Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Joel Clement characterizes the growing greenhouse-gas emissions from the commercial shipping industry as well as the efforts of the United Nations body, the International Maritime Organization, to reduce these emissions as unacceptable.

If Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump in November, the question he will face is not whether to restore the liberal international order. It is whether the United States can work with an inner core of allies to promote democracy and human rights while cooperating with a broader set of states to manage the rules-based international institutions needed to face transnational threats.

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 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.

The authors explain why the Trump administration's reiteration of its intent to finalize U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a tragic mistake that will weaken us as a nation.

The authors recount the history of ARPA-E and describe how it has supported clean energy innovation in the United States. They argue that ARPA-E needs two things in the short term in order to increase its chances of success in the long term: resources and a leader who can channel the country's top science and engineering talent toward particularly tough technical challenges.