UW News

April 27, 1998

Stanford biologist to address politics of global warming in UW lecture

The United Nations-sponsored climate convention in Kyoto last December was a failure, according to an award-winning global warming expert who will deliver the 1998 Evans Lecture at the University of Washington.

In his talk, “The Road To (and From) Kyoto : Where Global Warming Science and Institutional Politics Meet,” Stanford University biologist Stephen Schneider will present his case against the Kyoto conference. The lecture is at 7:30 p.m. May 7 at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture, 3501 NE 41st St ., southeast of University Village Shopping Center off Mary Gates Memorial Drive. The lecture is free, and the public is welcome.

Schneider, a noted speaker on environmental policy who has advised the past five presidential administrations, argues that the Kyoto conference failed to recognize the most cost-effective and environmentally appropriate solution to global warming: a fee for dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Without incentives to curb waste and develop alternative technology for 21 st century industrial development, Schneider believes atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will double or triple by the end of the next century.

“Such levels would likely threaten to create the dangerous (human-caused) interference with climate that the Kyoto meeting was set up to prevent,” he says.

The Evans Lecture is presented annually by the UW Department of Civil Engineering in honor of Daniel Lester Evans, a 1917 graduate of the department and longtime engineer for King County. The lecture is sponsored by Evans’ three sons, Robert, Roger and Dan, former governor and state senator and currently a UW regent.

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For more information, contact Nancy Cudlipp at (206) 543-2390 o r cive100@u.washington.edu