Search: Faculty directory, Environmental Legislation and Policy

Duane teaches environmental planning and policy, infrastructure planning, environmental impacts of energy systems, land use planning, environmentally sustainable community development, and the impacts of urban development on fragile natural systems. He is particularly interested in how institutional structures can be modified to address competing social values. He is therefore studying law and legal institutions in greater detail, since they dominate decision-making in the modern administrative state. His primary institutional focus is domestic, but has also worked in or traveled in over thirty countries and has supervised graduate students in over a dozen other countries. He has published on a wide variety of topics from electricity regulation in California to community participation in ecosystems management.

Dan Kammen founded and directs the unique Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, cited by many as the only ‘one stop’ site for energy science and engineering projects that are merged with energy finance and economics, sociology, market, and environmental impact studies. Recent RAEL contributions include: (i) significantly supporting and strengthening the burgeoning solar photovoltaic industries in East Africa, that have become the free-market model for a large number of nations; (ii) bringing the potential of continent-wide sustainable biofuel industries with major energy and health impacts to the attention of world leaders; (iii) highlighting the job benefits of clean energy investments, a story that became central to the adoption of clean energy standards in a number of states as well as a focal point of several national election campaigns; and (iv) focusing national attention on the federal under-investment in energy research, development, and deployment. He is co-author of Should We Risk It? Exploring Environmental, Health and Technological Problem Solving (Princeton University Press, 1999) and over 100 technical and refereed publications.

Michael's research in economics has focused largely on aspects of modeling individual choice behavior, with applications to demand forecasting, inducing conservation, environmental regulation and economic valuation. He is a leading authority on the methodology of non-market valuation using techniques of both revealed and stated preference. A team of two dozen prominent experts led by professors from the California Climate Change Center released a new report in early 2006 on the economic implications of meeting global warming emissions reduction targets established by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. The governor's goals include reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 2000 levels by the year 2010, and to 1990 levels by 2020. "Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in California," the first report in a series of economic and technology assessments, finds that just eight policy strategies can take California halfway to the governor's 2020 targets, while increasing the Gross State Product by approximately $60 billion and creating more than 20,000 new jobs.