Zhou Dadi is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment.
He is the director general (emeritus) of the Energy Research Institute (ERI) of the National Development and Reform Commission, where he served as director general for eight years. Zhou had served in ERI for 22 years as research professor and vice director, focusing on energy economics and energy system analysis.
Zhou was chief scientist for the Expert Team of China and a lead author for Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Zhou has been a prominent intellectual leader in China’s energy import and export reform policies, energy price reform, energy efficiency policy, and climate change. He serves as the vice chairman of the State Expert Advisory Committee to the National Energy Leading Group of China, a member of the National Expert Team of China for Climate Change, and as vice president of the China Institute of Geo-politics and Energy Strategy.
Zhou has served as a consultant to the World Bank, Global Environmental Facility, and many other organizations around the world, and has been a visiting fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the United States. He co-founded the Energy Efficiency Center in Beijing in 1992 in cooperation with PNNL and LBNL.
Zhou received the OECD Climate Technology Initiative (CTI) Global Climate Leadership Award in 2000, and the 2007 Climate Protection Award of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Although China will continue to rely on fossil fuels in the coming decades, the government has undertaken an unprecedented effort to forge a low-carbon development path by promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy.
With oil prices tumbling, some experts believe that this is the perfect time for China to reform its oil pricing mechanism, because a higher tax would currently inflict relatively little hardship on consumers. The government should use this rare opportunity to create a pricing system that better reflects the full economic and environmental costs of fuel production and consumption.
Carnegie’s William Chandler and Zhou Dadi discussed how to break the US-China “suicide pact” of self-destructive, energy-using behavior during a May 8, 2008 discussion at the Carnegie Endowment.
