I want people to know that a giant in the scholarly and policy world of
climate justice died yesterday, Paul Baer.  He was a brilliant scholar, a
strategic thinker dedicated to making an impact in this unequal world, he
was kind, and he was often troubled. Below is pasted a memoriam written by
Tom Athanasiou., his longtime collaborator at EcoEquity.org. Their 2002
book *Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming* (
http://catalog.sevenstories.com/products/dead-heat) had a big impact on my
work, and Paul and Tom showed me around the UN negotiations hall in 2003 in
Buenos Aires. Paul your ideas were an inspiration to me. We will miss you.
Timmons

In Memoriam: Paul Baer (1962 – 2016)

[image: pbaer-sm]This morning, while preparing for a meeting, I learned
that Paul Baer, my friend and EcoEquity’s co-founder, had just committed
suicide.  If you’re also a friend of his, you may know part of the story,
which was long and often agonizing.

Paul and I met in late 1999, just before the dramatic 6th Conference of
Parties in The Hague.  I was giving a brown bag talk up at the Lawrence
Berkeley Lab, one called “After the Kyoto Protocol.”  Afterwards, we talked
and talked, and it turned out that we agreed on a very great deal indeed.
What better way to celebrate such accord than to found an organization?
Thus, EcoEquity was born.

The tragedy of Paul’s death is underscored by the fact that it occurred
just before the Paris Agreement enters into force.  When it does, it’s
going to thrust us into a world of new complexities, and new
possibilities.  And, no doubt, new infamies.  It’s a world he should have
lived to see, and to work within.

Back in 2002, Paul and I wrote a book together, one called Dead Heat:
Global Justice and Global Warming
<https://smile.amazon.com/Dead-Heat-Global-Justice-Warming/dp/1583224777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473285723&sr=8-1&keywords=dead+heat+global+justice>.
(We were trying for a broad audience, so we used the J word).  It’s still a
nice piece of work, though we were at the time too heavily influenced by
per-capita approaches to global climate equity. I know Paul would agree
with this judgement, because he was a co-developer, along with myself and
Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, of the Greenhouse
Development Rights framework (archived here <http://gdrights.org/>), which
went on to have a considerable influence on the global fair-shares debate.
GDRs, in case you don’t know, evolved into the Climate Equity Reference
Project <https://climateequityreference.org/>, and Paul’s fingerprints are
all over it.

Here, from a 2015 grant proposal, is Paul’s last bio:

“Paul Baer is an internationally recognized expert on issues of equity and
climate change, with training in ecological economics, ethics, philosophy
of science, risk analysis and simulation modeling.  Paul has been the
Research Director for EcoEquity since 2000, when he co-founded the group
with Tom Athanasiou, with whom he also co-authored the 2002 book *Dead
Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming* (Seven Stories Press). Together
with Tom and colleagues at the Stockholm Environment Institute, he is a
co-author of the Greenhouse Development Rights framework, an influential
equity-based proposal for sharing the costs of global climate policy. His
work has been published in a number of interdisciplinary journals and
several published anthologies, including *Fairness in Adaptation to Climate
Change* (Adger et al., eds. MIT Press 2006), *Climate Change Science and
Policy* (Schneider et al., eds, Island Press 2009) and *Climate Ethics:
Essential Readings* (Gardiner et al., eds, Oxford University Press, 2010).

>From 2009-2013 he was on the faculty of the School of Public Policy at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, where he taught statistics, climate
policy, environmental policy, and ecological economics. He holds a PhD from
the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley,
as well an MA in Environmental Planning and Management from Louisiana State
University and a BA in Economics from Stanford University.”

Bye Paul.  I am so sorry for your trouble.  Really sorry.
Tom Athanasiou

-- 
Timmons
@timmonsroberts
www.climatedevlab.brown.edu
Collaboration|Impact|Mentorship|Sustainability|Justice

Just out June 2016: *The Globalization and Environment Reader*. Peter
Newell and Timmons Roberts.
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118964136.html

J. Timmons Roberts
Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology
Brown University https://vivo.brown.edu/display/jr17
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, 2012-14
http://www.brookings.edu/experts/robertst

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