Environment and Natural Resources

This brief examines the national challenges related to deploying and scaling infrastructure to transport CO₂ from capture sites to storage or utilization sites at a scale consistent with achieving net-zero by 2050.

Environmental policy experts discussed China’s energy policies during an event at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on April 10, 2023. The event featured Weila Gong, a Belfer Center postdoctoral research fellow, and Georgetown University professor Joanna I. Lewis, who discussed their joint research exploring China’s coal consumption, its pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, and the political and economic factors hindering the country’s transition away from coal.

 The Future of Coal Regions Study Group, co-sponsored by the Belfer Center's Environment and Natural Resources Program and the Wiener Center's Reimagining the Economy Project, will travel to coalfield regions in West Virginia on a trek led by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics Resident Fellow 2022 and former West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant.

If the world is serious about addressing climate change, we should welcome forward momentum on this critical technology. Getting on track for net zero emissions by 2050 will require swiftly and massively ramping up carbon capture deployment.

In an essay for Harvard Kennedy School Magazine, Henry Lee argues the policies China is pursuing to wean itself off reliance on fossil fuels may also benefit its quest for greater energy security.

We used the US-TIMES energy-system model in conjunction with integrated assessment models for air pollution (AP3, EASIUR, InMAP) to estimate the consequences of local air pollutant (LAP) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) policy on technology-choice, energy-system costs, emissions, and pollution damages in the United States. We report substantial policy spillover: Both LAP and CO₂ taxes cause similar levels of decarbonization. Under LAP taxes, decarbonization was a result of an increase in natural gas generation and a near-complete phaseout of coal generation in the electric sector. Under a CO₂ tax, the majority of simulated decarbonization was a result of increased electric generation from wind and solar. We also found that the timing of the CO₂ and LAP taxes was important. When we simulated a LAP tax beginning in 2015 and waited until 2025 to introduce a CO₂ tax, the electric sector was locked into higher levels of natural gas generation and cumulative 2010–2035 energy system CO₂ emissions were 8.8 billion tons higher than when the taxes were implemented simultaneously. A scenario taxing CO₂ and LAPs simultaneously beginning in 2015 produced the highest net benefits, as opposed to scenarios that target either CO₂ or LAPs, or scenarios that delayed either LAP or CO₂ taxes until 2025. Lastly, we found that net benefits compared to business as usual are higher under a regional versus a national LAP-tax regime, but that efficiency gains under the regional tax are not substantially higher than those under the national LAP-tax policy.

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is very likely to be a key technology for achieving the Biden administration's goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But absent regulation requiring its use, CCUS needs to become more economical in order for deployment in the United States to expand significantly.

How can China make good on its pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060? In Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China, a team of experts from China and the United States explains how China's near-term climate and energy policies can affect long-term decarbonization pathways beyond 2030, building the foundations for a smoother and less costly national energy transformation.

This study provides a whole-systems simulation on how to halve global CO2 emissions by 2050, compared to 2010, with an emphasis on technologies and costs, in order to avoid a dangerous increase in the global mean surface temperature by end the of this century.

China announced it would launch a national carbon market in 2017, yet this policy is taking years to come into effect. What will it take for a carbon market to work in command-and-control China? This policy brief explores an understudied challenge—emissions accounting—and identifies potential opportunities that have arisen in the first phase of China’s national carbon market.