Melanie Chan/Staff

One of the biggest challenges for sustainable international economic development is the need to control greenhouse gas emissions. Before we can make meaningful progress toward stabilizing the planet’s climate, we need to have an international roadmap for economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation that still bends the curve on emissions.

Solutions for saving the planet need to be ones that contribute to economic growth! Certainly, for developed economies, we need to have a plan for sustainable growth that includes emerging energy-efficiency technologies, novel green generation technologies and new infrastructures. For the developing world, however, the path to development goes through an increase in per capita consumption of energy. A fundamental sticking point to agreeing to an international agreement on carbon emissions has been the concern in developing economies that such an agreement will stymie GDP growth.

I deeply believe, however, that it is possible to chart a course for economic advancement in both developed and developing economies while still curbing greenhouse emissions. On the demand side, overall energy consumption can be grouped into three categories: buildings, transportation and industry. For example, energy-efficiency technologies have the potential to reduce energy consumption in buildings in an economically viable fashion by as much as 50 percent in the next five years, with the consequent drops in greenhouse gas emissions. In countries in the midst of building booms, new advances in materials and green cement will lead to even higher savings.

On the supply side, new technologies such as smart grids, solar thermal, nuclear and hydrogen fuels hold rich possibilities. The specific trajectory to economic growth, however, will vary from economy to economy, and the overall trajectory will need to be set strategically through a rigorous and vibrant roadmapping process.

This carbon emission quandary, with stalled international negotiations and ineffective policies, is analogous to a problem faced by the semiconductor industry.

Although the semiconductor industry had been doubling every 12 to 18 months for close to three decades, by the late 1980s, the complexity of the semiconductor supply chain began to dampen innovation and cost billions. Semiconductor industry groups, academics and manufacturers met to discuss best practices and fundamental decisions underpinning their industry and created the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in 1992. The plan continues to be updated annually and exists like a living document.

If the current boom in the Information Age and the ubiquity of devices such as smartphones, which rely on cheaper and faster semiconductors by the Silicon roadmap, is any indicator, the plan is working well.

To pursue the analogy between the Silicon roadmap and a carbon roadmap, with colleagues at UC Berkeley such as professors Spanos, Zysman, Ramesh and Doyle, we have launched the Center for Research in Energy Systems Transformation. CREST is under the rubric of the campuswide Berkeley Energy and Climate Initiative.

CREST is working to create roadmaps that are owned by implementers and are cooperatively developed for the purpose of guiding the world’s energy system toward high efficiency while producing fewer greenhouse gases.

The CREST carbon roadmap has two arms. The first is to develop long-term plans for specific carbon-reducing technologies. As a test case, Berkeley engineers are investigating how sensors and networks deployed in smart, green buildings can be designed for easy adoption on different scales. CREST makes use of Berkeley’s deep vein of multidisciplinary, smart building-technology research.

Second, CREST seeks to develop locally adapted tools and technologies that are sensitive to place, politics and culture. That’s why the second part of the CREST carbon roadmap is to identify obstacles to cross-national technology development and implementation. Colleagues such as professors Brewer, Miguel, Gadgil, Wolfram and others power the Blum Center for Developing Economies’ new partnership with USAID in a project called the Development Innovations Laboratory, which includes the development of sustainable energy technology roadmaps in economies such as India, Indonesia, Kenya, etc.

I was recently asked to serve on a new United Nations Scientific Advisory Board, which will provide guidance to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on international sustainable development issues, staffed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization with its mandate for science and technology.

I look forward to expanding on bringing the work that we are doing at centers such as CREST and Blum to the international conversation about sustainable development.

I am confident we can create a carbon-roadmap-style plan that outlines how equitable prosperity can be reached across the planet and shows that economic growth, job creation and greenhouse gas reduction are not mutually exclusive.

Shankar Sastry is dean of the College of Engineering and the faculty director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

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Amanda Burke/Staff

On June 13, we had the great honor of hearing Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of the global semiconductor company Qualcomm, announce a $20 million gift to UC Berkeley during a live webcast of the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Chicago.

Dr. Jacobs — who holds three degrees from our department of electrical engineering and computer sciences — chose to announce this gift before a global audience because he sees how critical Berkeley engineering and its graduates are for America’s future as an innovation economy.

“Today, it is not enough to provide our future engineering leaders with technical skills,” he said. “They must also learn how to combine art and engineering, how to work in interdisciplinary teams, how to iterate designs rapidly, how to manufacture sustainably and how to address global markets.”

What does this commitment mean for UC Berkeley students? First of all, it allows us to launch a new Institute for Design Innovation here at the College of Engineering. Drawing upon advanced 3-D printers and other prototyping equipment and software, our students will design and fabricate new devices and services for biomedicine, clean energy — wherever Berkeley engineers can improve people’s lives.

At the same time, we see this as a significant step toward the complete reinvention of engineering education at Berkeley. Undergraduates choose engineering because they want to build and make things. We will nurture this interest in experiential education by offering students multiple design experiences during their time at Berkeley, from the cornerstone (freshman year) and keystone (sophomore and junior years) to the capstone (junior and senior levels).

By providing our students, especially undergraduates, with design experiences early and often, along with opportunities to reflect with their peers on what worked and what did not, we will lay the foundations for a leadership education. The ability to articulate, design and innovate will be combined with the traditional technical rigor of a Berkeley engineering education.

Ask anyone to describe an engineer, and you’ll probably hear words like “logical” or “good at math” rather than “creative” or “artistic.” But we agree with Paul Jacobs that successful engineers must possess creative design skills and entrepreneurship skills on top of deep technical understanding.

Our students amaze us with their ability to come up with new and original solutions to problems. We want to give them forums to experiment, bake off various solutions against each other and learn from failures. Serial entrepreneurs will tell you that trying out new things and learning from failure is critical to successful innovation. Even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you get started. You make some right turns and some wrong ones, and you learn more about the best direction as you go along.

We are taking our cue from the innovation playbook and from what our students love doing to rethink engineering education, to infuse it with a deeper emphasis on design and learning by doing. Visit any number of classes — EECS and new media professor Eric Paulos’ critical making course, a course on design thinking co-taught by mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino and Haas professor Sara Beckman, or bioengineering professor Amy Herr’s senior capstone design course — and you will see our own maker movement taking shape at Berkeley.

Four students in Herr’s class, for example, teamed up this year with a practicing surgeon to invent a better laparoscope — one that does not need to be cleaned periodically during surgery. Their inspiration? A simple ballpoint pen.

We are also reshaping our prerequisite courses to focus more heavily on design. This year, students in professor Al Pisano’s introductory class on rapid prototyping designed automotive suspension struts by mastering concepts on finite element analysis — concepts that are typically taught in the senior year. Design is at heart an integrative experience, and we need to incorporate advanced concepts into instruction throughout the undergraduate sequence.

Our proposed Institute for Design Innovation will allow us to meet surging student demand for experiential learning. The institute’s offerings will go beyond mere skill development; they will also provide our undergraduates with opportunities to practice leadership. Many studies show that these kinds of opportunities, especially when they come early in engineering education, boost retention rates and keep more students in the pipeline toward rewarding engineering careers.

Paul Jacobs cites this as the real reason why he and his wife, Stacy, made their $20 million gift to UC Berkeley. “Students will get the satisfaction of doing actual designing and making — and the motivation to continue,” Jacobs said. “Berkeley graduates more than 1,200 engineers each year. And roughly a quarter of them are women. Diversity is critical for successful innovation, and Stacy and I see Berkeley as a place that embraces diversity.”

S. Shankar Sastry is the dean and Carlson professor of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Fiona M. Doyle is the executive associate dean and McLaughlin professor of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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