Beijing

Beida lecturer

I spent a full ten days in mid-June as a guest of Peking University, meeting with faculty members & students in the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, and giving a couple of lectures there entitled “The Development of Emissions Trading in the U.S.” and “Next Steps for Emissions Trading in China?”   The students were really quite knowledgeable about this topic – no doubt because of Prof. Zhang Shiqiu and her other faculty colleagues (including a new addition, Prof. Xu Jianhua, who completed her Ph.D. in the Engineering & Public Policy program at Carnegie Mellon in 2007, and who coordinated all of my lecture arrangements).

Another interesting part of this Beijing visit was a chance to meet up with Prof. Lu Yonglong & his colleagues at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences (RCEES) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  An article in the 19 March 2010 issue of Science about China’s efforts to clean up its environment mentioned that Prof. Lu advocated using real-time monitoring systems to speed up progress and to identify ‘who is doing the polluting.’  I contacted him about his quotes in that article, and he graciously invited me to come and make a presentation to his group during my Beijing visit.  Those of you who have incredible memories might remember that this was not my first visit to RCEES – I was there in late 2006 & gave a presentation for Prof. Zhuang Yahui and his colleagues about the Clean Development Mechanism.   Prof. Zhuang is now long retired, but it was really very nice to be back at RCEES once again, and I look forward to further collaborations with Prof. Lu and his colleagues.