Roel Hammerschlag

Roel Hammerschlag is the principal of Hammerschlag LLC, specializing in greenhouse gas management for large institutions and local governments. Special focuses of his work have included building inventory tools, marginal abatement cost curves, contribution analysis, carbon balances for bioenergy and waste management, life-cycle assessment of fuels, forecasting, and long-term scenario planning. 

From 2010 to 2013, Mr. Hammerschlag worked for the Washington State Department of Commerce’s Energy Office, leading development of the 2012 Washington State Energy Strategy. The final published plan recommended near-term actions and long-term strategies that, by legislative directive, balanced clean jobs growth, competitive energy prices, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. From 2007 to 2010, he was a Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, focusing on food-feed-fuel trade-offs induced by global regulations promoting bioenergy. Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) frameworks were leveraged to model changes in forest and agricultural products flows worldwide in response to the EU Renewable Energy Directive. 

In the early 2000s, Mr. Hammerschlag founded and directed the Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment. Quantitative LCAs at this “Consumer Reports of the environment” evaluated consumer choices like “paper or plastic?” or “cloth or disposable diapers?” During this time, Mr. Hammerschlag and research partner Patrick Mazza won a MacArthur Foundation Grant for Research & Writing to execute a critical analysis of the at-the-time viral “hydrogen economy.” 

Mr. Hammerschlag earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 and a Master of Public Administration at the University of Washington in 2007, supported by fellowships from the UW Program on Climate Change and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.