Stanford University

Energy Security for Developing Countries

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Politicians around the world are in vigorous agreement on the critical importance of "energy security." And yet useful definitions of the term are scarce, as is the recognition that "energy security" means different things to different people. Americans focus most on the risks of imported oil, Europeans on their dependence on Russian natural gas. Less commonly considered in the industrialized world is what energy security means to emerging powers like China and India, desperately poor countries in Africa and South Asia, or even major energy exporters like Russia or states in the Persian Gulf. By making explicit these many "faces" of energy security, we can begin a more useful debate on how to make the global energy economy more robust for all players. This talk will suggest some frameworks for thinking about energy security from both consumer and producer sides, and then explore specific cases in developing and transition economies -- in particular, the perspectives of China as a major importer of oil and Russia as a major exporter of natural gas.

Mark Thurber is Research Program Manager at PESD, where he oversees all aspects of the Program's research and is also directly responsible for research on low-income energy services. Before coming to PESD, Dr. Thurber worked in high-tech industry, focusing on volume manufacturing operations in Mexico, China, and Malaysia. This work included a multi-year assignment in Guadalajara developing local technological capability in precision manufacturing measurements. Dr. Thurber holds a PhD from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering (Thermosciences) and a BSE from Princeton University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a certificate from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His academic research has included engineering studies of gas-phase laser diagnostics as well as policy analyses of technology management in the developing world and power plant emissions reductions strategies in the United States.

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Mark C. Thurber

Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Mark C. Thurber is Associate Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University, where he studies and teaches about energy and environmental markets and policy. Dr. Thurber has written and edited books and articles on topics including global fossil fuel markets, climate policy, integration of renewable energy into electricity markets, and provision of energy services to low-income populations.

Dr. Thurber co-edited and contributed to Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply  (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Global Coal Market: Supplying the Major Fuel for Emerging Economies (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is the author of Coal (Polity Press, 2019) about why coal has thus far remained the preeminent fuel for electricity generation around the world despite its negative impacts on local air quality and the global climate.

Dr. Thurber teaches a course on energy markets and policy at Stanford, in which he runs a game-based simulation of electricity, carbon, and renewable energy markets. With Dr. Frank Wolak, he also conducts game-based workshops for policymakers and regulators. These workshops explore timely policy topics including how to ensure resource adequacy in a world with very high shares of renewable energy generation.

Dr. Thurber has previous experience working in high-tech industry. From 2003-2005, he was an engineering manager at a plant in Guadalajara, México that manufactured hard disk drive heads. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.S.E. from Princeton University.

Associate Director for Research at PESD
Social Science Research Scholar
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The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World

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In his new book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books 2008), Larry Diamond intensely scrutinizes the global effort on democracy promotion. By both exploring the sources of progress as well as the locations and reasons for failure, Diamond presents a comprehensive assessment that is realistic but also hopeful. Diamond presents his arguments through a world of examples, citing the negative Putin's Russia and Musharraf's Pakistan; the unsuccessful politically but nevertheless exemplary Toledo's Peru; and even the more difficult places like Nepal, Iran, and Thailand.

By comparing the progress of today with that of the mid 1970s, when he was a Vietnam War protester, Diamond expresses hope. At that time, Diamond notes, barely a quarter of all independent states were using free and fair elections. But times have changed since then: "by the mid-1990s," he writes, "it had become clear to me, as it had to many of my colleagues involved in the global struggle for democracy, that if some three-fifths of the world's states, many of them poor and non-Western, could become democracies, there was no intrinsic reason why the rest of the world could not do as well."

Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that "no one has thought harder or more broadly about the past and future of democracy than Larry Diamond. A passionate treatment, infused with optimism and eminently readable, The Spirit of Democracy is a must for anyone who cares about the toughest challenge of balancing national values and national interests."
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Tropical Deforestation and Carbon Emissions: Introduction to Special Issue

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Carbon emissions from tropical deforestation have long been recognized as a key component of the global carbon budget, and more recently of our global climate system. Tropical forest clearing accounts for roughly 20% of anthropogenic carbon emissions and destroys globally significant carbon sinks (IPCC 2007). Global climate policy initiatives are now being proposed to address these emissions and to more actively include developing countries in greenhouse gas mitigation (e.g. Santilli et al 2005, Gullison et al 2007). In 2005, at the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Montreal, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) launched a new initiative to assess the scientific and technical methods and issues for developing policy approaches and incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) in developing countries (Gullison et al 2007).

Over the last two years the methods and tools needed to estimate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation have quickly evolved, as the scientific community responded to the UNFCCC policy needs. This focus issue highlights those advancements, covering some of the most important technical issues for measuring and monitoring emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and emphasizing immediately available methods and data, as well as future challenges.

Elements for effective long-term implementation of a REDD mechanism related to both environmental and political concerns are discussed in Mollicone et al. Herold and Johns synthesize viewpoints of national parties to the UNFCCC on REDD and expand upon key issues for linking policy requirements and forest monitoring capabilities. In response to these expressed policy needs, they discuss a remote-sensing-based observation framework to start REDD implementation activities and build historical deforestation databases on the national level. Achard et al offer an assessment of remote sensing measurements across the world's tropical forests that can provide key consistency and prioritization for national-level efforts. Gibbs et al calculate a range of national-level forest carbon stock estimates that can be used immediately, and also review ground-based and remote sensing approaches to estimate national-level tropical carbon stocks with increased accuracy.

These papers help illustrate that methodologies and tools are indeed available to estimate emissions from deforestation. Clearly, important technical challenges remain (e.g. quantifying degradation, assessing uncertainty, verification procedures, capacity building, and Landsat data continuity) but we now have a sufficient technical base to support REDD early actions and readiness mechanisms for building national monitoring systems.

Thus, we enter the COP 13 in Bali, Indonesia with great hope for a more inclusive climate policy encompassing all countries and emissions sources from both land-use and energy sectors. Our understanding of tropical deforestation and carbon emissions is improving and with that, opportunities to conserve tropical forests and the host of ecosystem services they provide while also increasing revenue streams in developing countries through economic incentives to avoid deforestation and degradation.

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Environmental Research Letters
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Holly Gibbs
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Applications from mid-career and senior Southeast Asianist scholars for the 2008-2009 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Southeast Asia.

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The National University of Singapore and Stanford University invite applications from mid-career and senior Southeast Asianist scholars in the social sciences or humanities who would like to spend up to nine months between August/September 2008 and August/September 2009 at NUS and Stanford writing and doing research on or related to contemporary Southeast Asia.
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The Link between Migration and Health: A Longitudinal Analysis in Indonesia, and A New National Survey on Migration and Health in China

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Migration and health are two areas that have each received significant amounts of attention in sociology. However, only recently have researchers begun to examine the links between these two population processes. There is growing yet incomplete evidence that migration and the health are intertwined in complex ways. Health itself can impact the decision to move, and migration may affect the health of those who move, those who stay, and those who host migrants. Using high quality longitudinal data from Indonesia, Lu's research makes a serious attempt to tackle important questions about the association between migration and health in the Indonesian context. In particular, she examines both how health may affect migration decisions, and how changing socioeconomic conditions associated with migration may have implications for the health of various populations involved, including not only migrants but also people left behind in sending communities. Lu will also discuss research underway on migration and health in China, including a new national survey with data to study that topic in the Chinese context.

Yao Lu is a Ph.D. candidate of Sociology, M.S. candidate of Public Health, and student affiliate at the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. She has a BS from Fudan University in China. Her research focuses on studying the causes and consequences of internal migration in developing countries, and modeling socioeconomic and behavioral factors as determinants of health. Her papers include studies based on data from China, Indonesia, and South Africa. She has a paper forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, and has received dissertation fellowships from the AAUW foundation and the Asia Institute at UCLA. She is currently completing her dissertation on the relationship between labor migration and health in Indonesia, while working on a national survey project on internal migration and health in China.

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Yao Lu PhD candidate in Sociology Speaker University of California-Los Angeles
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Zerriffi explores rural electrification business models

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Seeking to electrify the world as a charity venture is counterproductive, argues PESD affiliate faculty Hisham Zerriffi. What's needed is close attention to which electrification business models actually yield sustainable results, a question Zerriffi tackles in detail through case studies of Brazil, Cambodia, and China.
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Oil, Islam, and Women?

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Michael Ross received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1996. From 1996 to 2001 he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He spent the 2000 calendar year as a Visiting Scholar at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and Jakarta, Indonesia. He is now an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA; and also the Chairman of the International Development Studies program, and Acting Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

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Michael Ross Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker University of California, Los Angeles
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FSE welcomes Peter Timmer as Visiting Professor

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FSE is excited to welcome Peter Timmer as FSE Visiting Professor. Prior to joining FSE, Timmer was a resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, and prior to that, Dean of the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego. Timmer has also held professorships at Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford. In 1992, he received the Bintang Jasa Utama (Highest Merit Star) from the Republic of Indonesia for his contributions to food security. He served as the chief outside advisor to USAID in developing their strategy on growth and agriculture for the Natsios Report (Foreign Assistance in the National Interest), and was one of the key advisors for the World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. Timmer's work focuses on three broad topics: the nature of "pro-poor growth" and its application in Indonesia and other countries in Asia; the supermarket revolution in developing countries and its impact on the poor (both producers and consumers); and the structural transformation in historical perspective as a framework for understanding the political economy of agricultural policy.

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ASEAN adopts charter despite differences over Myanmar

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A long-time loose group of countries focused on trade and business, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is trying to forge a common market roughly similar to the European Union. But the question of how to confront Myanmar's crackdown on democracy has left ASEAN divided. Will Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore start to take a stand on democracy, and are they turning away from the US as China booms? Dr. Donald K. Emmerson is director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the author of many papers and books on the region comments on the adoption of the charter on KCRW's To the Point. Link to audio file of the entire day's show below. Professor Emmerson's interview begins at about 42 minutes into the show.
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Center's corporate affiliates program gain valuable volunteer experience

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Volunteers from the University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and Hands-on Bay Area came together last night for "Bring Me A Book" Volunteer Night. The event took place at the Bring Me A Book headquarters in nearby Mountain View, where the volunteers had dinner and learned about the organization.

Denise Masumoto, Shorenstein APARC's manager of corporate relations, headed the 20 volunteers from APARC, who are visiting fellows doing research at Stanford for a year and represent countries including China, India, Japan and the Philippines. Masumoto said APARC became affiliated with the Bring Me A Book Program when she found the program online and thought it represented an integral part of American lifestyle and culture. She also hoped that it could "encourage the visiting fellows to volunteer in other ways in their own countries."

"It is an honor to host the students of Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center," said Bring Me A Book volunteer coordinator and community outreach manager Montez Davis. "Since many of these volunteers have families, this is the perfect way for them to experience first hand the difference you can make in the future success of a child all through volunteer work."

Bring Me A Book began with Judy Koch's mission to provide easy access to the best childrens' books and to inspire reading aloud with children. The foundation aims to provide brand-new books of the best quality to children who do not have the means to obtain them otherwise.

"We believe that every child deserves books of the same quality," said Bring Me A Book office manager Erin Smith.

Bring Me A Book is affiliated with volunteer corporations such as CISCO, Google and Starbucks, as well as other non-profit organizations. Hands-on Bay Area is a non-profit organization that aims to make volunteer work easy and accessible, organizers said.

Davis hosted the event along with Donovan Cook '66, director of development for Bring Me A Book. The pair began by giving the volunteers a brief tour around the headquarters and updating the volunteers on their latest plans.

The organizers mentioned projects including the recent distribution of Karen Ehrhardt's This Jazz Man to Oakland Public Schools like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School and the recent openings of Bring Me A Book in places such as Hong Kong, Malawi, Mexico and the Philippines.

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