MA, Louisiana State University, Environmental Planning and Management
PhD, UC Berkeley, Energy and Resource
Paul Baer is an internationally recognized expert on issues of equity and climate change, with interdisciplinary training including ecological economics, ethics, philosophy of science, risk analysis and simulation modeling. Before joining the School of Public Policy as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2009, he was a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, as well as research director of EcoEquity, an environmental organization he co-founded in 2000.
Dr. Baer’s focus on climate policy and its ethical dimensions dates from his Masters research at Louisiana State University, where he modeled the distributive implications of alternative assignments of rights in a global carbon trading system. During his time as a PhD student, in addition to publishing a variety of research and policy pieces on climate equity, he coauthored a book with long-term collaborator Tom Athanasiou (Dead Heat: Global Warming and Global Justice. Seven Stories Press, 2002). Since completing his PhD, his major project has been the development, with collaborators from EcoEquity, the Stockholm Environment Institute and elsewhere, of a global climate policy framework called "Greenhouse Development Rights."
Dr. Baer’s research has appeared in Environmental Research Letters, Bioscience, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Development and Change, Ethics Place and Environment, Contemporary Economic Policy, and Oecologia, and he has published policy editorials in Science and Climatic Change. He also has more than ten chapters published or forthcoming in academic books.
Together with Dr. Marilyn Brown, Dr. Baer recently founded the Climate and Energy Policy Laboratory in the School of Public Policy. He teaches courses in statistics, climate policy, environmental policy and politics, and ecological economics.
Dr. Baer completed his PhD in 2005 at UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, and also has a BA in Economics from Stanford University and a Masters in Environmental Planning and Management from Louisiana State University.