Environment & Climate Change

Senior Fellow of the Future of Diplomacy Project, David Ignatius examines the Navy’s energy diet that began seven years ago with an edict from newly appointed Secretary Ray Mabus, who issued five goals for radically changing how the Navy bought and consumed fuel.

Climate change is a global problem that will require global solutions. Harvard Kennedy School expects to be a part of the solution through the development of academically rigorous research and ideas, and by engaging policymakers, non-governmental actors, practitioners, scholars, and others from around the world.

The Global Energy Challenge provides a comprehensive overview of today’s three most topical energy challenges, or the “energy trilemma”: climate change, energy poverty and energy security. The book addresses the rise of energy geopolitics and the related concerns surrounding “energy weapons” and the “race for resources.”

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Dr. Abbas Al-Mejren, Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative and Professor of Economics at Kuwait University, discusses economic development plans in Kuwait and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, including poverty alleviation and rationalizing subsidies.

Daniel Poneman, former Deputy Secretary of Energy, has joined Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a senior fellow.

Poneman was nominated by President Obama to be Deputy Secretary of Energy on April 20, 2009, and was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 18, 2009. Under the leadership of Secretaries of Energy Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz, Poneman also served as Chief Operating Officer of the Department. Between April 23, 2013, and May 21, 2013, Poneman served as Acting Secretary of Energy.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), at the direction of President Barack Obama, released a landmark rule on June 2, 2014 that aims to reduce carbon emissions from the electric-power sector by 30 percent, nationwide, below 2005 levels by 2030. Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and Director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, was interviewed by HKS about the new rule.

"...[T]he reason I am more optimistic today is that just two years ago at the annual Conference of the Parties, this time in Durban, South Africa, a new approach was approved by the community of nations. And that is an approach which promises that by the year 2015 to come up with an international agreement that will include all countries in the same legal framework. That breaks from this Berlin mandate, which I think has been an anchor dragging against forward movement of the ship of progress. Now, with this new commitment from the community of nations to come up with an international agreement by 2015, for implementation by 2020, in which all countries will participate, there is for the first time in decades a real opportunity for meaningful progress."