Ethical Technology Transitions to Mitigate Climate Change
The “Ethical Technology Transitions to Mitigate Climate Change” program seeks undergraduates interested in conducting research on ethical considerations related to technology deployment, governance, and institutional designs for reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, for a desired average commitment of 3-5 hours/week and an expected wage of $15/hour. Research assistants may be paired with more senior researchers (e.g., PhD students and postdoctoral fellows) depending on interests and project availability. Topics are flexible and exploratory, within an overall frame of investigating ethical approaches to resource allocation in an unequal society with physical, technological, financial, and social limitations on technology deployment for clean energy and climate remediation. Particular priority areas include: ethical tradeoffs between local impacts and global benefits of industrial activity (e.g., solar panel manufacturing, direct air capture deployment); how society should think about prioritizing access to limited clean energy resources (e.g., should data center operations be curtailed to ensure people can heat their homes?); how governance frameworks encourage or discourage ethical outcomes; and how the “right to pollute” (and for what purpose) evolves as climate change advances.
Join an interdisciplinary research team focused on supporting better decisions that make our future energy systems more just and more sustainable. The kinds of things we work on mostly deal with how the energy system /should/ look in the future -- with a baseline assumption that justice and greenhouse gas neutrality are core objectives. We mostly work on the US (and individual US states) because policy is so specific to the site of study -- but we do a lot of technical and thought leadership work on the kinds of things you'd need to expect, and design, from both a technological and institutional perspective as we transition the majority of our energy and industrial systems over the next (small number of) decades. As an advisor, I'm really interested in supporting your overall goals, whether that's learning a new method, getting a publication, preparing for grad school or a job, etc.