Rob Socolow's Climate Change Seminar

A renowned Lab researcher presented information about coal-based industrialization in developing countries, the intermittency of wind and solar power, stubborn uncertainties regarding severe climate change, and the admissibility of geoengineering at a recent workshop.

Rob Socolow, professor emeritus and senior research staff in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, gave the talk on Feb. 15, 2018.

Robert Socolow is professor emeritus and senior research staff in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He introduced new conceptual decade-scale frameworks that are useful for climate change policy: “stabilization wedges,” “one billion high emitters,” “committed emissions,” and “destiny studies.” He is the co-principal investigator of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a project supported by BP from 2001-2020. He has investigated CO2 capture and storage, building energy efficiency, technological “leapfrogging,” and the dangers of nuclear power and biomass as large-scale climate change solutions.Rob is a member of many prestigious academies and societies, and was editor of Annual Review of Energy and the Environment from1992-2002. Rob also served on the Advisory Board of LBNL from 2009-2016. Rob received the 2003 Leo Szilard Lectureship Award from the American Physical Society “for leadership in establishing energy and environmental problems as legitimate research fields for physicists, and for demonstrating that these broadly defined problems can be addressed with the highest scientific standards.” He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in theoretical high energy physics in 1964, was an assistant professor of physics at Yale University from 1966 to 1971, after which he joined the Princeton University faculty.