David B. Goldstein Email & Phone Number

Humanity’s most consequential decisions involve the limitation of carbon emissions. Currently these are calculated inappropriately almost everywhere in the world. My focus is on developing new standards that correct these errors, three of which were adopted in 2022-3. My efforts have led to numerous large-scale successes and professional recognitions, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. Projects that I led have resulted in trillions of dollars of net savings and tens of Gigatonnes (GT) of carbon that was not emitted. Key accomplishments include:• The cancellation of some 17 gigawatts (GW) of coal and nuclear power plants in California during the 1970s that would have proven unnecessary by the 1980s, and their replacement with energy efficiency actions. • The development and passage of the bipartisan National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, the text of which I negotiated with the major appliance industry trade associations. This legislation is responsible for over $2 trillion of cost savings and over 7 GT of carbon emissions reduction in the U.S. alone.• The development of utility-sponsored incentive programs to encourage new technologies that went beyond what was available commercially; this process has been institutionalized in the Consortium for Energy Efficiency.• The establishment of new organizations to promote energy efficiency.• The establishment of binational advocacy programs, first at the Institute for Market Transformation for Russia and then at NRDC focused on India and China.• The adoption by Congress of tax incentives for buildings and components of extra-high energy efficiency. I was the lead advocate determining what levels of efficiency were required and how they could be documented. These incentives were re-established at higher levels of ambition in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.• The elevation of the global goal of limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees—my published article on this topic in 2016 anticipated the results that the International Energy Agency published three years later.• The adoption of two International Standards on energy efficiency and net zero energy and carbon by the ISO (ISO 50007 and 50010).• The adoption of two ANSI standards on how to count carbon emissions from buildings and how low those emissions should be (ANSI/RESNET/ICC 301 and ASHRAE 90.2).• Two books that challenged conventional economic wisdom by showing that there is not a tradeoff between economic development and environmental protection, and that efficiency is a resource whose potential is still underestimated.

Listed skills include Energy Efficiency, Energy, Energy Policy, Climate Change, and 25 others.

• 

  University Of California, Berkeley