David G. Victor and Richard K. Morse explain why coal, the world's fastest growing fossil fuel and leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, is here to stay and how climate policy can tackle this problem. Their piece is also featured in Engineering World's October/November 2009 issue.

Emily Meierding and Michael Sulmeyer have been awarded Zukerman Fellowships for the 2009-10 academic year. The fellowships are awarded to "exceptionally promising young scholars" working in the field of security studies at CISAC.

Meierding, a predoctoral fellow, studies territorial dispute dynamics, international conflict mediation and the political implications of climate change. She is pursuing a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines how the presence of petroleum resources affects the initiation and escalation of international territorial disputes and, to support this work, she has conducted research in Syria, Morocco, Nigeria and Cameroon. Meierding earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a master's in political science from the University of Chicago.

Sulmeyer, this year's teaching assistant in CISAC's Honors Program in International Security Studies, graduated from the program himself in 2002. He applied after taking one of the center's signature courses, International Security in a Changing World. "I hadn't a clue about international security, but I was blown away listening to Dean Wilkening describe the three different layers of a national missile defense system," he recalled in an interview for CISAC's 2007 annual review. "I didn't know you could study something like that. This was a real treat. I went on to take as many courses as I could from CISAC-affiliated faculty and was first in line to sign up for the new CISAC undergraduate honors program."

Sulmeyer went on to spend a year working at the Pentagon and, later, as a Marshall Scholar, began a doctorate at Oxford University. His dissertation is titled, "Weapons under Fire: Terminating Major Weapons Contracts for the U.S. Military." While finishing his doctoral research, he is a second-year student at Stanford Law School where he has written about the legality of targeting killings in U.S. military operations. Sulmeyer is Oxford Analytica's U.S. defense budget and procurement writer and is a consultant at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

The Zukerman Fellowships are funded through a gift from Stanford alumna Karen D. Zukerman and Morris E. Zukerman, president of M.E Zukerman & Co. in New York and chairman of M.E. Zukerman Investments in London.

The capture and permanent storage of CO₂ emissions from coal combustion is now widely viewed as imperative for stabilization of the global climate.  Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel.  This trend presents a forceful case for the development and wide dissemination of technologies that can decouple coal consumption from CO₂ emissions—the leading candidate technology to do this is carbon capture and storage (CCS). 

China simultaneously presents the most challenging and critical test for CCS deployment at scale.   While China has begun an handful of marquee CCS demonstration projects, the stark reality to be explored in this paper is that China’s incentives for keeping on the forefront of CCS technology learning do not translate into incentives to massively deploy CCS in power plant applications as CO₂ mitigation scenarios would have it.  In fact, fundamental and interrelated Chinese interests—in energy security, economic growth and development, and macroeconomic stability—directly argue against large-scale implementation of CCS in China unless such an implementation can be almost entirely supported by outside funding.  This paper considers how these core Chinese goals play out in the specific context of the country’s coal and power markets, and uses this analysis to draw conclusions about the path of CCS implementation in China’s energy sector. 

Finally, the paper argues that effective climate change policy will require both the vigorous promotion and careful calculation of CCS’s role in Chinese power generation.  As the world approaches the end of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 and crafts a new policy architecture for a global climate deal, international offset policy and potential US offset standards need to create methodologies that directly address CCS funding at scale.  The more closely these policies are aligned with China’s own incentives and the unique context of its coal and power markets, the better chance they have of realizing the optimal role for CCS in global climate efforts.