Richard Vietor
Richard H.K. Vietor
- Paul Whiton Cherington Professor of Business Administration
- Senior Associate Dean for the Asian Initiative
- Harvard Business School
“Carbon is one of the most important issues facing the world today, and as future business leaders, HBS students need to understand it. Despite the tremendous potential that low-carbon energy sources have for U.S. companies and the nation, American policymakers are not taking action, while China is moving ahead rapidly. U.S. entrepreneurial companies face barriers that have to do with price, not with innovative technology. These are the realities with which our MBA graduates will need to engage.”
For more than four decades, Professor Richard Vietor has been studying energy and the political process and the interactions of government and energy companies. He began his scholarly career in the context of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments and the first Earth Day and had just published his first book as carbon was becoming recognized as an environmental problem.
Vietor's commitment to educating students about energy, particularly renewable and low-carbon sources, is so great that he has written many cases for courses that he himself does not teach. The subjects include wind power (Cape Wind, Supergrid, Suzlon), solar power (Suntech), carbon capture (American Electric Power, indigenous innovation in China), and lithium ion batteries (A123 Systems).