Articles

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

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.

"Government support in the form of so-called feed-in tariff policies (FITs), which combine long-term, fixed-price electricity purchase agreements and guaranteed grid-access, has attracted large private-sector investments in sustainable electricity generation in the industrialized world. In an effort to replicate these experiences globally, a number of international organizations, NGOs, banks and donor countries are proposing mechanisms to cover part of the cost of FITs in developing countries. This paper reviews these proposals for supported FITs and then uses a case study of Thailand's Alternative Energy Development Plan 2013–2021 to investigate the opportunities and challenges of supporting FITs at a global scale."

High upfront costs are a critical barrier for investments in clean infrastructure technologies in developing countries. This paper uses a case study of Thailand's electricity sector to create realistic estimates for the relative contributions of local and global technological learning to reducing these cost in the future and discusses implications of such learnings for international climate policy.

Policymakers have long focused on preventing nuclear weapons proliferation by controlling technology. Even developing countries, however, may now possess the technical ability to create nuclear weapons. The history of gas centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective. To reduce the demand for nuclear weapons, policymakers will have look toward the cultural, normative, and political organization of the world.

China's unprecedented change offers a unique opportunity for uncovering relationships between economic growth and environmental pressure. Here the authors show the trajectories of China's environmental pressure and reveal underlying socioeconomic drivers during 1992−2010. Mining and manufacturing industries are the main contributors to increasing environmental pressure from the producer perspective. Changes in urban household consumption, fixed capital formation, and exports are the main drivers from the consumer perspective....Environmental sustainability can only be achieved by timely technology innovation and changes of production structure and consumption pattern.

Africa is yet to adopt full scale technology-led development. Steve Mbogo spoke to the Director of the Belfer Center's Science, Technology, and Globalisation Project and professor at Harvard University Calestous Juma on the opportunities that await the continent as a late comer.

China's dependency on coal fuels the country's phenomenal economic growth but at a major cost to the country's air and water quality, ultimately threatening human health and the country's continued economic growth. The Chinese government's efforts to put China onto a cleaner, low carbon development path have been substantial; however China's pollution and greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. In an attempt to develop its own advanced coal generation technologies to improve the country's air quality and energy efficiency, the Chinese government is investing heavily in gasification and other technologies that can be employed in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) applications. This investment has turned China into a global laboratory for CCS pilot projects, attracting foreign governments, multilateral institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and business partners.

Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.