In San Francisco, youth are protesting the climate crisis as pledges emerge in Glasgow. (Photo outside BlackRock's San Francisco office by Peg Hunter, via Flickr Creative Commons.)
A bumper crop of climate pledges and plans land in your inbox, but how many make it to your term sheet? This investigation follows a few global finance pledges, setting them against capital needs and focusing on partnerships and local efforts as units of action.
Each building owner, with a team of investors, needs to work out a particular electrification schedule. Broad public policies, though, can advance new technologies or marketing strategies that can help more buildings go electric sooner. This sequel to our earlier explainer sets out some scalable policies from across the United...
Activists in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood have explored whether Clean Peak Standards can address air quality and energy inequity. (Photo by Victoria Belanger via Flickr Creative Commons.)
One state has tried requiring power at peak demand periods to come from clean sources. This mandate can improve air quality in low-income communities. Critics question its effect on emissions, though, and its optimal design as clean-energy storage for utilities evolves.
Evidently too excited to wait for our explainer on the subject, Robert Downey Jr. tweeted bullishly about carbon removal recently. This March 21 story places the pronoucement in context.
This March 4 compression of a complex announcement outlines the play: major American city strikes deal with partnership among self-reinventing energy companies to use municipal land for building wind turbines and construction jobs.
(Courtesy Governor Phil Murphy's Flickr account.) A new capacity market framework for PJM could make offshore wind from this segment of New Jersey more competitive more quickly.
Now, to advance the buildout of renewable energy, FERC should set a process and timeframe for adopting a new market structure. That structure should be adaptable and transparent, advance state offshore wind policy goals, meet consumer clean energy and equity goals, and maintain reliability.
(Photo by Patrick Kovarik for Getty Images in Fashionista, September 25, 2020.) Chanel once staged a fashion show with wind turbines. The author argues that assertive tax policy can make renewable wardrobes a fashion-forward investment.
The US, as the largest consumer and highest emitter of carbon per capita, bears a critical share of the responsibility to facilitate a transition to sustainable practices. This article lays out the rationale and a pathway for the US to incentivize the apparel industry’s decarbonization. I propose a preferential tariff...
(Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.) A solar array in Virginia stands for the kinds of investment that could crowd in with a properly targeted federal carbon price.
Climate scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report warned that without immediate large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will cause devastating economic and human losses. Policymakers must come together to implement a comprehensive climate change strategy in the United States.
(Courtesy of Jo Zimny Photos via Flickr Creative Commons.) Ithaca took its buildings off fossil fuel. It aims to take its job base in the same direction.
At the local level, a Green New Deal can crowd in private capital. In this update of a Financing and Deploying Clean Energy policy memo, the sustainability director for Ithaca, NY explains the holistic economic and energy-justice strategy driving the city's project to decarbonize all its buildings.
