Edwin A. Schmitt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo in Norway. He has a PhD in Anthropology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he wrote a thesis on environmental consciousness, which included examining the issue of air pollution in Chengdu, China. He is currently a member of the interdisciplinary project – Airborne: Pollution, Climate Change, and Visions of Sustainability in China – at the University of Oslo. This team has collaborated with scholars at Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Oregon State University to examine air pollution in China from multiple perspectives. Prof. Schmitt’s most recent research focuses primarily on the historical role of energy institutions in China and what that means for air pollution.
Links to articles mentioned in the podcast:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00629-5
CORRECTING NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
After the interview, Edwin realized he had made a mistake at minute 13:20. He said that coal-fired power plants produce 4 million GW of electricity for the grid, but the correct number should be about 930 GW. Please see the following website for details: https://www.iea.org/weo/china/
