Energy

How have Appalachia’s coal-dependent communities adjusted to historical and contemporary declines in demand for coal, and how do these shocks – and their consequences for the educational composition of affected communities – influence the capacity for future generations to adapt to new challenges? In this policy brief, Eleanor Krause presents estimates of how Appalachia’s coal country has adjusted to recent declines in coal mining employment (“coal shocks”), and demonstrates how this adjustment process is, in part, dictated by the persistent consequences of historical employment shocks in Appalachia.

Green hydrogen is likely to play a pivotal role in a carbon-free future, as its adoption will enable the decarbonization of energy-intensive industrial processes whose emissions are hard to abate through simple electrification—such as steel and cement production. However, to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by its adoption at scale, countries will need to rethink the roles they could play in a new energy landscape and define strategic industrial policies accordingly.

The price cap on Russian oil implemented today by the G7 countries plus Australia represents a novel approach to sanctions. The policy is designed to reduce Russian fossil fuel revenues while keeping Russian oil on the market. In this brief, Catherine Wolfram, Simon Johnson, and Łukasz Rachel explain the basic economic principles at work and discuss some of the critiques of the price cap. 

Policymakers guiding their economies to a low-carbon, prosperous future must strike the right balance between technology-push and demand-pull. The rapid build-out of solar photovoltaics in recent years has revealed the benefits of generous demand-pull policies, but also their limits. In this policy brief, the authors show why combining robust demand-pull and technology-push policies results in more effective policy mixes that go beyond innovation and deployment to help competitive domestic industries create more and better jobs.

The authors explore an essential element in the portfolio of climate solutions required to rapidly achieve net zero emissions — flue gas carbon capture and storage, whereby carbon can be sifted from emission streams before it enters the atmosphere and safely sequestered in geologic storage systems.

Mobilising private finance is critical for closing the global sustainable infrastructure investment gap, particularly in lower-middle income countries. Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) – large state-owned investment funds – can play a critical role in incentivising and unlocking private national as well as international finance to enable low-carbon infrastructure investment that is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Recent events have highlighted how wars, pandemics, and even supply chain issues can quickly blunt existing efforts and policies to address climate change. The solution cannot lie in globalization, argue authors De Blasio and Zheng, but instead in a long-term systemic focus on clean technology innovation. The path ahead will require a collective understanding of how developing and deploying the needed clean technology innovation will affect value chains, markets, and geopolitics.

The attached document contains April 2022 updates to our database on U.S. government investments in energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) through the Department of Energy.

The transition from energy systems dominated by fossil fuels to ones based on renewable electricity and carbon-free molecules will significantly impact existing value chains and forge new pathways and transformation steps from production to consumption. This transition will bring not only substantial cost challenges but also promises to dramatically alter stakeholders’ interactions along value chains.

On March 17, 2022, Henry Lee testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission during the Hearing on China's Energy Plans and Practices. Read his full testimony here.