Energy

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Sarah Ladislaw, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Climate and Energy of the U.S. National Security Council, for an Energy Policy Seminar on the U.S. approach to energy and climate issues in its foreign policy.

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Jahi Wise, Senior Adviser to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to discuss the design and implementation of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a historic investment in American clean energy technology finance.

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, for an Energy Policy Seminar to discuss recent U.S. progress on addressing climate change and the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act.

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin seemingly dashed Democrats’ hopes for congressional action to slow climate change. Sen. Bernie Sanders accused Manchin of “sabotag[ing] the president’s agenda”; Rep. John Yarmuth, when asked about the consequences of Congress not acting on climate change, said, “We’re all going to die”; and climate activists, as well as some Democrats in Congress, wondered if Manchin should be removed as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The newly elevated "Major Questions Doctrine" of the Supreme Court's conservative majority puts a vast array of environmental and business regulations at risk, writes John Holdren.

Faced with an accelerating climate crisis, mounting political frustrations, and a congressional stalemate, Joel Clement writes that the White House must take the lead on climate action by curtailing fossil fuel extraction on public lands and providing economic protection to the communities that will be most impacted by the coming energy transition.

It's become something of a blood-sport to attack the Biden administration for not aggressively tackling the climate crisis. But a recent executive order calling for the federal government to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 shows that the federal government is still determined to drive the clean energy transition, with or without the Senate's support.

After Maine voters rejected the Central Maine Power corridor, Joel Clement and Pete Didisheim make the case that public involvement, fair compensation, and wise site selection are critical to the success of clean energy projects.

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.