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ENVS Graduate Program - Secondary Core prior to Fall 2012

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Lizzie Lokey is the Chair of the Sustainability Studies Department at The White Mountain School. She finished her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado in June 2008. For her dissertation, she researched the barriers to earning carbon credit through the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism for small-scale, renewable energy projects in Latin America. After defending her dissertation, she trekked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal for a month.

Prior to her current positions, she was an Assistant Professor in the Master of Public Administration Program at Boise State University, and worked with Camco International in Denver as a carbon consultant, helping companies lower their greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for U.S. climate change legislation.

As an undergraduate, she studied Environmental Studies and Latin American Studies at Middlebury College. She was previously a middle and upper school Spanish and science teacher for four years at the Vail Mountain School, a National Science Foundation GK-12 Fellow, and an Argosy Fellow with the Rocky Mountain Institute. She has published articles in The International Journal of Hydrogen, Electricity Journal, and Argus's Clean Air Daily during her time studying at CU.

Lizzie recently published a book based on her dissertation research. She wrote the following article for her high school magazine:

I originally became interested in clean energy development after spending a semester abroad in Ecuador in 1998. Unscrupulous and heavily-polluting oil extraction in the midst of the rainforest made me wonder if developing countries like Ecuador could continue to grow economically without sacrificing their natural resources. After finishing an Environmental Studies and Latin American Studies major at Middlebury College, I continued to explore this question as I taught environmental science and Spanish at the Vail Mountain School in Vail, Colorado for four years. Then, I decided to pursue this question in a systematic way through completion of an M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Colorado.

Through my graduate studies, I became aware of a way by which renewable energy projects could earn extra revenues by qualifying as offsets under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. This Mechanism allows companies that are located in countries that have ratified the Protocol and must make emission reductions to purchase offsets from projects like wind farms in Ecuador, which are not profitable without carbon credit or offset revenues.

Despite the best intentions of the Clean Development Mechanism, renewable energy projects in Latin America were not accessing carbon revenues as successfully as other offset project sectors and other regions. Therefore, I set out to discover the barriers to achieving this carbon finance and how they could be overcome.

I was most interested in this topic because of its interdisciplinary nature. The social barriers to a project are just as important as the technical ones and have equal ability to cause project failure. So, because of my multi-disciplinary background and the flexibility of my Ph.D. program, I was able to analyze the problem wholistically, considering social, economic, political, bureaucratic, technical, and informational barriers.

After four months of field research in 12 countries, a year and a half of research, and over 240 interviews with project engineers, governmental officials, local stakeholders, non-governmental representatives, and carbon consultants, I finished my Ph.D. I’m pleased to announce that it is being published as a book with Earthscan Publishers in May of 2009. If you are interested in purchasing a copy or learning more about this project, please see Earthscan's website.

March 17 2009

Alum Liz Lokey Publishes New Book

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