Dan Kammen: Adventures in Clean Energy
by editors at the American Energy Society, adapted from Breakthroughs
Fresh off a yearlong stint as a U.S. State Department science envoy, Kammen—a professor of energy and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL)—admits he was discouraged by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, which he views as the United States ceding its environmental leadership to nations such as China. Yet he remains optimistic that the momentum for clean energy will continue to swell, especially with leadership from the Golden State. “California is truly ground zero for innovating on science and climate change technology and policies,” he says in his Barrows Hall office—tall, trim, and clad in a gray “I [Heart] Science” T-shirt.
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Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in Ithaca, New York, he is the son of Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Michael Kammen. But history was not the younger Kammen’s calling. Instead, he studied undergraduate physics at Cornell University, noted for physicist-activists like Hans Bethe, who led the Manhattan Project’s theory division. There, Kammen was mentored by other physicist-activists, like David Lee, an expert on how economic development, agriculture, and the environment interact, and Kurt Gottfried, a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
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“I followed a path I didn’t know was a path at the time. And that was the physicist-activist path.”
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