Science, Technology, and Public Policy

India aims to become a leading producer of green hydrogen by the next decade as part of its broader industrial and decarbonization strategies. This brief provides an overview of India's current hydrogen strategy, as well as the challenges - land and water scarcity, infrastructure gaps, and financing gaps - that must be addressed in order for India to achieve its ambitious goals.

Low-carbon energy technology (LCET) startups could play a key role in accelerating India’s decarbonization. Yet, understanding of the LCET startup landscape and what shapes it remains low. This paper provides an analysis of the Indian LCET startup landscape to fill this gap.

How can electricity sector policymakers in developing countries ensure financial viability of utilities while also extending electricity access and minimizing the environmental impact of electricity supply? This study uses a mixed-method approach to analyze synergies and trade-offs between policies for financial reform of utilities, extending electricity access, and solar PV deployment in the case of Uttar Pradesh in India.

The capacity to manage technological change is an important prerequisite for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and green growth. This paper explores how capacity might be built in developing countries in the context of climate and sustainable development challenges through an in-depth qualitative case study on energy efficiency in India.

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

Over the last two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of financial sanctions as an instrument of US foreign policy to address security threats ranging from weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation and terrorism to human rights violations and transnational crime. Washington’s policymakers have prized these tools for their ability to rapidly apply pressure against foreign targets with few perceived repercussions against American business interests. The problem, however, is that Washington is ignoring a growing tension between financial sanctions designed to support economic statecraft (with non-financial goals) and those designed to protect the international financial system. Confusing the two sends mixed signals to adversaries as well as allies and undermines US credibility and commitment to upholding international banking rules and norms. If Washington cannot reconcile these competing processes, it is unlikely that future administrations will enjoy the same foreign policy levers, leaving the United States at a significant disadvantage.

Although Trump did not outline his legal basis for imposing the tariffs, several analysts anticipated that he was seeking to use the authorities granted him under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—the legal basis that presidents rely on to impose financial and economic sanctions against WMD proliferators, terrorist organizations, narco-traffickers, and human rights abusers. Mixing trade and immigration policy under the guise of a national security threat, however, may end up deflating Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaigns against Iran and North Korea.