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January 30, 2025
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Can AI Help Reduce Emissions of Greenhouse Gases?
Please join the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs for a special webinar "Can AI Help Reduce Emissions of...
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Welcome Back From the Founding Director: Start of the 2024-25 Academic Year
September 30, 2024
EDITORIAL NOTE:
The below was initially shared with CGEP staff on September 19, 2024 as a “Welcome Back” message to start the 2024-2025 academic year. It was authored by Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs and Founding Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, and Geoff Heal, the Donald C. Waite III Professor Emeritus of Social Enterprise in the Faculty of Business and Professor Emeritus of International and Public Affairs and Chair, CGEP Faculty Advisory Committee.
The message is presented in its entirety below.
Dear CGEP colleagues:
We want to welcome you all back to campus to begin a new academic year. Hopefully you all got time to rest and recharge, as the Center on Global Energy Policy is poised to hit the ground running as the semester begins.
The start of a new academic year is a particularly exciting time as we welcome new and returning students, faculty and staff back to campus. In welcoming Columbia’s community back to campus, our Interim President Katrina Armstrong wrote to all of us to explain, “Our first priority must be to affirm our values and principles so that they can guide our decision-making.” As part of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, doing so is important for all of us at CGEP, particularly at this polarizing and turbulent moment in geopolitics, energy and climate policy.
This fall promises to be particularly busy for us with a consequential upcoming U.S. presidential election. The twin challenges of the climate crisis and energy security will be a key focus for leaders in government, civil society and the private sector, as will be today’s more fractious geopolitical environment marked by escalating great-power competition, economic fragmentation, and ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. As the U.S. prepares for a new administration in the White House, and as campaign rhetoric reaches a fevered pitch in the final weeks of campaigning, the need for evidence-based and rigorous education about and analysis of today’s climate and energy landscape from universities such as Columbia, and institutions like CGEP, is as important as ever.
Being a trusted resource for such insights and expertise has been the mission of CGEP since its founding more than a decade ago. CGEP is a global leader in advancing evidence-based and actionable energy and climate solutions through research, education, and dialogue. As part of a leading school of international and public affairs, CGEP brings together a diverse group of scholars with deep experience and expertise in myriad fields necessary to understand today’s complex clean energy transition, particularly by connecting knowledge of foreign policy, national security, and key regions and countries with knowledge of climate change and of energy markets, finance, and policy. Our goal is to bring key insights from academic research to policymakers and other energy leaders in the formats and timeframes they need to inform real-world decision-making.
Heeding Interim President Armstrong’s request that we fulfill our obligation to affirm our values and principles, we wanted to share thoughts below about several values that guide the work we do at CGEP every day as part of Columbia SIPA. Our commitment to unbiased, evidence-based research on pressing energy and climate issues and the difficult tensions they may raise necessarily leads us to examine challenging, and at times controversial, political, economic and societal issues. As an energy center, we grapple with such energy policy goals as rapidly decarbonizing to address the threat of climate change, achieving energy security, and delivering more energy to lower income parts of the world—all of which necessarily involves engagement with contentious issues such as those related to oil and gas. Doing so makes upholding the University’s academic principles and protecting against conflict of interest of utmost importance.
Diversity of thought. As Interim President Armstrong explained, “Our mission is grounded in a fundamental commitment to free expression, open inquiry, and generous debate; it requires an environment of inclusive pluralism where all our community members can thrive.”
Deepening understanding of complex and often controversial issues related to the energy transition is enhanced by engaging with a diverse set of viewpoints, including, and perhaps especially, with those with which we may disagree. Such diversity of thought is evident in the student body and faculty at SIPA, for example, as it is within the staff and scholars of CGEP. A key principle of academic inquiry is to engage with differing views that may emerge from diverse backgrounds and perspectives on such difficult questions as equity and responsibility in the transition, the relative pace of transition in different regions, or the role of different technologies and sources of energy in the transition (and how that may differ in different countries, such as lower versus higher income ones).
As our Dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, wrote to all of us at the start of the semester, to understand and make progress on such urgent challenges at SIPA, “we strive to engage in evidence-based and constructive dialogue―to be inclusive, listen to different viewpoints and concerns, understand them, and be sensitive and respectful to each other.”
To expose students, scholars and other stakeholders to a diverse set of perspectives, in an effort to promote shared understanding, CGEP often brings together leaders from multiple sectors representing a wide range of interests and areas of expertise, including environmental non-profits, finance, energy justice, oil and gas, clean energy, developing countries, academia, government, and others.
Integrity. Engagement with a broad and diverse group of perspectives makes the commitment to research independence all the more important, as some stakeholders may have self-interested motives, misrepresent the understanding of climate change, or fail to act in good faith. Such instances should be called out, as disinformation is at odds with a university’s core mission to search for the truth.
CGEP operates under the highest standards of academic integrity, giving confidence that the work is free of outside influence. CGEP reports (as opposed to shorter blog posts and commentaries) are also subject to a double-blind expert review process.
Transparency about funding is important at CGEP, particularly as some funding to SIPA for CGEP comes from companies whose primary business is oil and gas. (In the coming fiscal year, we expect roughly 15 percent of our revenue to come from such companies, a figure that has been in gradual decline.) In response to requirements of the University’s Institutional Conflict of Interest (ICOI) Committee, CGEP lists on its website gifts from corporations, as well as gifts from foundations and individuals. All corporate gifts are unrestricted. Additionally, every CGEP research publication must disclose corporate gifts to CGEP that exceed $1 million, another step required by the University’s ICOI Committee.
Some of you may have read recent news articles suggesting sources of funding, particularly from oil and gas companies, influence research findings at universities. The excellent work you all do every day demonstrates that this is not the case at CGEP. CGEP has in place a culture of integrity, and we hold our work to the highest standards.
That commitment to quality and integrity is evident to objective observers of our work. For example, some of you will recall the outside review of CGEP that SIPA commissioned in 2021 by two leading faculty members at peer universities, David Victor of UC San Diego and Severin Borenstein at UC Berkeley. After reviewing CGEP’s publications and other outputs and interviewing dozens of faculty and students, they found: “We engaged in extensive questioning around whether funding sources have affected research agendas, outputs, and messages. We have, based on that questioning, no concerns on that front. It appears to us that a firewall has been erected between funding sources and the research and policy engagement operations of CGEP.”
Academic freedom. Robust institutional guardrails to protect against conflict of interest are particularly important given the university’s commitment to academic freedom. Consistent with that commitment, CGEP scholars, like all faculty, are free to select the subject matter of their research, form their own conclusions, collaborate with diverse stakeholders, and engage with diverse viewpoints. We do this across three broad thematic areas (as depicted below).
A university’s commitment to academic freedom is an underpinning of good research and allows for a robust and diverse set of approaches to be considered to the myriad challenges of climate change and the complex clean energy transition.
In pursuing the educational mission of a university, our scholars also teach, mentor students, and co-lead one of SIPA’s concentrations. Our work to train and develop career opportunities for students goes beyond teaching to such programs as Women in Energy and Global Energy Fellows.
Excellence. The research scholars at CGEP bring exceptional and deep insight in all these areas to their roles on the Columbia SIPA faculty. They are among the very best and mostly highly regarded experts in their fields, drawing not only on research or academic backgrounds but also experience as practitioners in government, business, and civil society. Expertise with how government operates, for example, allows scholars to produce analysis that is more actionable because it includes concrete options for what tools policymakers might deploy to address different challenges. Similarly, energy industry experience may be valuable because it can bring a real-world understanding of how businesses deploy capital and how energy markets operate that can make academic research more practical.
Alongside our focus on policy-relevant scholarship, CGEP is committed to the highest standards of independence, integrity, and pursuit of new knowledge. It is the powerful combination of quality scholarship and commitment to policy impact that has made CGEP, as the external review by Victor and Borenstein found, “one of the ‘go to’ places for engagement on energy policy.”
Interdisciplinary. As depicted above, CGEP’s three broad thematic areas of focus overlap, requiring an intentional interdisciplinary approach. Developing secure supplies of critical minerals, as just one example, is necessary for clean energy technology, and creates economic opportunities for emerging and developing economies, but also raises significant concerns about geopolitics given China’s dominant position and about environmental and social considerations. As SIPA and CGEP prioritize a global approach and international perspective, cross-cutting across all three thematic areas of focus is expertise in key countries and regions of the world important to the clean energy transition and energy security.
CGEP scholars collaborate with faculty across the university, such as at SIPA and the schools of Engineering, Law and Climate, to pursue our mission of bringing insights from academic research to policy officials in accessible and actionable ways.
In today’s polarized political environment and fractious geopolitical landscape, CGEP’s mission to provide leaders with timely, accessible, and actionable energy and climate insights, and to train the next generation of leaders, has never been more urgent. Given the severe threats of climate change and rapidly dwindling timeframe to curb emissions, evidence-based and trusted analysis is of utmost importance. As the new academic year kicks off, we look forward to educating Columbia’s students, deepening society’s understanding of our complex energy transition challenges, and helping leaders make decisions related to these difficult issues that advance a more sustainable, secure and prosperous future.
Thank you for all your excellent work. We look forward to an exciting year ahead.
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