Paulina Jaramillo
Professor Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh PA
Paulina Jaramillo is currently involved in research to understand the social, economic and environmental implications of energy consumption.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
National Academy of Sciences rebuffs Trump EPA’s effort to undo regulations fighting climate change
AP News online
2025-09-17
The National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed that climate change poses undeniable risks to public health, countering the Trump administration's efforts to revoke the 2009 endangerment finding. Paulina Jaramillo (College of Engineering) underscored the Academy’s credibility, contrasting its rigorous process with a DOE report authored by climate skeptics.
Switch to EVs could save state and local governments up to $360 million, study says
StateImpact online
2023-07-28
Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and wasn’t involved in the report, said the strategy of transitioning government fleets to EVs is reasonable. However, she pointed out the cost-savings could be reduced where more infrastructure for these vehicles is needed to be built.
Why the carbon capture subsidies in the climate bill are good news for emissions
MIT Technology Review online
2022-08-25
Finally, the subsidies should spur the development of carbon dioxide pipelines and storage facilities that will be necessary to move and reliably sequester growing volumes of carbon dioxide in the coming decades, says Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
Why hasn’t Henry Ford’s ideal power grid become a reality?
Popular Science online
2022-07-27
“What Ford described,” notes Paulina Jaramillo, codirector of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, “became the suburbs we developed in the middle of the last century, except the suburbs developed close to cities, not farms, and have massive negative externalities.” This is otherwise known as the sprawl–paving and building over open spaces like forests and fields, and driving up carbon emissions with more road transportation.
Hope Dims that the U.S. Can Meet 2030 Climate Goals
Scientific American online
2022-07-08
EPA’s tools are better suited to regulating emissions from coal plants than gas plants, said Paulina Jaramillo, a professor who studies the power industry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Hydrogen may be a climate solution. There's debate over how clean it will truly be
NPR online
2022-05-27
"I think hydrogen is crucial," says Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a co-author of a recent U.N. report on climate change. She says hydrogen can be a clean alternative for industries such as steel mills, fertilizer plants or shipping.
Media
Social
Industry Expertise
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
Ph.D.
Civil and Environmental Engineering
2007
Carnegie Mellon University
M.S.
Civil and Environmental Engineering
2004
Florida International University
B.S.
Civil and Environmental Engineering
2003
Articles
Potential hydropower contribution to mitigate climate risk and build resilience in Africa
Nature Climate Change2022
Hydropower will play an essential role in meeting the growing energy needs in Africa but will be affected by climate change. We assess future annual usable capacity and variability of supply for 87 existing hydropower plants in Africa on the basis of a multimodel ensemble of 21 global climate models and two emissions scenarios (representative concentration pathways RCP 4.5 and 8.5). We estimate near-future, mid-century and end-of-the-century impacts and assess the potential for connections within and across power pools to reduce changes in usable capacity and variability.
Estimating global demand for land-based transportation services using the shared socioeconomic pathways scenario framework
Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability2022
The global demand for transportation is growing owing to accelerated socioeconomic development worldwide. If the current modes of transportation, consisting mostly of personal internal combustion engine vehicles, dominate this growth, greenhouse gas emissions will rise and worsen the climate crisis. A key empirical challenge in understanding the barriers and opportunities for low-carbon transportation systems in developing countries is the lack of demand data. Because existing country-specific transport demand models focus on countries with robust historical datasets, it has been difficult to estimate the service demand for developing countries.
Corrigendum: Estimating global demand for land-based transportation services using the shared socioeconomic pathways scenario framework
Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability2022
Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author (s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Policy spillovers, technological lock-in, and efficiency gains from regional pollution taxes in the US
Energy and Climate Change2022
We used the US-TIMES energy-system model in conjunction with integrated assessment models for air pollution (AP3, EASIUR, InMAP) to estimate the consequences of local air pollutant (LAP) and carbon dioxide (CO2) policy on technology-choice, energy-system costs, emissions, and pollution damages in the United States. We report substantial policy spillover: Both LAP and CO2 taxes cause similar levels of decarbonization. Under LAP taxes, decarbonization was a result of an increase in natural gas generation and a near-complete phaseout of coal generation in the electric sector.
Macro energy systems modeling for the least developed and developing countries—a call for action
Environmental Research Letters2022
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, improvements in energy conversion and use have transformed the world. Unfortunately, expanded energy use, and the economic growth it enabled after the Industrial Revolution, have not benefited everyone equally. Similarly, the contribution of different countries to greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore, climate change, has differed among regions worldwide. Unsurprisingly, countries with lower energy consumption have had lower annual and cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases since the 19th century than those with high energy consumption.
