THE ENERGY AND RESOURCES GROUP PRESENTS: TITLE: Getting to sustainable energy systems while considering trade-offs, environmental justice, and distributional effects SPEAKER: Inês Azevedo DATE: October 14, 2020 TIME: 4:00-5:30 PM LOCATION: Zoom Meeting MEETING ID: 919 6633 4050 PASSCODE: 306004 DESCRIPTION:  I will cover several recent papers: In Tschofen et al. (2019) we compute economy-wide gross external damages (GED) due to premature mortality from air pollution. We find that: GED has decreased over time; damages from farms are now larger than those from utilities; 4 sectors, comprising less than 20% of the national GDP, are responsible for ∼75% of GED. In Thind et al. (2019) we estimate health impacts associated with PM pollution from electricity generation by race, income, and geography. We find that exposures are higher for lower-income than for higher-income, but disparities are larger by race than by income. In Sergi et al. (2020a), we estimate inter-county impacts of PM from all sources and find that 26% of U.S. counties experience worsening health damages over time. Furthermore, 30% of all U.S. counties receive 90% of their health damages from emissions in other counties, and these damage-importing counties also tend to have lower median incomes. Finally, we compare the best technology options for the transportation sector (Tong and Azevedo, 2020) and the power sector (in Sergi et al., 2020b) when climate and air pollution consequences are tackled in isolation versus considering both aspects jointly. BIOGRAPHY: Prof. Inês Azevedo is Associate Professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University. Her research interests focus on how to transition to a sustainable, low carbon, affordable, and equitable energy system. Her recent work focuses on understanding environmental justice and distributional effects related to energy issues. She has published 100+ peer-reviewed journal papers, she has participated as an author and committee member in several U.S. National Academy of Sciences reports. She is currently participating in the IPCC AR6 as one of the lead authors for the Energy chapter. Prof. Azevedo has received the World Economic Forum’s “Young Scientists under 40” award in 2014, and the C3E Women in Clean Energy Research Award in 2017.