Articles

At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from different vantage points, writes Steven E. Miller.

While research suggests that democracy offers an answer to the climate crisis, evidence of the effect of regime type on greenhouse gas emissions is mixed and yields inconclusive findings. This article investigates the effect of regime type on carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emissions and presents new evidence showing that when it comes to climate change mitigation, democracies are no greener than autocracies.

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.

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.

As diplomats, activists, and researchers converged on Vienna in June for the first meeting of states-parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), recent tragic world events highlighted how critical it was to convene this multilateral forum on nuclear disarmament.

Since February, Russia’s war against Ukraine has epitomized the grave dangers of a world where nine states possess approximately 12,700 nuclear weapons.¹ That Russia could invade a sovereign state and indiscriminately target its civilian population, while using nuclear threats to deter NATO from intervening, has stunned the world. It offers a stark reminder that possessing nuclear arms can enable abhorrent violations of international law

New forms of international cooperation and technology competition with China are the main drivers of public investment in energy innovation, though it remains insufficient to help meet climate goals.

As latecomers to the industrialization process, developing countries may face barriers to upgrading from the production of mass-produced goods to higher-value technologies. Using a comparative qualitative case study focusing on three renewable energy technologies, this paper develops a typology of catching-up opportunities in green energy industries and finds that policymakers should target certain technologies in their industrial strategies based on certain technology characteristics, and should seek opportunities to capitalize on a local niche that creates a need for innovation.

John Holdren spoke to The Harvard Gazette about the proposed Inflation Reduction Act legislation and its potential impact, should it survive House scrutiny and be signed by President Biden.

On April 11, 2022, The New York Times covered the launch of the new Permafrost Pathways project, a collaboration between the Belfer Center's Arctic Initiative, Woodwell Climate Research Center, and the Alaskan Institute for Justice. The six-year effort by climate scientists and policy experts aims to fill gaps in knowledge about planet-warming emissions and help affected communities in Alaska.

Robert Stavins closely examines the advantages and disadvantages of two distinct pricing instruments for reducing carbon emissions—carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. Both policy instruments are in common use today in many countries although not in the United States. Stavins looks at the practical challenges, financial implications, and political feasibility of both approaches, concluding that while they are equivalent in many ways, they can perform quite differently along other dimensions, making an apples-to-apples comparison quite difficult.