Lee Schipper

Dr. Lee Schipper (April 7, 1947 – August 16, 2011) was an energy efficiency expert and international environmentalist who devoted his life to understanding societal, infrastructural and technological challenges to energy efficiency, particularly in the heating and transport sectors.

He was Senior Research Engineer at the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University and a Senior Project Scientist in Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an accomplished jazz vibraphonist.

Early life
Lee Schipper was born in St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California. He spent his early years in Westwood, Los Angeles, attending Warner Avenue Elementary School, Emerson Junior High School and University High School, graduating in June 1964. During his childhood, he enjoyed collecting stamps, coins, chemistry experiments, and going on Teen Tour in the summer of 1961.

Academic career
Lee Schipper attended the University of California, Los Angeles as a senior in high school to take advanced courses. At the end of his year, he had completed almost two years of units, and was consequently able to enroll in University of California at Berkeley as a sophomore. He began UC Berkeley in September 1964, studying Physics and Music. He completed his double-major B.A. in 1968, moving straight into his PhD in Astrophysics in the Physics Department. His dissertation examined black holes.

Musical Life
Dr. Schipper was also an accomplished musician with a B.A. in music from U.C. Berkeley. During travels in Europe from the late 60's he played with and got a lot of friends among musicians in Denmark. In 1969 Danish saxophonist Carsten Meinert invited him to record on his album "C.M. Musictrain" in Denmark (Spectator Records). In 1973 he recorded "The Phunky Physicist" with Swedish guitarplayer Janne Schaffer. He continued to perform on the vibraphone decades later at major climate change and energy conferences as the lead for ‘Lee Schipper and the Mitigators’. He performed in Copenhagen, Denmark with Danish musicians as late as December 2009. A grounded jazz pianist as well, he played Brazilian bossa nova and jazz standards on the piano in duet with Mexican singer-songwriter, soprano and environmentalist Marina De Santiago Haas, his best friend whom he shared his passion for opera, Brazilian music, jazz, and environmental topics.

Professional Life
Although he held a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Lee Schipper has dedicated his career to the related problems of transportation, energy, and climate change. Dr. Schipper worked as a staff scientist for Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and in Group Planning for Shell International Petroleum Company. He worked as a visiting scientist for the International Energy Agency from 1995–2001, and in 2002 he helped found the World Resources Institute (WRI) Center for Sustainable Transportation, EMBARQ, where he served as Director of Research until his appointments at Stanford and Berkeley. He published over 100 professional papers on energy, transportation, and climate change, and he sat on the editorial boards of five journals in these fields.

Schipper gained prominence early in his career for a paper published in Science in 1976 showing how Sweden, an affluent country, had an energy intensity far lower than that of the U.S. "This became a very famous paper," said Mark Levine, who was Schipper’s supervisor for most his career at Berkeley Lab and now leads Berkeley Lab’s China Energy Group. "By the mid-1970s he was one of the most highly regarded energy analysts in the U.S., known and widely respected in energy circles around the world."

In the early 1970s he joined UC Berkeley’s then-nascent Energy and Resources Group where he worked with John Holdren, now President Barack Obama’s science adviser. He contributed to the Second and Third Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

In the early 1980s, Schipper started the Berkeley Lab’s International Energy Studies group with Jayant Sathaye, and the two co-led the group for many years. Schipper broke new ground by analyzing energy data sector by sector and end-use by end-use in various countries and comparing them. He demonstrated that energy intensity did not correlate with GDP in any simple way and was able to show why. "The work he did has been carried on here. He created an important tradition of understanding energy by studying it from the bottom up, which means by end user," Levine said. "Lee was the founding father of a school of energy analysts, a tradition carried on with vigor in the Energy Analysis Department at LBNL."

Schipper mentored many students, Sathaye said, and several went onto become professors. "Lee’s unbridled enthusiasm for his work and music was both engaging and stimulating and lit a fire in his colleagues for not only working harder but also for making sure that our conclusions were based on solid research," said Berkeley Lab scientist Ed Vine. "While we were engaged in our work, he made sure that we knew the difference between authenticity and misrepresentation and falsehood. At the same time, we always looked forward to Lee’s latest jokes and humor, as a way to lighten our day."

He had published widely, including the book 'Energy Efficiency and Human Activity: Past Trends, Future Prospects' (1992) with Stephen Meyers, Richard Howarth and Ruth Steiner (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).

Publications

 * Measuring The Invisible: Quantifying Emissions Reductions From Transport Solutions - Hanoi Case Study, March, 2008 (with: Maria Cordeiro, Robyn Liska, Dr. Tuan Le Anh, Hans Orn, Wei-shiuen NG) WRI 2008, http://www.wri.org/publication/measuring-the-invisible-hanoi
 * Measuring the Invisible: Quantifying Emissions Reductions from Transport Solutions - Querétaro Case Study, September, 2006 (with: Maria Cordeiro, Diana Noriega) WRI 2006, http://www.wri.org/publication/measuring-the-invisible-queretaro
 * Growing in the Greenhouse: Protecting the Climate by Putting Development First, December, 2005 (with: Rob Bradley, Jonathan Pershing, Kevin A. Baumert, Navroz K. Dubash, Jose Roberto Moreira, Stanford Mwakasonda, Wei-Shiuen Ng, Luiz Augusto Horta Nogueira, Virginia Parente, Harald Winkler) WRI 2005, http://www.wri.org/publication/growing-in-the-greenhouse
 * Too Expensive to Ignore: The Real Story on Car Fuel Economy and Use, July 2008, EMBARQ 2008, http://www.embarq.org/en/news/08/07/21/too-expensive-ignore-the-real-story-car-fuel-economy-and-use
 * Transportation in Developing Countries: Greenhouse Gas Scenarios for Delhi, India, May 2001, (with: Ranjan K. Bose, Daniel Sperling, Mark A. Delucchi, K. Nesamani, Lothlorien S. Redmond, Geetam Tiwari) UC Davis ITS, Reference Number: UCD-ITS-RP-01-13, http://pubs.its.ucdavis.edu/publication_detail.php?id=388
 * Mind the Gap: The Vicious Circle of Measuring Automobile Fuel Use, December 1993, (with: Maria J. Figueroa, Lynn K. Price, Molly Espey) UC Davis ITS, Reference Number: UCD-ITS-RP-93-27, http://pubs.its.ucdavis.edu/publication_detail.php?id=878
 * Environmentally Benign Automobiles, October 1992, (with: Daniel Sperling, Mark A. DeLuchi, Michael Q. Wang) UC Davis ITS, Reference Number: UCD-ITS-RP-92-25, http://pubs.its.ucdavis.edu/publication_detail.php?id=936
 * Transport and Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Forecasts, Options Analysis, and Evaluation, 2009, Asian Development Bank, http://www.asiandevbank.org/documents/papers/adb-working-paper-series/ADB-WP09-Transport-CO2-Emissions.pdf