HAMMOND – Southeastern Professor of Organic Chemistry Jean Fotie has been appointed to serve as a member of the Science Advisory Group of the Governor’s Climate Initiatives Task Force.
Governor Edwards recently kicked off a Climate Initiatives Task Force to look at the best ways to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the state, with the objective of mitigating the worst impacts of climate change on our natural and cultural heritage while adapting our economy to maintain our position as a world leader in energy, industry, agriculture, and transportation.”
The vision is for Louisiana to be able to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% of 2005 levels by 2025, by about 40-50% of 2005 levels by 2030, and to net zero greenhouse gas emission by 2050.
“As a coastal state, Louisiana is among the areas where one can witness, almost daily, the increasing severe effects of climate change on our environment and on our way of life,” Fotie said. “In recent years, our research group has developed a deep interest in finding new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without impairing economic viability. As such, it is an honor to be able to contribute, even in the smallest of ways, to the state’s climate vision for the next decades.”
The role of the Science Advisory Group is to support the Climate Initiatives Task Force by developing fundamental objectives and rubrics for evaluating the impacts of potential solutions, and to ensure that the proposed strategies are based on sound science and engineering.
Fotie recently received a $265,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop greener and sustainable catalytic methods for the reductive functionalization of carbon dioxide (CO2).
