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The transition to a low-carbon economy is reshaping how societies produce and consume energy, with far-reaching implications for technology, industry, policy, and everyday life. Yet moving away from fossil fuels brings complex challenges around infrastructure, affordability, political economy, and the distribution of costs and benefits.
This panel brings together advanced graduate students from UC Berkeley whose research examines the forces shaping green energy transitions around the world. Drawing on emerging scholarship spanning energy systems, technological change, environmental policy, and social equity, the discussion will explore how societies can navigate the opportunities and tradeoffs of decarbonization, and what is at stake for communities, economies, and the future of the planet.
The panel will feature Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton, PhD candidate in the Energy and Resources Group; August Rud Jacobsen, PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; and Janna Zou Huang, PhD Candidate in Sociology. Ken Alex , Director of Project Climate at the UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE), will moderate.
This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM); the Energy and Resources Group (ERG); and the Center for Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE).
Panelists
Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton is a PhD candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. His research examines the political economy of critical minerals for energy transitions, with a focus on China and the United States. Before joining UC Berkeley, he served as an Assistant Researcher with Dean Kelly Sims Gallagher’s Climate Policy Lab in The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He holds master’s degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and a BS from UC Berkeley.
Janna Huang is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her work spans economic sociology, organizational theory, science and technology studies, and climate politics. Broadly, her research investigates how organizations navigate uncertain regulatory contexts for corporate climate accountability. Specifically, her dissertation examines climate disclosure (regulatory standards for the collection and reporting of sustainability metrics on emissions and targets to investors and regulators) as a lens into how sustainability performance metrics emerged as a solution to regulatory deadlock over corporate climate governance. While climate disclosure is now mandated across major financial markets worldwide, companies overwhelmingly fixate on producing sustainability metrics, which remain decoupled from integrating these metrics into decarbonization. Janna’s work is published in Social Forces, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Technology in Society. Prior to graduate school, she earned a B.S. in Computer Science with honors in Science, Technology, and Society, and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.
August R. Jacobsen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and a member of the Energy and Environment Policy Lab. He studies the political economy of green industrial policy in Europe and the US, with his dissertation examining the interactions between policy design, corporate strategy, and technology choice. His work engages with multiple disciplines, including comparative political economy, sustainable transitions research, and heterodox economics. Prior to starting his PhD, he led the Policy Coordination Unit at the EFTA Secretariat in Brussels and supported the Norwegian Presidency of the UN Economic and Social Council. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a Dual BA from Sciences Po and UC Berkeley.
Ken Alex is the director of Project Climate at the UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE). From 2011 to 2018, Ken was a Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Jerry Brown, the Director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, and the Chair of the Strategic Growth Council. Before joining the Governor’s Office, Ken was the Senior Assistant Attorney General heading the environment section of the California Attorney General’s Office. From 2000 to 2006, Ken led the California Attorney General’s energy task force, investigating price and supply issues related to California’s energy crisis. Ken is a graduate of Harvard Law School and holds a B.A. in political theory from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
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