Environment and Natural Resources

The attached document contains July 2020 updates to our database on U.S. government investments in energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) through the Department of Energy.

The authors argue that more determined efforts to globalize renewable energy transmission can confer significantly higher economic and environmental benefits from renewables on billions of people. This can be done by exploiting spatial differences between electricity loads and net renewable generation across time zones (temporal arbitrage) and latitude (seasonal arbitrage). Using very long distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure, temporal and spatial arbitrage can move low-cost clean electricity from areas with excess capacity to high demand zones in other countries and even continents.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important cooperative framework that increasingly affects the global economy, trade, and emission patterns. However, most existing studies pay insufficient attention to consumption-based emissions, embodied emissions, and non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs). This study constructs a GHG emissions database to study the trends and variations in production-based, consumption-based, and embodied emissions associated with BRI countries

This policy brief describes the persistent challenge of poor electricity reliability in India and how it interacts with key regulatory policies, analyzes Delhi’s experience with outage compensation since 2017, and highlights areas for additional economic and policy research on this topic.

Joel Clement, a Mainer by birth, offers some words of advice before Donald Trump's proposed visit to Guilford, located in Maine's 2nd Congressional District, on June 5, 2020: Don't get played by out-of-state money that is pouring into Maine to politicize mask wearing and organize protests.

The peer-reviewed update of ENRP's ongoing research on renewable hydrogen is featured in the June volume of Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, an academic journal of which Dr. Nicola de Blasio is now also an editor.

Cristine Russell details how the seasonal scientific field work in the Arctic — from the Toolik Field Station on Alaska's North Slope to ice core drilling in Greenland — is being postponed or cancelled this year because of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the course of two days, the Greenland Policy Challenge teamed up students from the University Greenland with students from Harvard over Zoom to co-develop recommendations for Greenland's policy strategies in the fields of climate change, education and cultural preservation, foreign affairs and economics and trade. Student groups were paired with expert local Greenlandic mentors who offered guidance along the way.

The COVID-19 recovery response from the UK government should include increased and well-targeted R&D investments to foster the energy transition and a more sustainable economy.

Temperatures across the Arctic are increasing two to four times faster than the global average. The dramatic consequences that are already apparent include reduction of sea-ice cover, accelerating loss of land ice from glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet, proliferating wildfires, and—the topic of this panel—ongoing heating and thawing of the permafrost that underlies most of the land area of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions across the globe