News & Announcements

Dorothy Zinberg, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a founding member of the Belfer Center, was awarded the prestigious Harvard Signet Medal on Saturday, April 21.

This document contains March 2016 updates to our database on U.S. government investments in energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) through the Department of Energy. The database, in Microsoft Excel format, tracks DOE appropriations from FY 1978–2016 and the 2017 budget request and includes funding for ERD3 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It also includes several charts.

For journalism, the 21st century is an era where public trust drops yearly, and reporters face competition to reach a growing Internet audience. Adding these challenges to a beat as controversial and global as climate and energy policy creates a job that seems near impossible.

The New York Times’ Energy and Environment Correspondent Coral Davenport confronts these challenges head-on by covering environmental policy in a way that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of Washington-based reporting to the larger, all-encompassing impact of climate change issues on a human and dollars-and-sense scale.

Cambridge, MA – The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has named Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Director of the Center for the Environment at Harvard University, to lead its Science, Technology, and Public Policy program. STPP, one of Harvard's most collaborative and cross-disciplinary programs, is renowned world-wide for its cutting-edge research on technology innovation, nuclear non-proliferation and safety, climate science and policy, cybersecurity, and globalization and development.

On August 3, 2015, President Barack Obama and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy released the final version of the Clean Power Plan (CPP). The CPP's goal is to reduce emissions of CO2 in the United States by 32 percent in 2030, relative to 2005 emissions. See earlier analysis of the CPP by Harvard faculty members and other Harvard-Project affiliates here and here and reaction to the final version by faculty affiliated with the Harvard Law School Environmental Law Program.

During a candid conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School, prominent women leaders in the science and media industries recently talked about their efforts to remedy this. They ignited a fervent discussion and identified achievable goals that both professional women and their male and female bosses can work toward. The event, “Sexism, Science, and Science Writing: Promoting Women Leaders in the Lab and the Newsroom,” drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 women and men of all ages—from a female high school student to senior astrophysicists and science writers.

James Stock, a Faculty Fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program—the Harvard Project's parent program—organized a roundtable discussion that took place on January 4, 2015, at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Association, held this year in Boston, entitled "The Economics of the EPA's Proposed Regulation of CO2 Emissions from Power Plants." Professor Stock was a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors in 2013–2014, where he worked on the development of this important regulatory proposal. Harvard Environmental Economics Program (HEEP) and Harvard Project Director Robert Stavins participated in the roundtable panel.