Articles

22 Items

Students at left watch as student activists take positions in the Cathedral of Learning

AP/Keith Srakocic

Journal Article - Environmental Politics

Fossil Fuel Divestment and Public Climate Change Policy Preferences: An Experimental Test in Three Countries

| 2023

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach

AP/Mark Thiessen, File

Journal Article - Science Advances

The Polar Regions in a 2°C Warmer World

    Authors:
  • Eric Post
  • Richard B. Alley
  • Torben R. Christiansen
  • Marc Macias-Fauria
  • Bruce C. Forbes
  • Michael N. Gooseff
  • Amy Iler
  • Jeffrey T. Kerby
  • Kristin L. Laidre
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Johan Olofsson
  • Julienne C. Stroeve
  • Ross A. Virginia
  • Muyin Wang
| Dec. 04, 2019

Over the past decade, the Arctic has warmed by 0.75°C, far outpacing the global average, while Antarctic temperatures have remained comparatively stable. As Earth approaches 2°C warming, the Arctic and Antarctic may reach 4°C and 2°C mean annual warming, and 7°C and 3°C winter warming, respectively. Expected consequences of increased Arctic warming include ongoing loss of land and sea ice, threats to wildlife and traditional human livelihoods, increased methane emissions, and extreme weather at lower latitudes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his annual news conference in Moscow

AP/Alexander Zemlianichenko

Journal Article - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

How the Next Nuclear Arms Race Will Be Different from the Last One

| 2019

All the world's nuclear-armed states (except for North Korea) have begun modernizing and upgrading their arsenals, leading many observers to predict that the world is entering a new nuclear arms race. While that outcome is not yet inevitable, it is likely, and if it happens, the new nuclear arms race will be different and more dangerous than the one we remember. More nuclear-armed countries in total, and three competing great powers rather than two, will make the competition more complex. Meanwhile, new non-nuclear weapon technologies — such as ballistic missile defense, anti-satellite weapons, and precision-strike missile technology — will make nuclear deterrence relationships that were once somewhat stable less so.

Magazine Article - The Economist

Seeds of Change: Calestous Juma died on December 15th

| Jan. 11, 2018

Colleagues said he tweeted more than any professor they knew, and Calestous Juma’s tweets covered a swarm of things. Income inequality, and a free-trade area for Africa, you might expect. Those were the subjects he taught at Harvard: getting poorer countries, especially in Africa, to grow and thrive was the obsession of his life. But he also tweeted about a wheelchair that could climb stairs, the increasing size of steaks, and the maximum number of goats seen eating up in a tree. He was extra-delighted to send out a New York Times editorial, from 1878, about Thomas Edison’s new “aerophone”: “Something ought to be done about Mr Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope.”

Calestous Juma

Martha Stewart/HKS

Newspaper Article - The Boston Globe

Calestous Juma, 64, Champion of Sustainable International Development

    Author:
  • Bryan Marquard
| Dec. 22, 2017

A professor of the practice of international development, and a writer of great range, Calestous Juma promoted technology for the poor and vulnerable throughout the world. He also wrote a book explaining why people are wary of innovation, and delighted his more than 100,000 Twitter followers by retweeting cartoons that ribbed those who are resistant to science.

A rural stove using biomass cakes, fuelwood and trash as cooking fuel... It is a major source of air pollution in India, and produces smoke and numerous indoor air pollutants at concentrations 5 times higher than coal.

Wikipedia

Journal Article - Nature Energy

Energy decisions reframed as justice and ethical concerns

| 6 May 2016

Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns.

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Magazine Article - H-Diplo/ISSF

Roundtable on Bargaining on Nuclear Tests: Washington And Its Cold War Rivals by Or Rabinowitz

| November 16, 2015

"In Bargaining on Nuclear Tests the historian Or Rabinowitz demonstrates the rare ability to engage with contemporary policy debates on nuclear proliferation and U.S. nonproliferation strategies on the one hand, and successfully utilize qualitative analytical frameworks in social science like prospect theory (19) on the other."