Be it solar panels or biofuels, we all have favorite climate solutions. These proposals are often for technologies that are “just around the corner.” But greenhouse emissions need to be reduced now! How do we figure out which of these proposals would give us the biggest bang for a buck in terms of reducing emissions? Should we keep chasing the “supply-side” ideas for more and more energy production, or should we look at the “demand-side” and waste less energy? Should we spend on shiny renewables or make the existing grimy fossil-fuel power plants more efficient? One cannot ponder such critical policy issues without using energy economics to answer questions such as: What is the most efficient passenger transport from New Brunswick to Washington DC (not Amtrak), and why is it also the cheapest? Why is the answer different if you ask the same question for freight transport? Why do Europeans guzzle much less energy than we do? (Not because US is a large country.) Is a shiny new electric car speeding down the turnpike near Newark airport greener than the Linden natural gas power plant that sits in a stinking petroleum refinery next to the turnpike?
In this seminar, I will first go over climate and energy basics. Once you are comfortable with the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour, you will lead, on a rotating basis, short informal discussions on relevant news items of your choosing. There will be no required reading per se. Instead, you will learn to glean useful information from sources such as the Energy Information Administration and get ready to pick a class project, to be done either individually or with another student. We will collectively flesh out your projects. There will be project presentations towards the end of the semester followed by short writeups. Making the project your own by deploying any artistic, literary, social, or any other special skills is highly encouraged.
About Professor Somalwar
Prof. Sunil Somalwar does experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to understand what our universe looked like a fraction of a second after its big-bang origin. Much later, that elegant universe somehow gave us a green planet teeming with life, but that planet is now in a state of utter environmental disrepair. Therefore Prof. Somalwar peddles, without license, ideas in energy and environmental policy with the hope that a sensible quantitative policies will extract us from this mess. He initiated some of the earliest undergraduate climate/energy classes and seminars at Rutgers and is a recipient of several awards for his educational and scientific contributions. He is an active environmentalist, and a co-founder of "Saving Wild Tigers".