FSI researchers examine the role of energy sources from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) investigates how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality. Professors assess natural gas and coal markets, as well as the smart energy grid and how to create effective climate policy in an imperfect world. This includes how state-owned enterprises – like oil companies – affect energy markets around the world. Regulatory barriers are examined for understanding obstacles to lowering carbon in energy services. Realistic cap and trade policies in California are studied, as is the creation of a giant coal market in China.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, 2nd floor, Encina Hall East
CISAC Central Conference Room, 2nd floor, Encina Hall
How should the United States deal with so-called rogue states that threaten to use chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. homeland or its troops abroad? Scott Sagan of Stanford University examines Washington's "calculated ambiguity doctrine," which holds that the United States does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological weapons attack. Sagan argues that the risks associated with this doctrine outweigh the benefits. He warns that although the ambiguity doctrine might decrease the likelihood of a chemical or biological attack, it also raises the probability that Washington would feel compelled to use nuclear weapons to respond to such an attack. Sagan concludes that the United States should renounce the nuclear option and instead recommit itself to meeting a chemical or biological attack with overwhelming conventional force.
Through research and track-two diplomacy, CISAC scholars seek to identify policy oriented, cooperative measures aimed at fostering effective dialogue between Pakistan and India in an effort to enhance nuclear safety and security in the region.
Under the leadership of CISAC Consulting Professor George Bunn and Fritz Steinhausler (University of Salzburg), a visiting professor at CISAC and IIS, the European Forum and CISAC co-sponsored workshops on the legal and illegal transport and diversion of hazardous materials, and US and EU policy responses to security threats. Bunn and Steinhausler also conducted a CISAC project to strengthen global practices for protecting nuclear material against theft and sabotage.
This paper examines the impact on global warming of development and structural changes in the electricity sector of Guangdong Province, China, together with the possible effect of international instruments such as are generated by the Kyoto Protocol on that impact. The purpose of the paper is three-fold: to examine and analyze the data available, to put that data into an explanatory economic and institutional framework, and to analyze the possible application of international instruments such as CDMs in that locality. Our plans are to supplement this work with similar work elsewhere in China.
This research contributes to two groups of existing studies. First, several researchers have studied China's energy industry, including the utility sector, in the context of global greenhouse gas emissions and abatement policies. Not much attention has been paid to the electricity sectoral development at the sub-national level and its regional differences. Yet, important decisions are taken and important constraints operate at the sub-national level. Second, since the Kyoto Protocol provided for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as a policy instrument to involve developing countries in carbon emissions abatement in 1997, a number of studies have focused on the operation of CDM. Applying CDM is challenging because its rule of additionality requires that a "baseline" estimate be made of what developing countries, including China, would do to reduce carbon emissions in the absence of CDM. Minimizing moral hazard and other incentive problems is a daunting task. The studies to date have focused on discussions of general embedded problems and desirable principles for applying the additionality rule. However, how to identify baseline factors in specific economies and evaluate their impact on the energy sector decisions in terms of transaction or institutional costs remain unsettled questions.
This study is a first step towards filling that gap. By investigating Guangdong's electricity sector, we hope to highlight new characteristics of Guangdong's electricity market and institutions, which may have been neglected from large model and highly aggregated approaches. At the same time, by examining the economic and institutional features of the decision making process in Guangdong's electricity sector, we hope to get a better understanding of the factors affecting possible baselines and to draw some preliminary implications for CDM and other carbon abatement policy instruments. This study may also provide a reference for other regional analyses and permit some preliminary implications for baseline and abatement policy studies to be drawn.
William Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University. He is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution, and serves as director of the Preventive Defense Project. He is an expert in U.S. foreign policy, national security and arms control. He was the co-director of CISAC from 1988 to 1993, during which time he was also a part-time professor at Stanford. He was a part-time lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Santa Clara University from 1971 to 1977.
Perry was the 19th secretary of defense for the United States, serving from February 1994 to January 1997. He previously served as deputy secretary of defense (1993-1994) and as under secretary of defense for research and engineering (1977-1981). Dr. Perry currently serves on the Defense Policy Board (DPB). He is on the board of directors of Covant and several emerging high-tech companies. His previous business experience includes serving as a laboratory director for General Telephone and Electronics (1954-1964); founder and president of ESL Inc. (1964-1977); executive vice-president of Hambrecht & Quist Inc. (1981-1985); and founder and chairman of Technology Strategies & Alliances (1985-1993). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
From 1946 to 1947, Perry was an enlisted man in the Army Corps of Engineers, and served in the Army of Occupation in Japan. He joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps in 1948 and was a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves from 1950 to 1955. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 and the Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1998. Perry has received a number of other awards including the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal (1980 and 1981), and Outstanding Civilian Service Medals from the Army (1962 and 1997), the Air Force (1997), the Navy (1997), the Defense Intelligence Agency (1977 and 1997), NASA (1981) and the Coast Guard (1997). He received the American Electronic Association's Medal of Achievement (1980), the Eisenhower Award (1996), the Marshall Award (1997), the Forrestal Medal (1994), and the Henry Stimson Medal (1994). The National Academy of Engineering selected him for the Arthur Bueche Medal in 1996. He has received awards from the enlisted personnel of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. He has received decorations from the governments of Albania, Bahrain, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Poland, Slovenia, and Ukraine. He received a BS and MS from Stanford University and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics.
Deborah C. Gordon is a Senior Fellow, Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils. Gordon serves as a Senior Advisor for Longview Fusion Energy Systems, Inc. and several other high technology companies where she helps them bridge the gap in understanding between science, industry and government institutions. She is an Affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University from which she retired in August 2019 after 22 years where she served as the Executive Director, Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project, co-directed by Sec. William Perry and Sec. Ashton Carter. In this role, Ms. Gordon participated in the highest-level interactions with political and military leaders around the world. Her expertise is in promoting highly informed, non-governmental dialogues, known as track-two diplomacy, to provide opportunities for international innovation, agreement and cooperation. The Preventive Defense team devised creative and innovative policy approaches to U.S. defense policy and communicated them directly to high-level government officials. Gordon has over 40 years of experience in algorithm design, signal processing, network design, and network security and holds several U.S. and Canadian patents. She is the former Mayor of Woodside, CA and served 17 years on the Woodside Town Council; Chair and Director, City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County; and Chair for many San Mateo County and California State policy advisory bodies including for energy and water policy. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Strategic Risks, Arms Control Association, and Probability Management. Gordon is a founder and director (emerita) of the Institute for Security and Technology. She holds a BS in computer science from the University of Southern California.
Not in residence
Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.
In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.
Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.
Please feel free to bring a bag lunch.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall East
