Environment and Natural Resources

The behavior of EV users themselves could play a role in modulating electricity demand and providing needed flexibility in electric grids, said Christine Gschwendtner, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, during an Energy Policy Seminar.

Antonio Perry MPP 2024 and Monserrat Ocana MPP 2024 had the opportunity to intern with Iceland’s National Energy Authority (NEA) and contribute to the country’s ambitious climate journey. 

As a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, Lydia Zemke has spent the last two years studying climate finance in developing countries. As she rounds out her time at the Belfer Center, Zemke she reflects on her research interests, her experience conducting fieldwork in Kenya and Costa Rica, and her advice for other early-career researchers. 

Legal scholar Andrey Todorov, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Arctic Initiative, reflects on the recent agreement reached by United Nations delegates to protect biodiversity in international waters and its implications for the Arctic. 

Arctic Initiative Research Fellow Andrey Todorov analyzes options to integrate the ecosystem-based approach (EBA) with Arctic Ocean governance.

As climate change and economic activity in the region accelerate in the Bering Strait region, the United States and Russia have a common interest in mitigating these shared environmental risks. A November workshop hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative, the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) brought together seventeen experts to explore potential actions that the United States and Russia could pursue, jointly or independently, to protect the Bering Strait’s sensitive marine ecosystem and coastal communities. 

In an interview with The Harvard Gazette, Henry Lee welcomes California's aggressive move toward electric vehicles, but sees one ‘huge mistake’ policymakers need to avoid and a surefire way to anger drivers.
 

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.

Surging demand and dizzying price hikes have raised concerns that inadequate metal and mineral supplies may impede the clean energy transition. Given the urgency of reducing fossil fuel use, the science and policy worlds must solve two main challenges: how to ensure the availability and affordability of critical metals in the quantities needed, and how to manage the environmental impacts related to mining and processing them. The latter issue is likely to be much trickier than the former, argue Henry Lee and Xin Sun.

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.