Faculty Spotlight: An Interview with Joanna Lewis
Feature Series: Faculty Spotlight
Joanna Lewis is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Lewis has over two decades of experience working on international climate and clean energy policy with a focus on China. The initiative sat down with faculty committee member Joanna Lewis to reflect on her career and research on China, climate cooperation, and clean energy supply chains.
Witnessing China’s Clean Energy Transition
Throughout her career, Lewis has worked for a number of governmental and non-governmental organizations, including the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Asia Society, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, among many others. She is currently a faculty affiliate in the China Energy Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Tell us about your early engagements with China, and how those experiences influenced your career and research interests.
When I went to graduate school at [University of California] Berkeley, I got a job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s China Energy Group. The China Energy Group had a long history of collaborating with Chinese scientists and policymakers in the energy field, and they were really the first ones that helped me build up my own connections in China and also my own expertise about how the Chinese bureaucracy worked.
I remember we would have weekly lab meetings where all my colleagues would talk about the bilateral cooperation they were doing with all these different Chinese research institutions and policymakers, and it really helped me understand the energy policy apparatus and the energy bureaucracy within China at that time. I was getting this dual education both in school on energy technologies and then on the job on how policymaking in China worked, and those experiences really solidified what I wanted to do for my career and for my research.
You have a lot of experience working in China, and you recently had the opportunity to return there in summer 2024. What was it like to travel back to China this time around?
I used to go to China multiple times a year and spend long periods of time there, up to a full year. This summer was my first time going back since the COVID-19 pandemic started. I got to visit twice—I went to Shanghai and Anhui in May and Beijing in July. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how much things felt more the same than I thought they would. I had really productive exchanges with scholars and government officials during both trips.
My first trip to Shanghai and the neighboring area was really focused on the research I'm doing on clean energy supply chains. I was able to visit several of China's electric vehicle and battery factories, and it was really quite interesting to see the amazing growth that's happening in China with these industries.
I've read a lot about this over the last few years, but it is really hard to understand until you actually see the transformation firsthand and just how state of the art and massive China's scale out of these key clean energy technologies is.
My second trip in July was really a Beijing-focused trip with a group of other scholars, and I made the rounds to a lot of key government policy agencies. Again, I was pleasantly surprised that senior officials took our meetings and that they were interested in talking to us.
I was wondering over the last few years if I would have to completely change the way I do work in China, but I've actually been able to maintain collaborations even through the pandemic and increasing political tensions between China and the United States. For example, I have colleagues at Tsinghua University that I have been working with for about 20 years, and those collaborations remain strong.
Climate Cooperation and Clean Energy Competition
Lewis is the author of the acclaimed books Green Innovation in China (2012) and Cooperating for the Climate (2023) and is a leading expert on climate and energy-related issues in China and in the U.S.-China relationship. She has recently published on the climate implications of green industrial policy, China’s just transition away from coal, opportunities for U.S.-China cooperation on renewable energy development finance, and the impact of artificial intelligence on climate change research.
Why is U.S. engagement with China on climate so important, particularly during this era of rising geopolitical tensions and increased competition?
I would say there's two main reasons. The first is that bilateral engagement between the United States and China is important for maintaining a sense of understanding from both sides of what's happening in each country in terms of climate advances.
I think one of the biggest challenges during the pandemic was that you didn't have a constant flow of information back and forth, and this led to misunderstanding in the climate space. Many of the topics discussed are very technical issues, where you need to have face-to-face exchanges that are happening on a consistent basis.
The second reason it's so important is because the United States and China play such an important role globally in any response to climate change. Together both countries are responsible for about 40% of global emissions, so you can't make serious progress towards reducing global emissions if both countries aren’t on board with ambitious climate action. And given their outsized role in the climate challenge, whenever the United States and China can agree to things in a bilateral sense, it has major reverberations multilaterally.
Of course, the relationship has competitive tensions, and competition is starting to focus in on some of the key clean energy technologies that are going to be pivotal for the low carbon transition. This makes climate change engagement more challenging than it used to be.
A lot of the cooperation I used to be involved in at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for example, was very focused on science and technology cooperation. However, it is very difficult to do that kind of work today with the broader concerns about technology-related information sharing and general technology competition. We also are in this world where countries really want to move away from being reliant on other countries for key energy resources and critical supply chain components. So whether it's importing oil and gas or it's importing solar panels from China, you have this push towards diversifying where these fuels or technologies are sourced from.
Can you speak more about this trend towards reshoring and green industrial policy in recent years? How do you assess the effectiveness of these policy approaches?
I think that this whole conversation about decoupling, derisking, and reshoring, particularly in the clean energy space, is really complicated, so we need to be a little more precise over what is in the U.S. interest and what our ultimate goal is here.
Is our goal to manufacture all the clean energy technologies we need for the low carbon transition locally, here in the United States? Or is our goal to become more innovative by strengthening our innovation ecosystem to be more globally competitive? Should we really be trying to compete with China where they are the most successful, or should we be thinking about our positioning to lead the development of the next generation of clean energy technologies?
When it comes to talking about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the United States, I think we need to be realistic about how manufacturing technology has evolved. When I visited battery factories in China, the one thing I did not see there was a lot of people working. I saw very high-tech robots making batteries, cars, and electric vehicles, not thousands of Chinese workers. These are heavily automated industries. As a result, it’s not realistic to think that bringing these high-tech technologies back to the United States is going to create a lot of new jobs, even though it’s convenient for politicians to promise this.
We also need to be strategic in our use of punitive trade measures. The United States put in place tariffs on solar panels starting about a decade ago, and they essentially just shifted which countries we get our solar panels from, as opposed to promoting U.S. solar manufacturing.
Diversifying supply chains makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons; obviously, being overly reliant on any one country for anything can create problems. But that doesn't mean doing it all ourselves is what makes the most sense. Involving multiple countries, particularly those emerging and developing countries that really want a part of the low carbon transition, will be important as well.
So I just think we need to be strategic about how we're using trade measures and green industrial policies that may end up slowing the low carbon transition. We need to be aware of the global repercussions and this trade-off between what we call national security (very broadly defined) and climate security, which I think can certainly be threatened by a slower low carbon technology transition.
Climate Dialogues at the Hilltop and Beyond
At Georgetown, Lewis has led several dialogues facilitating U.S.-China climate engagement, including the Clean Energy and Climate Research Group and the U.S.-China Research Group on Climate Change with the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue. She is also the director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA), where she oversees undergraduate and graduate degree programs and teaches classes on international climate policy and China’s energy and environment.
Drawing from over two decades of firsthand experience working in Track II and Track 1.5 dialogues, how would you define the importance of these groups in terms of what they can accomplish, and in what ways might they be productive in contrast to Track I dialogues?
Track I dialogue is important because it sets the tone for everything that happens at lower levels. But there's increasingly so much U.S.-China engagement in the climate space that happens beyond the Track I space, and in many ways that's where the deeper and more meaningful cooperation can happen right now. That includes subnational cooperation and the research collaborations that I and many others are involved in.
Track II dialogues are also really useful because they allow you to get to the tougher issues. One of the dialogues I participated in over the last year dealt with clean energy supply chain issues, which are not being directly discussed in the Track I space. Another Track II that I participated in focused on climate finance, which is another very complicated issue bilaterally between the United States and China, and that is an area where you can have much more frank and open discussions in the Track II space.
Something else I do with the support of the U.S.-China initiative is bring together, just within a U.S. context, people from inside and outside the government in Washington who work on China climate and energy issues. You constantly have new people moving into these roles in the U.S. government who have the responsibility to negotiate important U.S.-China agreements but don't necessarily have the extensive relationships or context, so they find it's very helpful to be part of these more informal conversations with people who work with Chinese interlocutors from a variety of perspectives.
If you're sitting within the [U.S.] Department of Energy, the [U.S.] State Department, or the [U.S.] Commerce Department, for example, you may be constrained in terms of who you can engage with in China and how, whereas people in think tanks, NGOs, and universities can engage in different ways. So I convene groups of people in these spaces to get together and share notes on what we're doing and how our work can benefit each other.
What are some of the topics you teach at Georgetown’s STIA program?
I direct the STIA program at Georgetown, which is really about training students in a lot of the science and technical issues that affect the global challenges of our time, such as climate change, but also nuclear security, water security, and health, among other issues. My own teaching is on international climate diplomacy, and I teach classes on energy and environment in China.
As part of my own research on the international climate negotiations, I've been bringing students to the Conference of the Parties (COP) climate negotiations annually since I came to Georgetown in 2009. I helped to get Georgetown accredited as an official observer to the United Nations, which allows us to send a delegation of students, faculty, and staff every year.
I went to my first COP as a graduate student myself, so I know how valuable it is to see how these processes work firsthand. I think it's the easiest way for students or any observers to understand it.