Environment & Climate Change

Low-income consumers are "feeling the heat" of growing energy prices, and reducing their use of potentially life-saving air conditioning technology at a time when global temperatures are rising.

The behavior of EV users themselves could play a role in modulating electricity demand and providing needed flexibility in electric grids, said Christine Gschwendtner, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, during an Energy Policy Seminar.

Robert Stavins analyzes the challenges for the Biden administration in producing a quantitative statement of how and by how much U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced over time in a new Nationally Determined Contribution.

Daniel Schrag argues that in order to reestablish the United States as a serious partner in addressing global climate change, the president must make good on the original standards of the Paris Agreement.

In order to fully appreciate the global climate-change challenge that the Biden administration will face, Robert Stavins reflects on the history of international negotiations that brought us to this point.

Joseph Aldy advocates for a carbon-price benchmark — which could be set initially at $50 per ton and rise over time — that would reflect the benefits of reducing the pollution causing climate change.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns speaks about the "devastating portrait" of President Trump's leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Joseph Nye writes that the world is increasingly obsessed with the ongoing power struggle between the United States and China. But the technology-driven shift of power away from states to transnational actors and global forces brings a new and unfamiliar complexity to global affairs.

Arctic Innovator Jenna Stark recommends closing the crisis-related collaboration gap in the polar region. Greater communication between emergency response specialists is needed both for the Arctic to weather the current coronavirus crisis and also to prepare for and mitigate future disasters, such as assuring food security for remote communities in the event of a wildlife disease outbreak.

The authors argue that more determined efforts to globalize renewable energy transmission can confer significantly higher economic and environmental benefits from renewables on billions of people. This can be done by exploiting spatial differences between electricity loads and net renewable generation across time zones (temporal arbitrage) and latitude (seasonal arbitrage). Using very long distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure, temporal and spatial arbitrage can move low-cost clean electricity from areas with excess capacity to high demand zones in other countries and even continents.