Tribute to Alex

Alex Farrell
Credit: Jeffery Kahn/UC Berkeley

On a rather sad note, I received a message in mid-April noting the passing of one of my former students and colleagues, Alex Farrell.  Alex was certainly one of the most outstanding students I ever had the privilege to teach at Penn — as well as being one of the nicest. He took one of my courses in the early 1990s, and a few years later we worked together on a Wharton School project studying regional ozone control (along with Robert Carter).  Alex was the lead author of the “oft-cited” paper I mentioned on my emissions trading webpage, and that article (about the NOx Budget) was subsequently included in one of Tietenberg’s ET anthologies.

We co-taught a course addressing the urban environment at Penn, and it was at this time that I came to realize the wide range of his intellectual interests, as well as the wonderful rapport he had with students.  It was immensely satisfying to work on a day-to-day basis with such a caring — and environmentally dedicated — individual.  We kept in touch over the years as he progressed from an AAAS fellowship in Washington (working with US EPA); through a post-doc at Harvard’s Kennedy School (including a stint at IIASA in Austria); to professorships at Carnegie Mellon University and Berkeley.  He always had time for his former teacher, inviting me to Harvard to give a presentation, and then using my Pollution Markets book in his own courses at Berkeley…..  all the while publishing a steady stream of outstanding articles and publications in a variety of top-notch journals and books.  (For example, he had an interesting article — about air pollution in Spain, no less — in the Smoke & Mirrors book cited two postings below.)

His recent work on biofuels and transportation energy systems was particularly exciting. Less than a week before hearing the news, one of my current students brought some of that work to my attention, and so I set about explaining — well, okay, bragging about — the fact that I knew Alex, and had worked with him earlier in his career.  Alex was the kind of brilliant yet personable scholar that every teacher dreams about…. and I was both honored and privileged to have worked with him.  All of us — and the environment — will miss him very, very much.