In This Episode...
I speak with Dr. Lisa Benjamin, Associate Professor of Law at Lewis and Clark Law School, about the benefits of Electronic Vehicles. Dr. Benjamin takes an honest look at the benefits and burdens of driving an EV (BTW, the benefits far outweigh the burdens) and explores the many consequences of continuing our dependence on fossil fuels. You can read about her thesis in her article, EVs as EJ? published in Harvard Environmental Law Review.
About Our Guest...
Dr. Lisa Benjamin is an Associate Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland Oregon. She completed her PhD at the University of Leicester in 2017, and received the Doctoral Honors Award in 2018. In 2018, Lisa was a Global Leaders Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, and was a visiting assistant professor at Penn State Law School, where she taught Business Associations and Energy Law. In 2019, she was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. In 2021 she won the Huffman Award for outstanding faculty scholarship, in 2022 she won the Leo Levenson Award for excellence in teaching, and was also awarded the 2022-2023 Pace Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award.
Her research focuses on climate justice and climate risk, and how these issues intersect with energy law and administrative law. She has written a book and several articles and book chapters on non-state actors and climate risk, as well as energy and climate justice in developing countries, including small island developing states. She was the legal advisor to The Bahamas during the UNFCCC Paris Agreement negotiations.
Lisa is the Vice Chair of the UNFCCC Compliance Committee (Facilitative Branch), a director of Verde PDX (an environmental justice NGO), co-Chair of the Climate Accountability working group of the Climate Social Science Network, and a member of the Expert Peer Review Group in the Race to Zero campaign (a UN-backed global campaign to rally leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, investors for a healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery). She has been quoted in Bloomberg Law, The Financial Times, and made appearances on Velshi on MSNBC, and the BBC World Service.