Chris Kennedy, Professor of Environmental Economics, George Mason University A brief overview of personal research? Research into fisheries and resource management. Specifically how climate change driven impacts populations and in turn fishery outcome. Animals do not respect political boundaries. A problem resulting from shifting populations causes issues for management of marine species. Personal views on the current economic practices of today? Scarcity is the reality of life. All resources are limited. Everything from time to our natural resources. How do you feel about the clean water act loophole concerning hydraulic fracking? It was a mistake to exempt fracking from the clean water act. A mistake for the industry to be exempt from regulations because of the negative attention. A couple bad apples ruins the barrel. Why is it that Atlantic Cod cannot recover? It has not recovered. Open topic of debate. Some believe it will take decades for it to recover. Predators such as Spiny Dogfish play a major role in preventing Atlantic Cod recovery. There is debate as to how temperature effects recruitment rates and distribution. Warmer waters are usually a good thing for recruitment. In general stocks may move northward as a result of increase in temperature. There were unique stocks that once exposed to overfishing they became more like one school. That is why overfishing was so severe because it was hidden by the data collected because catch per unit effort remained high while the population decreased. Environment Effect: Lobster fisheries have been in great shape. Many believe this is due to the collapse of Cod stocks. Personal view on the coming administration? The new administration will have little impact on our climate policy because the climate policy has been driven by economics. Renewable energy is becoming less expensive. The economics concerning fisheries are most likely not going to change at all. What about committed warming? Depending upon how severe Global Warming gets we will end up on a geoengineering solution. I believe that there will be a technological solution. That leads to geopolitical problems. Warming benefits some areas of the world while bad in others. Global warming is not something that has been done deliberately. What solutions would you propose to reduce pollution while advancing prosperity and economic opportunity? Developing countries should leap frog the through energy systems. For example telephone poles in Africa, they do not have hardwire telephones because it is a better economic practice to simply build one cell tower. Economics will drive a transition to renewables in industrialized countries. Renewable energies are becoming cheaper while coal for instance is not.