Research Assistantship with the Bill Lane Center: Designing equitable policies to support carbon removal and storage

Overview

Meeting ambitious climate goals, including limiting warming to 1.5°C, increasingly requires permanently removing past emissions from the atmosphere at a large scale. Despite the significant assumed capacity for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in global models, its technologies and practices remain underdeveloped compared to other climate solutions like renewable energy. As the largest cumulative emitter in history, the U.S. bears the responsibility to develop and deploy a portion of the CDR necessary to meet global climate goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement. CDR has received relatively little public attention in the U.S. Where it has been discussed, it has raised controversies among stakeholders. California often leads U.S. national policymaking on climate change and the environment, and is beginning to develop policies around CDR. 

This project aims to understand how the public perceives various CDR options, with a special focus on California. We will do so by developing a national survey with state-level resolution that does three things: 1) take the country’s “pulse” on levels of support for CDR, 2) test which policy framings lead to greatest level of voter support, and 3) ascertain whether voters support allocating resources to various CDR approaches. We will collaborate with Data for Progress to launch this survey and communicate its implications to policymakers. 

This role offers an excellent opportunity to learn about climate policy at national and state levels, as well as the diverse strategies that fall into the category of carbon dioxide removal. We aim to assess and amplify equity concerns regarding policies to promote these strategies. The Research Assistant would be responsible for developing survey questions and analyzing survey results for California, as well as crafting creative data visualization strategies to communicate results to policymakers. The successful candidate would gain skills in survey design and implementation, and data analysis and visualization.  You will receive mentorship from Celina Scott-Buechler, PhD student in the EIPER Program.

Key Roles

Student(s) assisting with this project will be involved one or more of the following activities, depending on student interests:

• Assist in developing a survey questions about carbon removal and storage policies. This may include reviewing past research on this issue and speaking with experts in the field in order to help identify alternative policy framings to test in survey questions;
• Help to pilot the survey among a test group;
• Assist in the visualization and analysis of the survey data to identify key trends; and
• Assist in the planning and implementation of a workshop bringing together stakeholders for conversations about survey findings in order to better understand sentiments behind them.
• Develop and deliver a presentation at the end of the summer or beginning of Fall 2022 to share your work with the Bill Lane Center community.

Qualifications

• Interest in climate change policy, especially questions related to carbon capture and removal and the intersection with environmental justice concerns
• Familiarity with climate change policy at federal and state levels, and/or willingness to learn
• Past experience with quantitative or qualitative data analysis is preferred
• Experience with data visualization, i.e. in R or Tableau, is useful but not required