Rice alum makes news in energy circles

Rice alum makes news in energy circles

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff
 
Andy Karsner ’89 has gone to the ends of the Earth for U.S. energy policy, literally. A month after attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference on the Indonesian island of Bali, he went to the South Pole as part of the National Science Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Program to promote wind and solar power.
 
Karsner, the Department of Energy’s assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, has played a leading role in several key energy events recently. In addition to serving in the U.S. delegation to the Bali conference, he worked for the passage of the 2007 energy bill, known officially as the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
 

	Neal Lane, left, the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and senior fellow in science and technology policy at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, joins Rice alumnus Andy Karsner, assistant U.S. secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station Jan. 12.

More than 180 countries sent representatives to Bali in December to work on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Karsner praised the gathering as “a turning of the page on how we interact within a new U.N. framework.”
 
One of the accomplishments of Bali he pointed to was the reinforcement of a group known as the Major Economies Process on Energy Security and Climate Change in Honolulu earlier this year. That organization brought together the G-8 industrialized nations with emerging powers like China, India and Brazil to launch a comprehensive process to enable a full, effective and sustained implementation of the plan agreed upon in Bali.
 
These nations produce more than 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, Karsner noted, but they also hold the key to developing the technology to solve the problem. It will be crucial, he said, “to see what the group could do to accelerate inputs under a tight timetable,” moving from problem identification to problem solving.
 
Karsner praised the new energy bill, which was signed into law Dec. 19, as a way to achieve President George W. Bush’s call to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years. “The goal,” Karsner said, “is clean, abundant and secure energy.” He cited the legislation’s raising of corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards to 35 miles per gallon for new automobiles by 2020, with the first improvements required in passenger fleets by 2011, as well as the ban on incandescent light bulbs by 2014.
 
His broad support of the bill is not without some reservations, however. He had misgivings about the law’s heavy reliance on biofuels to replace some of the gasoline consumed in the U.S. Karsner also wanted a greater role for the market in determining the energy future, saying the government shouldn’t pick technology winners.
 
But Karsner pointed to the Federal Energy Management Program, administered by his Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, as evidence of progress in his own backyard. The federal government is the largest energy consumer in the United States, and it is now under orders to lower greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 30 percent by 2013. These “ambitious metrics,” Karsner said, “are not just rhetorical, they are mandates backed by the force of law.”
 
Asked about the role Rice played in his rise to assistant secretary of energy at the ripe old age of 40, Karsner had praise for his alma mater. “Rice is one of the most intimate education environments you could have,” he said, recalling the college system, with its communal dining facilities, and the rest of Rice’s distinctive social features. Majoring in political science and religious studies, he said he learned human relations outside the classroom as an undergraduate.
 
While he’s only been in Washington for a short time, Karsner seems to be achieving results in changing the country’s energy outlook. Speaking at a 2006 conference at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, he told the audience, ”We have to get beyond the status quo and the incumbent technology that are defining our economic destiny at this point and move beyond them.”