Rethinking Regulation co-director appointed to National Academy of Sciences committee

Lori Bennear, co-director of the Rethinking Regulation Program at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, has been appointed to a National Academy of Sciences committee tasked with reviewing the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Offshore Oil and Gas Operations Inspection Program.

The 13-member committee is comprised of a variety of scholars and experts who are charged with providing findings and recommendations to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement regarding its inspection program and goals over the next decade. In 2015, 16 percent of U.S. production of crude oil and 7 percent of natural gas withdrawals happened in federal offshore waters. The U.S. Geologic Survey estimates that 30 percent of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves lie in the Arctic ocean, a significant share of which could be accessible from offshore drilling in U.S. waters off the coast of Alaska.

“From an ethics standpoint, the work of this committee is critical to help improve regulations to balance the sometimes-conflicting values of energy security and energy independence, with environmental protection and worker safety,” Bennear said.

A leading voice in research and scholarship assessing effectiveness of environmental policies and regulation, Bennear was also recently named Duke’s inaugural Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy. Her primary appointment is associate professor of environmental economics and policy at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, with secondary faculty appointments at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and its Economics Department, along with serving as co-director of Rethinking Regulation.