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Biography 

Don Grant is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the Â鶹ӰԺ.  He also directs the university’s certificate programs in Social Innovation and Care, Health, and Resilience. Before joining CU in 2014, he taught for several years at the University of Arizona.  He has written on a variety of topics, ranging from racial income inequality, strike violence, and crime rates to religion, economic development, and environmental justice.  Currently, he is investigating the organizational and policy determinants of power plants’ carbon pollution and how frontline helping professionals uphold the dignity of suffering individuals within highly bureaucratic and scientific systems of public care.  Several of his articles have appeared in such leading journals as the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Social Forces, Energy Policy, and Nature Climate Change.  He is the lead author of Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions (Columbia University Press 2020), coauthored with Andrew Jorgenson and Wesley Longhofer.  And he is the author of Nursing the Spirit: Care, Modernity, and the Sanctity of Vulnerable Strangers, which is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Don’s past research on energy and environmental issues examined the effectiveness of U.S. states’ climate policies in reducing power plants’ carbon pollution. Currently, he is extending this research to investigate the effects of organizational characteristics, international trade, non-governmental organizations, inequality, entrepreneurial activity, and national energy regulations on the CO₂ emitted by individual power plants throughout the world.   

Contributions can be made to further Don’s research on mitigating the electricity sector’s carbon pollution by clicking . Select your desired contribution amount, and write into the comment box: Don Grant Power Plants’ Carbon Footprints Fund.