Sustaining People and Planet

Mary D. Nichols is widely recognized for a career as one of the world’s most important environmental regulators. As chair of the California Air and Resources Board, California’s powerful air pollution and climate regulatory agency, from 1975 to 1982 and then from 2007 to 2020, Professor Nichols led California’s battle to cut smog and carbon emissions. Under her leadership, CARB enacted the first comprehensive cap on industrial greenhouse gas emissions by any major regulatory agency in the world. Professor Nichols and CARB also crafted and enforced regulations that slashed air pollution from cars and light trucks by over 99%, paved the way for a new generation of advanced biofuels, and created the roadmap for a transition to a fully electrified transportation system.

Professor Nichols is a professor at UCLA Law School and holds a visiting appointment in the Columbia Global Energy Program. At Cornell Atkinson, she serves as Senior Visiting Fellow and as a member of the Advisory Council. Professor Nichols also serves as vice chair of the China-California Climate Center and as co-chair of the Commission on the Future of Mobility.

Ram Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs (used as refrigerants and propellants) in 1975 and showed that a ton each of CFC-11 and CFC-12 has more global warming effect than 10,000 tons of CO2. This discovery established the now-accepted fact that non-CO2 gases, including short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) methane, ozone, HFCs, and black carbon particles, are major contributors to planet warming and enabled the Montreal Protocol to become the first successful climate mitigation policy.

Dr. Ramanathan has led international field campaigns, designed satellite experiments and developed unmanned aircraft platforms for examining numerous climate forcers and feedbacks involving clouds, water vapor, aerosols, and SLCPs. His work led to the formation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition by the United Nations to regulate emissions of SLCPs. Dr. Ramanathan has received numerous prizes, including the Blue Planet prize in 2021, the Tang Prize in 2018, and the Tyler Prize in 2009, as well as honors such as the election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was honored as the Science Advisor to Pope Francis’s Holy See delegation to the Paris Climate Summit in 2015.

Robert Howarth is an Earth systems scientist and ecosystem biologist. He earned a Ph.D. jointly from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and continues to be an adjunct scientist in Woods Hole. Dr. Howarth joined the Cornell faculty in 1985 and became the endowed David R. Atkinson Professor in 1993. He works broadly at the interface of science and policy, with research on both the causes and consequences of global climate disruption. Dr. Howarth is one of the 100 most-cited environmental scientists in the world, with his more than 200 papers cited more than 70,000 times in other peer-reviewed articles.

Dr. Howarth published the first paper on how methane emissions make shale gas from fracking an unacceptable fuel from the standpoint of climate. This work, which literally changed the debate on methane and shale gas, led Time Magazine to name him as one of 50 “People Who Mattered” in their 2011 Person of the Year issue. Currently, Dr. Howarth is a member of NY’s Climate Action Council, the group charged by law to implement the state’s progressive climate legislation.