Environment & Climate Change

Climate change is threatening the network of winter ice roads that connect Canada's remote Northern communities. Airships could provide a sustainable transportation alternative.

The Biden Administration and automotive industry have announced ambitious targets for the number of electric vehicles they hope to deploy by 2030, but automakers are not yet on track to meet those targets, according to new analysis by researchers at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. 

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.

Economic historian Emma Rothschild, the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard, lauded the efforts of young scholars to discover local solutions to mitigate the impacts of global climate change in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

Stephen Walt advises that in order to prepare students of public policy schools for a rapidly changing world, faculty should teach historical cases where the prevailing theories led to bad policy choices, and where new ones had to be devised to address a novel set of circumstances. 

Antonio Perry MPP 2024 and Monserrat Ocana MPP 2024 had the opportunity to intern with Iceland’s National Energy Authority (NEA) and contribute to the country’s ambitious climate journey. 

Joseph S. Nye argues that history shows that globalization is largely driven by technological changes that reduce the importance of distance, and that will not change.

While the Paris Agreement provides the framework for the nations of the world to slow the growth of CO2 emissions, additional policy and technological tools will have to be deployed to meet the challenge of climate change. That’s the perspective expressed by Daniel Bodansky, the Regents’ Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, during the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

In an interview with The Harvard Gazette, Henry Lee welcomes California's aggressive move toward electric vehicles, but sees one ‘huge mistake’ policymakers need to avoid and a surefire way to anger drivers.
 

Surging demand and dizzying price hikes have raised concerns that inadequate metal and mineral supplies may impede the clean energy transition. Given the urgency of reducing fossil fuel use, the science and policy worlds must solve two main challenges: how to ensure the availability and affordability of critical metals in the quantities needed, and how to manage the environmental impacts related to mining and processing them. The latter issue is likely to be much trickier than the former, argue Henry Lee and Xin Sun.