing, construction, and waste processing—generates between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. In spite of this, it remains one of the most under-studied and under-discussed drivers of climate change. This presentation will provide an overview of the emissions sources in the industrial sector and their variation in space and time, with a focus on the largest sources: commodity production of steel, cement, fertilizer, and plastics. These materials are the ingredients we make everything else out of, and we produce billions of tons of them every year. I will give a deep dive on recent research mapping the emissions of the most complicated of the commodity sectors—chemicals—and finish by laying out the current state of climate action in the industrial sector and the opportunities going forward.
Bio: Rebecca Dell is a visiting scholar at Columbia Business School and a Senior Fellow at its Climate Knowledge Initiative, where she researches and writes about climate transitions in heavy industry. For the last seven years, she led the industry sector program at ClimateWorks Foundation, a grantmaker based in San Francisco, CA. Prior to that she served in the Obama administration at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she led implementation of the President's Climate Action Plan. She has a PhD in climate science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
