Students at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center choose their coursework from several concentration areas, including Energy, Resources and Environment (ERE). ERE focused students take classes from Professor Roger Raufer, Resident Professor at the HNC who joined the faculty in 2014. He has more than four decades of engineering consulting experience and has been an advisor for the UN, USAID, and World Bank. This week's blog explores Professor Raufer's busy spring semester.
HNC’s Professor Roger Raufer had an especially busy Spring semester! He spent the first part of the semester in Europe, giving his annual lectures on environmental policy at the IFP School near Paris. He then went to Italy to present a Professional Skills Course (PSC) about emissions trading at the SAIS Europe campus in Bologna. This course had a special focus on China’s nascent emissions trading program. The course was funded by the Yeung Family Scholar Fund, a program designed to encourage innovative teaching related to China within SAIS.
From Bologna, Professor Raufer returned to the HNC to teach a compressed course entitled Economic Instruments for Pollution Control in the Spring-II semester. This is a full-semester course offered over eight weeks, addressing such topics as carbon taxes, emissions trading, and the controversial role of carbon offsets. Professor Raufer arranged two exceptional guest speakers: Mr. Li Shaoyi is a former senior UN official who retired from the UN Environment Programme in Paris and had an office adjacent to Professor Raufer at the UN Secretariat office in New York. Mr. Li spoke about trade issues and the role of the EU’s new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Next was Mr. David Fishman, an HNC 2014 alum who is a Shanghai-based Senior Manager at the Lantau Group, an energy advisory group. Mr. Fishman spoke about the role of Green Electricity Certificates (GECs) in China’s power sector transition, as well as his observations about the impact of the country’s carbon market (currently still limited to the power sector).
Professor Raufer also had an opportunity to provide a lecture about carbon mitigation strategies for Professor Bu Maoliang’s MBA course at Nanjing University’s School of Business. Professor Bu teaches ERE Economics in HNC’s ERE program, highlighting the shared-professor interactions between Nanjing University and HNC, which is especially valuable for both programs.
Finally, Professor Raufer is glad to report that the Fourth Edition of Springer’s Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation was recently published and contains an updated revision of his chapter on Emissions Trading. He is co-authored with – among others – Professor Carla Freeman, former HNC Co-Director and former head of the Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS; and Cory Combs, a SAIS alum and Associate Director of Energy at Trivium China.
