Life cycle assessment (LCA) in an environmental and innovation policy context

Recently I gave a seminar presented at the UC Santa Barbara Bren School on Life cycle assessment (LCA) in an environmental and innovation policy context. If you are interested in Life cycle assessment and its use as a framework to inform and design policies to support specific technologies for their environmental benefits, you might find the presentation interesting else below is a brief summary. 

I like to think my take on LCA is quite different from the majority of the researchers and certainly practitioners of LCA whose focus by design or inadvertently is narrower than what it ought to be from a societal perspective and this is the part that really excites me – LCA's utility in a public policy context. I see it as a uniquely valuable tool – one that is grounded in basic scientific and engineering principles,  but also requiring understanding of the socio-economic context in which the products or technologies analyzed in LCA operate. However, most people trained in LCA tend to be those exposed only to the former and not the latter which is largely because LCA is mainly offered in environmental engineering programs and both the faculty and students may not have the background in micro-economics, environmental economics  and cost-benefit analysis which I think is really needed if one needs to provide proper guidance on policy use of LCA.  For what it is worth, I have encountered many engineers who dismiss LCA as not real engineering and more of economics. To the typical engineer, economics is nothing more than cost budgeting and doing NPV calculations which only betrays how little they know of economics. On the other hand, as I explain in this talk, economists don't take LCA seriously for they think directly targeting CO2 or SOx or NOx is simpler instead of through LCA of specific technologies, and LCA as being inferior to pollution tax which is simpler. My former PhD advisor, Prof. David Zilberman with his trademark wit and humour, likened it to a Rube Goldberg machine yet oversaw my dissertation on this topic.  Anyway to the economists who doubt LCA I insist, so long as pollution taxes are not adopted everywhere and uniformly, LCA despite its complexities makes a lot of sense. 

To conclude, I think LCA is both an exciting area for research for those interested in the unintended consequences of technology and a really valuable tool for environmental and innovation policy.  For more details as to why check out the talk HERE