The Buck Stops With, Who? Confronting Scope 3 Emissions Within Hard To-Abate Sectors

Representing around 75% of corporations’ global carbon footprint, Scope 3 emissions are the hardest to quantify yet arguably the most important. With the impending introduction of SEC disclosure regulations, are you prepared to identify and take action to mitigate the full scope of your emissions?

This Reuters whitepaper, “The buck stops with, who? Confronting Scope 3 emissions within hard-to-abate sectors”, dives into the challenge of measuring and confronting scope 3 emissions and identifies strategies to unlock the cost and climate benefits associated with reducing your impact.…

Energizing Innovation in Fiscal Year 2024

The Biden administration’s FY 2024 budget request (PBR) for the Department of Energy (DOE) calls for an 18 percent increase in investment in clean energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) over FY 2023-enacted levels. The 117th Congress passed three landmark bills—the Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—that are reshaping energy innovation in the United States. But despite boosts from these bills, the requested levels for many energy RD&D programs trend below the levels that the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Center on Global Energy …

Economic Implications of the Climate Provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) represents the largest federal response to climate change to date. We highlight the key climate provisions and assess the Act’s potential economic impacts. Substantially higher investments in clean energy and electric vehicles imply that fiscal costs may be larger than projected. However, even at the high end, IRA provisions remain cost-effective. IRA has large impacts on power sector investments and electricity prices, lowering retail electricity rates and resulting in negative prices in some wholesale markets. We find small quantitative macroeconomic effects including a small decline in headline inflation, but macroeconomic conditions–particularly higher interest rates and …

Greener Fleets: Meeting the Demand for Clean Transit

In 2021, America’s transportation sector emitted 38 percent of the nation’s total energy-related carbon emissions, the largest share of carbon emissions of any sector in the economy. Public transit’s contribution to transportation emissions are small compared to private auto emissions. However, almost all public transit is under public agency control, therefore transit’s emissions can be mitigated through policy. Congress has provided the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) with funding programs specifically to “make greater reductions in energy consumption and harmful emissions, including direct carbon emissions.”

This white paper discusses findings based on Transportation for America’s data analysis of all applications submitted …

Disclosure to Decarbonization: A Guide to Setting and Achieving Your Climate Goals

Today, sustainability plays an increasingly vital role in corporate strategy and operations, with expectations on sustainability leaders growing as climate risks become more material. As those expectations grow, many organizations are encountering challenges as they endeavor to turn their sustainability goals into concrete, impactful initiatives.

The process of developing smart strategies, getting buy-in from leadership and stakeholders, and mapping out decarbonization pathways can drive home the scale of changes – and investments – that will be required to achieve bold climate goals and overcome existing challenges. As a result, sustainability leaders must shift their approach from one built around data …

Preventing Electric Truck Gridlock

Even though heavy-duty trucks make up 4 percent of vehicles on the road in the United States, they are responsible for 20 percent of the transportation system’s pollution. Electrifying trucks nationwide can significantly reduce air pollution and improve health impacts, all while decreasing owners’ operating and maintenance costs.

A growing number of private and public decision makers are considering or are in the process of developing and implementing initiatives to strengthen local EV charging infrastructure so it can support the increasing number of electric trucks. But many, including utilities and fleet owners, are concerned that these efforts won’t be enough.…

Climate Policy and the Economy: Evidence from Europe’s Carbon Pricing Initiatives

This paper investigates the impact of carbon pricing on the economy, with a focus on European carbon taxes and the carbon market. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, while both policies have successfully reduced emissions, the economic costs of the European carbon market are larger than for national carbon taxes. Second, we explore four factors that explain this difference: fiscal policy and revenue recycling, pass-through and sectoral coverage, spillovers and leakage, and monetary policy. Our findings suggest that all four factors play a significant role. Third, we document substantial regional heterogeneity in the impacts of the carbon market, which …

On The Path to 100% Clean Electricity

Rapid decarbonization of the power sector is a critical strategy for meeting the nation’s climate goals of reducing economy-wide greenhouse gases by 50-52% below 2005 levels in 2030, on the way to net-zero economy-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by no later than 2050. Power-sector decarbonization is especially important because efficient electrification, when paired with clean electricity, can decarbonize large parts of the transportation, buildings, and industrial sectors. Recognizing the key role of the power sector in overall decarbonization and other key benefits, the United States has set a goal of 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.

The U.S. power sector …

There Will Be Blood: Decommissioning California’s Oilfields

The inherent cyclicality of the commodity markets overlapped with the intrinsic depletion of the aged resource base and accelerated the decline of the onshore industry. Since 2014, onshore oil production in California has decreased by 42%, and production from gas wells has dropped even further. More importantly, for the first time in decades, new drilling slowed, and the number of actively producing wells also declined even before increasing political pressure.

Several sources of funds for decommissioning do exist, but the total falls far short of the money required. Oil and gas companies have provided $106 million in financial assurance for …

Waiting Game: How the Interconnection Queue Threatens Renewable Development in PJM

For more than 20 years, U.S. policymakers have made steady progress toward a future in which renewable energy is supported by a reliable electric grid and widely available to consumers at a low cost. Favorable economics, demand from clean energy buyers, and public policies like state renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have been successful in driving renewable growth that has met and surpassed early expectations. In 2022 the Biden administration passed the seminal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most ambitious climate legislation in U.S. history. With renewables now cheaper than fossil fuels and new incentives through the IRA, renewable power is …