November 16, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Harlan L. Watson is senior climate negotiator and special representative at the U.S. Department of State. In this capacity, he served as alternate head of the U.S. delegation at the seventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. He heads the National Security Council Policy Coordination Committee (NSC/PCC) Working Group on Climate Change, and he joined the Department of State’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs in September 2001. He previously served for more than sixteen years on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, including over six years as staff director of the Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. Mr. Watson also served as science adviser to the secretary of the Interior and as principal deputy and deputy assistant secretary of the Interior for water and science. 

Hugh Pitcher is a staff scientist with the Joint Global Change Group Research Institute. He has been with the group more than a decade, during which time he has played a major role in developing the Second Generation Model (SGM), developed the initial version of the integrated assessment model MiniCAM, and worked with many others in the international community to create the recently revised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios. His current interests include continued work on long-term scenarios, including major revisions to the demographics models such as health, climate, and economic development. He spent twenty years at the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Institute for Defense analysis, where the focus of his work was the development of computer models for use in policy analysis. These models and analyses have covered a wide variety of topics, including the costs and benefits of reducing lead in gasoline and the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

Clive Crook is the deputy editor for The Economist and a columnist for National Journal. One of the world’s leading economic journalists, he writes widely on international economics and globalization. At The Economist, he has served as an economics correspondent, as a Washington, D.C., correspondent, and as economics editor. Before starting at The Economist, Mr. Crook worked as an official in H. M. Treasury, and he was a part-time consultant to the World Bank and principal editor of the Bank’s annual World Development Report. His reporting on controversies over emissions scenarios brought the issue to a wider audience. He is a coauthor of Globalisation: Making Sense of an Integrating World. 

David Henderson is currently a visiting professor at the Westminster Business School, London. He was formerly head of the Economics and Statistics Department of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Before this, he worked as an academic and a national and international civil servant, and since leaving the OECD, he has been an independent author and consultant, holding visiting appointments in several countries. He is working on a range of issues in public policy, with particular focus on the balance in economic policies across the world between liberal or market-oriented tendencies and regulation and controls. He has recently published a critique of current notions of “corporate social responsibility,” under the title Misguided Virtue. He is the author of The Changing Fortunes of Economic Liberalism.

Warwick McKibbin is executive director at the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis and professor of international economics at the Australian National University.  He is also a fellow of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. In addition, he is a board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia and an entrepreneur as president of the McKibbin Software Group. He has served as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and as a visiting scholar at the Congressional Budget Office, as well as at the Japanese Ministry of Finance. Among many other areas of expertise, he has written extensively on environmental policy.

Richard N. Cooper is Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics at Harvard University. His primary field of interest is international economics, including international trade and international monetary economics, international environmental, and energy issues. His recent paper, “A Glimpse at 2020,” written for the World Economic Forum’s most recent Growth Competitiveness Index, can be downloaded online. He is the coeditor of What the Future Holds: Insights from Social Science and the author of a number of books on world economics.

James L. Connaughton was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on June 14 and appointed by President George W. Bush in June 2001 to serve as the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. He serves as the senior environmental adviser to the president, as well as director of the White House Office of Environmental Policy, which oversees the development of environmental policy, coordinates interagency implementation of environmental programs, and mediates key policy disagreements.  Before joining the Bush administration, Mr. Connaughton was a partner in the law firm Sidley Austin Brown & Wood in its Environmental Practice Group. From 1993 until 2001, he served as one of the lead U.S. negotiators of the ISO 14000 series of international environmental standards. He has lectured throughout the world on international environmental standards, environment and trade, environmental management systems implementation, product regulation, and natural resource damages assessment.

Ross McKitrick is associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, where he teaches environmental economics. He is the coauthor, with Christopher Essex, of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming (Key Porter Books, 2002) and numerous journal articles on climate science and economics. He specializes in the application of economic analysis to environmental policy design and climate change.

Mark Strazicich is assistant professor of economics at Appalachian State University.  Before his arrival at that university, he was an assistant professor at the University of North Texas. His fields of specialization include macroeconomics, econometrics, and international economics. His research has examined economic growth and convergence, economic growth and the environment, the behavior of government debt at different levels of government, and developing and applying new unit root tests with structural breaks. His research has been published in professional journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Economic Inquiry, Economics Letters, Journal of Macroeconomics, and Southern Journal of Economics.

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