Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

Joel Clement writes that while climate change is a scientific matter, climate action is a political one, and, if done right, can usher in dramatic social, economic and ecological improvements.

Ian Masters and Joel Clement assess how much time has been lost by governments in facing the looming crisis of climate change, in particular here in the U.S. where the last four years were not only wasted, but were steps backwards from the urgent challenges made clear by yesterday's alarming IPCC report.

Joel Clement describes the influence of U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin over the Department of the Interior and advises that a forward-looking legislator in a fossil-fuel state would be wise to fight aggressively for financial commitments to make the people in their state part of the vanguard of the new clean energy economy, rather than set back the U.S. economy by fighting the inevitable energy transition itself.

John Holdren, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, expressed his optimism in the Biden Administration’s approach to climate policy in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

This paper aims to articulate the absence of Indigenous people in Arctic climate change news coverage and to enumerate approaches for generating resonant, representative, and ethical stories in the white hot center of climate change.

There is an urgent need to incorporate the latest science on carbon emissions from permafrost thaw and northern wildfires into international consideration of how much more aggressively societal emissions must be reduced to address the global climate crisis.

In the face of advancing impacts of climate change — fires, smoke, floods, droughts, storms, and heat— Lara Hansen and Joel Clement argue for changing the way the country does business in every facet of the economy, with an eye toward reducing risk, increasing resilience, and ensuring equity and justice.

Joel Clement describes the Leaders Summit on Climate, held on April 23, 2021, as making a strong point that the Biden administration is up to the challenge of combating climate change.

Joel Clement outlines how the Interior Department can become a forceful catalyst for a just transition to clean energy.