Michael Gillenwater (Part 1) - Co-founder, Dean and Executive Director at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute

Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast

Dr. Gillenwater is a co-founder, Executive Director, and Dean of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, a non-profit organization with the unique mission to train and professionalize a global community of experts for measuring, verifying, and managing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Michael is a thought leader on GHG measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), carbon offsets, additionality, green power, international capacity building, and environmental accounting. He has dedicated his career to professional and international development, focusing on the infrastructure needed to produce highly credible environmental information that can serve as the basis of effective climate policies. Beyond guiding the Institute’s strategy and programming, Michael also directs its research program and curriculum development.

He is a four time lead author for the IPCC and contributor to its 2007 Nobel Peace Price. He has been actively engaged in the work of the UNFCCC process for 25 years, including the training of compliance experts for the Kyoto Protocol. He has been a core advisor and contributing author to the WRI/WBCSD GHG Protocol. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Michael was lead author of the official U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory for its first 7 years. He also served on the U.S. negotiating team to the UNFCCC Conference of Parties.

Michael founded and serves as a co-Editor in Chief for the peer reviewed journal Carbon Management published by Tyler & Francis. He is also an active research scholar on GHG accounting and climate policy topics, having been widely published in peer-reviewed journals and quoted by the media. Dr. Gillenwater completed his PhD at the Science, Technology, & Environmental Policy Program at Princeton University, where his research was on the economics of renewable energy and emission markets and design of environmental commodities. He has three master’s degrees: i) environmental engineering, ii) technology policy, both from MIT, and iii) evolutionary systems from the University of Sussex where he was a Fulbright scholar. His bachelors is in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University.

Michael Joins the Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast to Discuss:

• How to determine who would be the best fit within an organization to conduct an GHG inventory
• Spend based emission factors and where to find reputable sources
• TACCC Principals for GHG inventories

Michael’s Listener Takeaway: If there's only one thing that our guests take away from this conversation, what do you think it should be?

Don't assume how we think about and how we do corporate GHG reporting now is the way it should be or will continue to be like. Especially going into the next couple years, open your mind to potential new ways of approaching this question. Start asking yourself and others: why are we doing this, what are specific use cases? Dive deeper into the specific use cases, not just for the inventory data now, but what you can imagine you might want to use the data for in the future. Start the thought process of being open to new ways of thinking.Maybe there isn't one corporate inventory. Maybe there's different ways of reporting for different purposes.

Learn more about the work being done at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute at ghgmi.org.

Timestamps:

08:50 Engineering skills for understanding environmental systems processes.

12:48 Reliance on default factors limiting accurate emissions tracking.

16:12 Expansive lifecycle assessments offering emission source insights.

19:42 GHC protocol website for resource options.

23:07 Importance of transparency for environmental treaty compliance.

25:32 Corporate reporting not designed for company comparisons.