FSI's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) is pleased to announce the selection of a new director, Frank Wolak, who is Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics and FSI Senior Fellow.  Professor Wolak brings to the post a distinguished record of scholarship and deep policy experience in energy and environmental economics and regulation.

Wolak’s wide-ranging research contributions have examined energy systems both domestically and in emerging markets around the world.  He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for the electricity supply industry in California and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), among other professional affiliations.

PESD founder David G. Victor, Professor of Law and FSI Senior Fellow, stepped down from the director position effective April 1, 2009. PESD Assistant Director Mark C. Thurber will take over as acting director until Wolak assumes the director position on September 1, 2009.

Victor will remain at Stanford as faculty through the end of the summer of 2009, when he will leave to become a full professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at U.C. San Diego, where he will build a research group working on the study of international regulation.
 
“FSI and Stanford are extremely grateful to David Victor for all that he has done to establish PESD and build it into the innovative and influential research program that it is today,” said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. “I know that the entire Stanford community joins me in extending our best wishes to David and in offering a hearty welcome to Frank.”

In a world facing profound transformations in the way energy is generated and used, PESD’s work on how political, economic, and institutional factors combine to shape energy market outcomes meets a critical global research need. For additional information on PESD research interests and platforms, please contact Acting Director Mark Thurber.

India has been famous for arguing that it (and the rest of the developing world) should incur no expense in controlling emissions that cause climate change. The West caused the problem and it should clean it up. That argument is increasingly untenable-both in the fundamental arithmetic of climate change, which is a problem that is impossible to solve without developing country participation, and in the political reality that important western partners will increasingly demand more of India and other developing countries. India's own public is also demanding more.

The Indian government has outlined a broad plan for what could be done, but the plan still lacks a strategy to inform which efforts offer the most leverage on warming emissions and which are most credible because they align with India's own interests. This paper offers a framework for that strategy. It suggests that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India's own self-interest, and with three case studies it suggests that leverage on emissions could amount to several hundred million tonnes of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030. (For comparison, the Kyoto Protocol has caused worldwide emission reductions of, at most, a couple hundred million tonnes of CO2 per year.) We suggest in addition to identifying self-interest, which is the key concept in the burgeoning literature on "co-benefits" of climate change policy, that it is also important to examine where India and outsiders (e.g., technology providers and donors) have leverage.

One reason that strategies offered to date have remained abstract and difficult to implement is that they are not rooted in a clear understanding of where the Government of India is able to deliver on its promises (and where Indian firms have access to the needed technology and practices). Many ideas are interesting in theory but do not align with the administrative and technological capabilities of the Indian context. As the rest of the world contemplates how to engage with India on the task of controlling emissions it must craft deals that reflect India's interests, capabilities and leverage on emissions. These deals will not be simple to craft, but there are many precedents for such arrangements in other areas of international cooperation, such as in accession agreements to the WTO.