The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability is a school at Stanford University focusing on climate change and sustainability. The school also researches many domains of fossil fuel extraction and development. [1] It opened on September 1, 2022, [2] as Stanford's first new school since the School of Humanities and Sciences in 1948. It is considered one of the largest climate change–related schools in the United States. [3]
Arun Majumdar is the school's inaugural dean. Initially, the school will have 90 faculty members. It has plans to add 60 more faculty members over 10 years and construct two new buildings adjacent to the existing Green Earth Sciences and Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy buildings. It incorporated the academic departments and interdisciplinary programs of the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences as well as the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. The school also includes the Hopkins Marine Station and a startup accelerator. [3] [4] Despite being Stanford's newest school, it incorporates the university's oldest academic department, geology.
The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability was created in part by incorporating the former Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences on September 1, 2022. [5] Prior to February 2015 it had been called the School of Earth Sciences. [6]
Stanford University's very first faculty member, John Casper Branner, was a professor of geology, so that earth science is considered the oldest academic foundation of Stanford University. [7] The search for and extraction of natural resources was the major focus of Branner's geology department during that period of Western development. Departments were originally not organized into schools, but this changed with the establishment of the School of Physical Sciences in 1926. In 1946 the School of Mineral Sciences was established, and geology was eventually split into several departments. [8]
The School of Sustainability formed an Advisory Council in 2023 with two co-chairs: John Hennessy and John Doerr. [9]
The members of the Advisory Council are: Anela Arifi, Sandra Begay, Natarajan “Chandra” Chandrasekaran, Steven A. Denning, Ann Doerr, Jennifer Doudna, Angela Filo, Bill Gates, Jamshyd N. Godrej, Hal Harvey, Mark Heising, Martin Lau, Laurene Powell Jobs, Condoleezza Rice, Tom Steyer, Gene Sykes, Yi Wang, Akiko Yamazaki, Eric Yuan, and Fareed Zakaria.
The School of Sustainability has six academic departments and three interdisciplinary programs. The departments are Civil and Environmental Engineering (a joint department with the School of Engineering); Earth System Science; Energy Science and Engineering; Geological Sciences; Geophysics; and Oceans. The interdisciplinary programs are the Earth Systems Program; the Sustainability Science and Practice Program; and the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). [10] Research and teaching span a wide range of disciplines. The interdisciplinary programs, in conjunction with the six departments, reach out to all other schools on the Stanford campus as well as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and state and federal policy makers.
The school's library, Branner Earth Sciences Library, contains over 125,000 volumes, a large map collection, and Stanford's GIS lab for ongoing GIS reference and research consultation.
The school offers both undergrad and graduate degrees. The majority of the students are graduate students, with a large contingent of coterminal master's degree recipients from the Earth Systems interdisciplinary program. The school attracts students from all six of the inhabited continents, and continues to be one of the most ethnically diverse Earth Sciences programs in the US. As of 2022 about 4.0% of Stanford's graduate students (approximately 360) are in the school [11] and 1.4% of the undergraduates (approximately 100). [12]
Research programs in the SES continue to make groundbreaking discoveries about the planet, its environment, and human interactions. As a result, there are a number of industry funded-research groups (e.g., Stanford Exploration Project, Stanford Wave Physics Laboratory, Stanford Rock Physics and Borehole Geophysics Project) that implement student-led research for industry implementation.
The Doerr School includes 14 industry-funded affiliate programs, including the Stanford Exploration Project, the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative, and the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage. [13] The affiliate programs cover many areas of research, including oil and gas exploration, [14] oil field monitoring and development, [15] hydraulic fracturing, natural gas extraction, methane leak detection, [16] carbon capture and sequestration, and enhanced oil recovery. [17]
The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) is one of three components of the Earthscope Project, funded by the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the USGS and NASA. The SAFOD site is located just north of the town of Parkfield, California. The SAFOD main hole was drilled to a depth of ~3.4 km in 2004 and 2005, crossing the San Andreas near a region of the fault where repeating Magnitude 2 earthquakes are generated.
A goal of this project is to install instruments to record data near the source of these earthquakes. In addition to the installation of these instruments, rock and fluid samples were continuously collected during the drilling process, and will also be used to analyze changes in geochemistry and mechanical properties around the fault zone. The project will lead to a better understanding of the processes that control the behavior of the San Andreas fault, and it is hoped that the development of instrumentation and analytic methods will help evaluate the possibility of earthquake prediction which is of primary importance for earthquake engineering.
The project is co-PIed by Bill Ellsworth and Steve Hickman of the USGS, and Stanford geophysics faculty member and alum Mark Zoback. Zoback's research in the SES focuses on stress and crustal mechanics. His students are heavily engaged in on-going research in the Global Climate and Energy Project.
Stanford has raised $1.69 billion for the establishment of the school, including $1.1 billion from venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife Ann, after whom the school is named. The Doerrs' gift was the largest ever given to a university for the establishment of a new school and the second largest gift to an academic institution; it makes the Doerrs the top funders of climate change research and scholarship. Other donors include Yahoo! cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo and their spouses, Akiko Yamazaki and Angela Filo. [3] [4] The Doerr School has also received funding from ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell, Saudi Aramco, Petrobras, and many other oil and gas companies via the Doerr School's industry affiliates program [18] and the Precourt Institute. [19] [20] Dean Arun Majumdar has indicated that the Doerr School is open to continuing to accept funding from and to work with fossil fuel companies, [3] [21] drawing criticism from Stanford students, [22] [23] faculty, [24] staff, [25] and alumni. [26]
Some of the Doerr School's affiliate programs, including the Natural Gas Initiative, provide funders with seats on their advisory or governance boards, give them access to unpublished research, and allow representatives from funders to directly mentor students. [27] The school allowed representatives from three of its oil and gas funders, Shell, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, to give input into the school's first Flagship Destination. [28]
As of 2023, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability was ranked as the fourth best Earth Sciences program by the U.S. News & World Report, tied with Columbia. (Caltech was ranked number 1, MIT number 2, and UC Berkeley 3) [29] The same year, the Doerr School ranked as the number 1 environmental science program (with Columbia ranked number 2 and MIT number 3). [30]
A fossil fuel is a carbon compound- or hydrocarbon-containing material such as coal, oil, and natural gas, formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of prehistoric organisms, a process that occurs within geological formations. Reservoirs of such compound mixtures can be extracted and burned as a fuel for human consumption to provide heat for direct use, to power heat engines that can propel vehicles, or to generate electricity via steam turbine generators. Some fossil fuels are further refined into derivatives such as kerosene, gasoline and diesel.
Energy development is the field of activities focused on obtaining sources of energy from natural resources. These activities include the production of renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuel derived sources of energy, and for the recovery and reuse of energy that would otherwise be wasted. Energy conservation and efficiency measures reduce the demand for energy development, and can have benefits to society with improvements to environmental issues.
L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 40th richest person in tech in 2017 and, as of 1 August, 2023, as the 146th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$11.9 billion. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) at Stanford University, "seeks new solutions to one of the grand challenges of this century: supplying energy to meet the changing needs of a growing world population in a way that protects the environment."
Business action on climate change is a topic which since 2000 includes a range of activities relating to climate change, and to influencing political decisions on climate change-related regulation, such as the Kyoto Protocol. Major multinationals have played and to some extent continue to play a significant role in the politics of climate change, especially in the United States, through lobbying of government and funding of climate change deniers. Business also plays a key role in the mitigation of climate change, through decisions to invest in researching and implementing new energy technologies and energy efficiency measures.
The Earth Institute is a research institute at Columbia University created in 1995 for addressing complex issues facing the planet and its inhabitants, with a focus on sustainable development. With an interdisciplinary approach, this includes research in climate change, geology, global health, economics, management, agriculture, ecosystems, urbanization, energy, hazards, and water. The Earth Institute's activities are guided by the idea that science and technological tools that already exist could be applied to greatly improve conditions for the world's poor, while preserving the natural systems that support life on Earth.
The Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin unites the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences with two research units, the Institute for Geophysics and the Bureau of Economic Geology.
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Energy subsidies are measures that keep prices for customers below market levels, or for suppliers above market levels, or reduce costs for customers and suppliers. Energy subsidies may be direct cash transfers to suppliers, customers, or related bodies, as well as indirect support mechanisms, such as tax exemptions and rebates, price controls, trade restrictions, and limits on market access.
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.
Pamela Anne Matson is an American scientist and professor. From 2002 - 2017 she was the dean of the Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. She also previously worked at NASA and at the University of California, Berkeley. Matson is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies (Emerita) at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a Senior Fellow (Emerita) at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Matson is a winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the "genius grant," and is considered to be a "pioneer in the field of environmental science." She was appointed to the "Einstein Professorship" of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011. She received an honorary doctorate from McGill University in 2017. She is married to fellow scientist Peter Vitousek.
Arunava Majumdar is a materials scientist, engineer, and the inaugural dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He was nominated for the position of Under Secretary of Energy in the United States between November 30, 2011, and May 15, 2012.
David G. Victor is a professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, where he holds the Center for Global Transformation Endowed Chair in Innovation and Public Policy.
Steven J. Davis is an earth system scientist in the Department of Earth System Science of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. He is a highly cited researcher and leads the Stanford Sustainable Solutions Lab.
An energy transition is a major structural change to energy supply and consumption in an energy system. Currently, a transition to sustainable energy is underway to limit climate change. Most of the sustainable energy is renewable energy. Therefore, another term for energy transition is renewable energy transition. The current transition aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy quickly and sustainably, mostly by phasing-down fossil fuels and changing as many processes as possible to operate on low carbon electricity. A previous energy transition perhaps took place during the Industrial Revolution from 1760 onwards, from wood and other biomass to coal, followed by oil and later natural gas.
The Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment serves as Stanford University's environmental studies hub for faculty. An interdisciplinary research lab, Woods encompasses senior fellows and affiliated faculty as well as researchers, postdoctoral scholars, and students collaborating on sustainability research. It supports research in seven areas: climate, ecosystem services and conservation biology, food security, freshwater, oceans, public health, and sustainable development. It provides seed funding for environmental research and supports seven research centers, programs and workshops. In September 2022, it became part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Global Energy Monitor (GEM) is a San Francisco–based non-governmental organization which catalogs fossil fuel and renewable energy projects worldwide. GEM shares information in support of clean energy and its data and reports on energy trends are widely cited by governments, media, and academic researchers.
High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey is an interdisciplinary center for environmental research that studies effects of and solutions to climate change and other environmental threats. The International Center for Climate Governance named the Princeton Environmental Institute the second-highest climate change think tank in the global category for 2012, following the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Hal Harvey is an American energy policy advisor. He is the founder of Energy Innovation. Harvey was previously the CEO of ClimateWorks Foundation. He is a co-author of the book The Big Fix.
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