Building a Climate Coalition: Aligning Carbon Pricing, Trade, and Development
A new report from the Global Climate Policy Project at Harvard and MIT finds that a voluntary coalition of countries coordinating carbon prices could slash global emissions and raise billions for mitigation and adaptation, while avoiding a patchwork of unilateral border carbon measures. The report outlines a pathway to decarbonize heavy industry independent of UNFCCC timelines and centered on developing-economy priorities.
From Tank to Odometer: Winners and Losers from a Gas-to-VMT Tax Shift
As drivers shift to hybrid and electric vehicles, federal gas tax revenue is declining. In response, some have called for replacing the gas tax with a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax. Using machine learning techniques, a new working paper carries out an analysis of this tax shift at the census tract level.
Firm Presence, Pollution, and Agglomeration
Firm location decisions are a key managerial choice, usually optimized over factors like proximity to customers or suppliers. These decisions may also impose externalities on the environment, and on other firms due to competitive or agglomerative forces. The inherent endogeneity of location decisions makes estimating the impact of firm presence difficult. In this paper, we study an environmental place-based policy that randomly moved over 20,000 small firms in New Delhi to industrial areas outside the city over several years.
The (Hopefully) Enlightening Blackout in Spain
The impact of the April 28th blackout in the Iberian Peninsula went well beyond its immediate economic effects. From the outset, different interest groups began to speculate (in their favor) not so much on the causes of the problem (not yet fully known), but on the conclusions to be drawn for the future, not only in Spain and Portugal, but globally: what should the expansion of the electricity system be like in order to make progress in the decarbonization of the economy while guaranteeing security in the short term?
Household-Level Responses to the European Energy Crisis
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered a significant energy price shock across Europe. This event offered a unique opportunity to study how households adjust their behavior—across energy consumption, labor supply, financial distress, and broader consumption—when faced with price hikes.
Charger data transparency: Curing range anxiety, powering EV adoption
Electric vehicle (EV) adoption faces a persistent problem: the lack of real-time data makes it hard to figure out which public chargers are working and available. A new paper by CEEPR's Christopher Knittel, Luke Heeney and co-authors proposes that states enact laws that require fast chargers to report real-time status that any EV mapping app can access.
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International carbon taxes would expand under climate proposal
"There's definitely a need to increase the ambition of the carbon pricing programs that are out there," said professor Catherine Wolfram, the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy at the Sloan School of Management and an MIT CEEPR faculty affiliate. She is on a council of economists supporting the COP30 president ahead of the November climate conference in Belem, Brazil.
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Data center flexibility can save money but may come with higher emissions
Data centers with the capability to shift workloads to different times can avoid stressing the electric grid and save consumers money — but the shifts may increase power plant emissions in some markets, according to new research co-authored by associate dean for climate and sustainability and MIT CEEPR Director Christopher Knittel. "Our report underscores the urgency of rethinking grid management and operating data centers more flexibly — especially when it comes to AI training," he said.
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Clean Investment
Monitor
The Clean Investment Monitor (CIM) is a joint project of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) and the Rhodium Group. The CIM tracks public and private investments in climate technologies in the United States. Through this data and analysis, the CIM provides insights into investment trends, the effects of federal and state policies, and on-the-ground progress in the U.S. towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
The CIM covers dozens of different technologies and their input components across all sectors of the economy, including for clean electricity and transportation, building electrification, low-emission industrial production, and carbon management.
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Climate Action
Through Education
The MIT Climate Action Through Education (CATE) program, directed by Professor Christopher R. Knittel, has developed an MIT-informed interdisciplinary, place-based climate change curriculum for U.S. high school teachers in the following core disciplines: History/Social Science, English/Language Arts, Math, and Science.
Curricular materials – labs, units, lessons, projects – will be aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, and MA education standards. The solutions-focused curriculum aims to inform students about the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change, while equipping them with the knowledge and sense of agency to contribute to climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience.
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Driving Towards
Seamless Public
EV Charging
Widespread electric vehicle (EV) adoption is critical to confronting climate change – but a lack of sufficient public charging infrastructure is holding many potential EV drivers back. A team of researchers from Harvard and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research will work to accelerate progress on public EV charging as a gating requirement to achieving widespread EV adoption. The team will contribute by working directly with stakeholders and stakeholder groups to identify barriers to seamless public EV charging, build consensus for solutions, and advance those solutions.
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The Roosevelt
Project
Transitioning the United States economy toward deep decarbonization will have unequally distributed effects, positive and negative, across socio-economic groups, geographies and economic sectors. The concerns of workers and communities adversely affected by the transition must inform the discussion around decarbonization, associated policy changes and institutional development. The goal of the Roosevelt Project is to provide an analytical basis for charting a path to a low carbon economy in a way that promotes high quality job growth, minimizes worker and community dislocation, and harnesses the benefits of energy technologies for regional economic development.
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