Energy

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian recounts his 544 days in an Iranian prison during a talk with R. Nicholas Burns of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Last May, Chinese solar panel manufacturer LONGi signed an agreement with Saudi trading company El Seif Group to establish large-scale solar manufacturing infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. The deal came several months after the Trump administration's imposition of global tariffs on imports of Chinese solar panels and cells.

During the Trump administration, the usual ways of conducting diplomacy have been upended. Many positions in the State Department have never been filled, and meetings with foreign leaders such as Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin have been undertaken with little advance planning. What effect are these changes having now, and how will they affect ongoing relationships between the United States and its allies and adversaries?

Today, the Yemeni people are suffering from the actions of outsiders. Regional powers have turned the country into an arena for proxy conflicts that have little to do with the actual interests of the Yemeni nation. Large parts of the country have been devastated, including much of its vital infrastructure. Millions are threatened by starvation and disease. The fighting has left tens of thousands of others dead or wounded.

So much for American justice. In a statement both stunning and coldhearted, President Trump on Tuesday gave Saudi Arabia a pass on the grisly murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the name of U.S. national security. He blithely rejected a U.S. intelligence assessment as well as damning physical evidence provided by Turkey indicating that the kingdom’s de-facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, authorized the Saudi dissident’s execution, in Istanbul, on October 2nd. The President of the United States sounded more like a defense attorney—or lobbyist—for the oil-rich kingdom than a protector of American values.

Inside Washington, foreign-policy experts hoping for a reset swiftly downgraded their expectations. And as the Khashoggi affair has played out, disappointment has morphed to cynicism within the diplomatic community.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the latest research from leading scholars on the international political economy of energy and resources. Highlighting the important conceptual and empirical themes, the chapters study all levels of governance, from global to local, and explore the wide range of issues emerging in a changing political and economic environment.

This paper is a background review representing part of the initial phase of the Financing the Urban Transition work program. The review builds on a growing body of research that highlights both the importance of national sustainable infrastructure and the need to develop more effective and efficient financing mechanisms for delivering compact, connected cities that meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. While progress has been made in both these areas over the last five years, there remains a policy gap between the international/national level and the municipal level.