Principles and Actions for More Effective Transportation Policy

Affordable, reliable transportation is the backbone of American prosperity, touching everything from family budgets to national competitiveness. This white paper explains how a modernized, innovation‑friendly policy framework can both strengthen supply chains and accelerate environmental progress. Drawing on the sector’s track record of dramatic pollution cuts—cars and trucks are now 99 percent cleaner than they were in 1970—the authors argue that market‑driven advances such as AI‑optimized logistics, cleaner fuels, and autonomous technologies can further decouple growth from emissions while keeping costs in check. ​

The authors set out a clear, technology‑neutral path for lawmakers: streamline outdated regulations, empower private capital …

The Transition Finance Nexus

Transition finance has rapidly emerged as a key concept for banks seeking to reach their net-zero targets and support real-economy decarbonization. This has relied on and contributed to a growing ecosystem of transition-related processes and approaches. In this primer, RMI introduces the “transition finance nexus” as a new way of conceptualizing the connections among transition pathways, transition plans and planning, transition assessment, and transition finance.

While transition finance guidance often refers to these different elements, little attention has been paid to the interconnections between them. Here the authors address this gap and add nuance to the transition narratives in the …

Clean Investment Monitor: The State of US Clean Energy Supply Chains in 2025

Since the US enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), manufacturing has emerged as the fastest-growing segment of investment in clean energy technologies. Quarterly investment in clean manufacturing more than tripled—from $2.5 billion in Q3 2022 to $14.0 billion in Q1 2025—primarily driven by the electric vehicle supply chain. Companies have announced 380 clean technology manufacturing facilities since the bill was signed into law on August 16, 2022, nearly half of which were operational as of March 31, 2025.

This rapid buildout reflects an intensifying global competition to onshore clean technology supply chains and boost domestic manufacturing. The Section 45X Advanced …

Preventing Public Participation

As explained in Part I, agencies cannot use good cause broadly to rescind regulations that they now purport to be unlawful, without first going through notice-and-comment rulemaking. Simply because an agency believes a prior rule is improper does not mean there is not extensive value in public comments, as comments may shed light on relevant legal issues, highlight important factual issues or reliance interests that the agency must consider, or propose alternatives short of full repeal that the agency must assess. This is confirmed by judicial caselaw, which interprets the good cause exception narrowly and finds it does not apply …

Marginal Wells 101: What Are They, Where Are They, and Why Do We Need to Assess Them?

Over half a million oil and gas wells in the United States produced 15 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) or less daily in 2023 (according to RMI analysis using Enverus and Rextag). These low-producing wells, called marginal wells, comprise three-quarters of all US oil- and gas-producing wells. At most, these wells extract less than 630 gallons a day — enough to fill just eight bathtubs. But most of these wells produce far less than that. Almost half of marginal wells are submarginal wells or “micro producers” that produce one BOE or less per day — not enough to fill one …

Realistic Roles for Hydrogen in the Future Energy Transition

Hydrogen has been promoted as a revolutionary fuel for 50 years, yet usage is confined to oil refining and fertilizer production. For hydrogen to advance global decarbonization, many barriers must be overcome. In this perspective, the authors examine the challenges hydrogen faces from production to usage, assessing its environmental and economic credentials, controversies and uncertainties. The authors provide the evidence base for companies and governments to assess clean hydrogen’s current and potential future competitiveness. Fuel cell cars and space heating are among the least promising applications owing to rapid advances in direct electric alternatives. Hydrogen holds potential in industry, long-duration …

Building with Biomass: A New American Harvest

What if we could effectively store millions of tons of carbon in a way that helps solve America’s housing crisis, creates jobs, and boosts manufacturing — all at once? This report sheds new light on a powerful and cross-cutting solution: manufacturing building products from upcycled biomass that’s already abundant across the United States.

RMI’s analysis investigates into the multiple benefits of converting the 400 million tons of underutilized biomass from farms, forests, and landfills into valuable building materials. RMI determined the scale of positive impacts by analyzing the life cycle of bio-based versus conventional building products in US home construction, …

VP3 Progress Report: From Awareness to Action

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are aggregations of distributed energy resources such as smart thermostats, batteries, and electric vehicles (EVs) that can be orchestrated to deliver a wide array of benefits to the energy system. For instance, in times of peak demand, customers enrolled in VPP programs can discharge electricity from a plugged in EV to support their grid and get compensated for the service.

The Virtual Power Plant Partnership (VP3) brings together a coalition of industry stakeholders to scale the benefits of VPPs across the United States. The technologies and systems that create VPPs already exist. VP3 works to scale …

Impacts of Agrisolar Co-Location on the Food–Energy–Water Nexus and Economic Security

Understanding how solar PV installations affect the landscape and its critical resources is crucial to achieve sustainable net-zero energy production. To enhance this understanding, we investigate the consequences of converting agricultural fields to solar photovoltaic installations, which we refer to as ‘agrisolar’ co-location. We present a food, energy, water and economic impact analysis of agricultural output offset by agrisolar co-location for 925 arrays (2.53 GWp covering 3,930 ha) spanning the California Central Valley. We find that agrisolar co-location displaces food production but increases economic security and water sustainability for farmers. Given the unprecedented pace of solar PV expansion globally, these …

Achieving Carbon-Neutral Economies Through Circular Economy, Digitalization, and Energy Transition

Decarbonization is of utmost importance to effectively address climate change, advance environmental sustainability, and protect biodiversity and ecosystems. Therefore, developed and developing economies are focusing on adopting various approaches to achieve zero carbon emissions. Thus, this study attempted to generate a meaningful relationship between the circular economy, digitalization, energy transition, and eco-friendly trade strategy to capture the role of factors that function to attain carbon neutrality. For the above-given objectives, dynamic econometric methods, such as the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag model (CS-ARDL), were adopted to assess the G7 dataset between 1990 and 2022. These findings suggest that the parameters under …