Science & Technology

In the face of advancing impacts of climate change — fires, smoke, floods, droughts, storms, and heat— Lara Hansen and Joel Clement argue for changing the way the country does business in every facet of the economy, with an eye toward reducing risk, increasing resilience, and ensuring equity and justice.

President Joe Biden started signing executive orders and announcing new hires after his inauguration. Joel Clement, a former senior executive and whistleblower at the Interior Department, elaborates on what this would mean for his former agency.

 The Gazette spoke with John Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of environmental science and policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, about what the incoming Biden-Harris administration reinstalling science as a foundation for government policy means.

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.

Joel Clement, a Mainer by birth, offers some words of advice before Donald Trump's proposed visit to Guilford, located in Maine's 2nd Congressional District, on June 5, 2020: Don't get played by out-of-state money that is pouring into Maine to politicize mask wearing and organize protests.

Joel Clement describes the long, tough road for scientists during the Trump administration—particularly those at the Department of the Interior. 

Shaughnessy and Joel Clement, Senior Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists and former Director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Interior, talk about blowing the whistle on former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for his efforts to purge the agency of government scientists working to address climate change in the Trump Administration.

In this edition of "The Interview," Fair Observer talks to Professor John Holdren, former science adviser to President Barack Obama and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2009 to 2017 about the impacts of global warming on the United States and the government's strategies to combat climate change.