Media gallery

Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Residence

Jeffrey Ball
March 26 – 29, 2018

Public Address: “Sharp Fights and Hard Lessons in the Global Race for Cleaner Energy
Shaw Hall, Younts Conference Center, Furman University
7 pm, Wednesday, March 28, 2018

As part of Furman’s yearlong exploration of climate change, we welcomed Jeffrey Ball, our 2018 Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. Jeff spent three full days on campus, visiting classes, conducting a writing workshop, and talking with students and faculty in small groups.

Recap of Jeffrey Ball’s three days on campus

About Jeffrey Ball

Jeffrey Ball is an award-winning writer whose work focuses on energy and the environment. He is the scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and a lecturer at Stanford Law School.

His stories and essays have appeared in The AtlanticFortune, the New RepublicForeign AffairsThe Wall Street JournalThe New York Times, and Slate, among other publications. Ball came to Stanford in 2011 from The Wall Street Journal, where he was the paper’s environment editor and spent more than a decade writing about energy and the environment as a reporter and a columnist. In his approximately 15 years at The Journal, he was based in the paper’s Atlanta, Detroit, and Dallas bureaus, and he traveled widely. He has reported from five continents and more than 15 countries.

Ball speaks, and moderates discussions, about energy and environmental issues at gatherings in the United States and around the world. He is a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate. He contributes commentary about energy issues on WSJ.com as a member of “The Experts,” a Wall Street Journal panel. He has appeared at conferences including ECO:nomics, The Journal’s annual forum on energy and the environment, which he helped create and which continued for nearly a decade, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. And he visits colleges to teach and speak as a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. He has been interviewed on PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and CCTV, among other networks.

At the Stanford Center, a joint initiative of the university’s law and business schools, Ball heads a project exploring the globalization of clean energy. It examines how China and the United States might deploy cleaner energy more efficiently if each played to its economic strengths. Ball was the primary author of the Stanford report based on that research, The New Solar System, and of a New York Times op-ed on the report, both published in March 2017. The New Solar System lays out a strategy to boost solar energy to a level that would contribute meaningfully to global carbon reductions. The New Solar System, which has drawn widespread media coverage, illuminates little-understood changes in the Chinese solar industry, the world’s largest, and analyzes the implications for the rise of affordable solar power in the United States and the world. It argues that the United States needs to restructure its solar policies to make them more economically efficient – including adopting a more-nuanced approach to China.