Lab News

Report

Climate policy has entered a new era as public investment increasingly moves to center stage. While essential for decarbonization, public investment is not enough—the carrots of investment need to go hand in hand with regulatory sticks. Drawing on the experience of late industrializers with “reciprocal control mechanisms,” this report advances our understanding of how to tie climate requirements to public investment.

Journal article

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted energy markets, producing price spikes reminiscent of the 1970s. Many suggest that the crisis may accelerate transitions away from fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Yet, governments have responded very differently to the price shock. Though some are prioritizing clean energy, others are doubling down on fossil fuel production. Why do countries respond so differently to the same problem?

Journal Article

Public funding and institutions for energy innovation are critical to achieving climate goals, but our understanding of their evolution, variation, and drivers is limited. Meckling et al. compile funding and institutional data across major economies and examine how they changed after the financial crisis, Mission Innovation and expanded competition with China. 

Journal article

Critics have opposed clean energy public investment by claiming that governments must not pick winners, green subsidies enable rent-seeking behavior, and failed companies means failed policy. These arguments are problematic and should not determine the direction of energy investment policies. 

Journal article

Given the importance of advocacy for climate policy development, we ask how climate mitigation advocacy is distributed across US states. Specifically, we examine whether pro-climate groups—both environmental groups and clean energy interests—are concentrated where the politics are most opportune or the emissions are greatest.

Journal Article

We measure the comprehensive carbon price from 2008 to 2019 resulting from climate policies imposed by 25 high-polluting countries that represent 82 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2019.

Journal article

Industrial policy has begun to move into the center of debates on climate policy. This represents a shift away from climate policy as we know it—as classic environmental policy. Industrial policy and environmental policy differ in their policy goals, policy instruments, and distributional effects […]. This raises questions about policy interactions between industrial and environmental policy in broader climate policy mixes and how these affect global decarbonization.

Article

The Sunrise Movement deserves enormous credit for putting the Green New Deal on the national political agenda. But the organization seems to have hit a wall as of late. It may be time for Sunrise to pursue a new direction in its tactics.  

Jonas Meckling received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Best Paper on Public Policy Award, along with his co-author Jonas Nahm from Johns Hopkins University. The paper, “Strategic State Capacity: How States Counter Opposition to Climate Policy,” discusses the ability

Journal article

Scholars have long understood the American states as “laboratories of democracy,” exploring how mechanisms of learning and competition lead to the diffusion of successful state policy experiments across the federal system.