Reports & Papers

The New York City Council passed the Climate Mobilization Act in April of 2019, charting a path forward to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This report is designed to support the Department of Buildings as it seeks to appropriately value the avoided emissions from energy storage and encourage its deployment, helping to achieve the goals set forth in the Climate Mobilization Act and securing a renewable, reliable, and inexpensive energy future for New Yorkers.

There are potential roles for sub-national climate policies in addressing climate change. Theory and experience of nesting sub-national climate policies within a broader, national climate policy indicate that the interactions between the two levels of governance can be problematic, benign, or positive, depending upon the nature, design, and stringency of the policies. When the national system is a tradable performance standard, as with China’s national system, the consequences are similar to those with cap-and-trade, but more complex.

The U.S. Department of State does not advance and protect U.S. national interests to its full potential without a diverse, equitable, and inclusive ambassador corps. This report specifically focuses on policy recommendations for improving diversity, equity, and inclusion within the U.S. Department of State’s ambassador corps.

This brief focuses on how the cybersecurity landscape will be changed by quantum computing advances and is aimed at preparing the public and private sector for accompanying cybersecurity risks and opportunities.

The implications of the Schrems II decision have substantial short and long-term repercussions. This paper will seek to briefly explain the history of the Schrems cases, then outline the options available to decision makers seeking to enable transatlantic cooperation. The paper will also argue that short-term solutions such as the ones leveraged up till now will increasingly be unfeasible, and therefore present four proposals for consideration on how a revived data transfer ecosystem could be shaped through national and international tools and mechanisms.

Unfortunately, data localization policies are causing more harm than good. They are ineffective at improving security, do little to simplify the regulatory landscape, and are causing economic harms to the markets where they are imposed. In order to move away from these policies, the fear of sovereignty dilution must be addressed by alternative means. This will be achieved most effectively by focusing on both technical concerns and value concerns. 

China’s emissions trading system (ETS) for carbon dioxide (CO₂) will become operational in mid-2021. This paper describes the trading system’s history, design, rules governing implementation, and anticipated developments over the next decade. The ETS is expected to support China’s goals of reaching peak CO₂ emissions by 2030 and of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.

How can United States policymakers better understand the next generation of emerging technologies and their societal implications? How can we make more educated decisions on the basic and applied research needed to solve the next generation of emerging threats? 

The 117th Congress and the Biden Administration must urgently address these questions to protect the lives and livelihoods of those living in the United States.
 

This paper aims to articulate the absence of Indigenous people in Arctic climate change news coverage and to enumerate approaches for generating resonant, representative, and ethical stories in the white hot center of climate change.

The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”