Former White House staffer to discuss politics of climate change Oct. 7

Climate and policy expert Johannes Loschnigg, formerly of the White House staff and currently the principal at Loschnigg Consulting, will speak at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7, on the Western Washington University campus. The event is sponsored by the WWU Geology Department.

Loschnigg will deliver a presentation titled “The Politics of Climate Change in Washington D.C.: 'Debates' about the science, confusion about the impacts, and ideological battles” in Environmental Studies Room 100. The presentation is free and open to the public.

As a staff member in both the U.S. Congress and the White House during the past decade, Loschnigg has been closely involved in the debates about the science of climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions and shift to cleaner sources of energy. But Congressional action has been slower than many would prefer, often because of misinformation regarding the science of climate change and confusion about the projected impacts. Loschnigg will provide of overview of this debate, discuss how the issue has deeper ideological underpinnings and give an assessment of current and future action for reducing emissions.

Loschnigg was a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Washington DC from 2009 to 2013. As a member of OSTP's Environment and Energy Division, he was responsible for the development of federal policy for renewable energy, climate change, aerospace and earth satellite observations. Prior to that, Loschnigg was the staff director for the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the Committee on Science in the U.S. House of Representatives, overseeing NASA and U.S. civil space programs. He first came to the U.S. Congress in 2002 as a congressional science and technology policy fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working for U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. While in the Senate, he directed the development of legislation relating to innovation, broadband wireless communication, nanotechnology, defense research and climate change policy. Between 1998 and 2002, Loschnigg was affiliated with the University of Hawaii, initially as post-doctoral fellow and later as a faculty research scientist in atmospheric and oceanic sciences. While in Hawaii, he concentrated on coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling of the Indian and Pacific oceans as well as the impacts of climate variability on disease and human health. He has been a senior advisor for the administrator at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. and has also consulted for the National Academy of Sciences. He has previously been a scientific assistant at the the NASA Ames Research Center in California, at the Department of Physics at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and at the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Loschnigg holds bacjelor's degrees in both physics and international relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and master's and doctorate degrees in astrophysical, planetary and atmospheric sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He currently is a consultant providing strategic advice for organizations and companies for projects related to energy, aerospace and climate change. He resides near Portland, Ore.