Environment & Climate Change

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.

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) doctoral student Daniel Velez Lopez is researching air pollution in Mexico and whether the country is willing to pay the costs to reduce it. HKS student Jennifer Kao is interviewing academics, investors, and government officials working to generate and commercialize clean energy innovations in the United Kingdom.

Panelists will discuss the "energy-efficiency gap"—that is, the apparent gap, suggested by research, between the rate at which energy-efficient technologies are actually adopted and the rate at which we expect them to be adopted, based on expected private financial returns to investment in these technologies. As energy efficiency is often put forward as an important approach to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, an understanding of the energy-efficiency gap is relevant to climate-change policy.

The international climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, have concluded, and despite the gloom-and-doom predictions that dominated the weeks and months leading up to Cancun, the Sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) must be judged a success.  It represents a set of modest steps forward.  Nothing more should be expected from this process.

"Without energy, there is no economy. Without climate, there is no environment. Without economy and environment, there is no material well-being, no civil society, no personal or national security. The overriding problem associated with these realities, of course, is that the world has long been getting most of the energy its economies need from fossil fuels whose emissions are imperiling the climate that its environment needs."

Managing the dangers of global climate change will require developing countries to participate in a global climate regime. So far, however, those nations have been nearly universal in their refusal to make commitments to reduce growth in their greenhouse gas emissions. This paper describes how a set of international "Climate Accession Deals" could encourage large policy shifts that are in developing countries' interests and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

John P. Holdren presented the John H. Chafee Memorial Lecture on Science and the Environment on January 17, 2008, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C. Holdren's lecture was presented during the 8th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment: Climate Change: Science and Solutions, organized by the National Council for Science and the Environment.

The Chafee Memorial Lecture is presented in memory of the late Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, who was a champion of bipartisan, scientific approaches for protecting the environment.

"...the oil-supply problem has become worse and energy security more complex."

This is the first handbook to provide a global policy perspective on energy, bringing together a diverse range of international energy issues in one volume.