This grant supports the launch of new a mentoring program at the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE), a leading professional society, to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in energy and environmental economics. Led by Jill Caviglia-Harris at Salisbury University, the AERE Scholars Program will engage a diverse set of scholars interested in a broad range of research questions, support early-career energy and environmental economists as they move through their career, and create a more inclusive culture for scholars from historically underrepresented groups. The year-long program pairs early-career faculty with more established mentors in the field and also involves peer-mentoring activities. This mentorship program will culminate in a workshop at the end of the year. AERE has selected 20 mentee-mentor pairs for its inaugural group and plans to recruit 10 mentee-mentor pairs in future years.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is the White House Department tasked with coordinating efforts across the federal government to develop and implement sound science and technology policy, evaluating the effectiveness of federal scientific research budgets and programs, and advising the President on scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of executive governance. Energy and environmental topics are playing an increasingly important role in OSTP’s work, with a consequent need for high quality scientific expertise to help inform policy advisory activities.  This grant supports an expansion of the Day One Project, an initiative by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) that works with government agencies to identify the scientific and technical expertise needed to effectively fulfill their functions, to bring energy and environment expertise into OSTP.   Grant funds will enable an expansion of the Day One Impact Fellows program, allowing FAS to recruit a scholar with expertise on energy and environmental topics and place this individual within OSTP for a one-year fellowship, giving OSTP access to the impartial scholarly expertise needed to effectively fill its advisory functions. This grant also provides resources to develop a stronger cohort network of Impact Fellows working on energy and environment issues in different agencies.

Many low carbon technologies require the use and deployment of relatively rare metals and minerals in their manufacturing and construction. For instance, next generation batteries require lithium, cobalt, and nickel. High-efficiency motors utilize neodymium and dysprosium.  Platinum and platinum-like elements are essential for new fuel cells and in many other clean manufacturing processes.  As the economy decarbonizes, demand for these elements will rise and with that rise in demand raises a number of economic, policy, and environmental issues, such as how supply chain bottlenecks might raise prices for these rare metals and minerals, how they might be reused or recycled, and whether they will be disposed of responsibly. This grant supports a project by Morgan Bazilian of the Colorado School of Mines that will attempt to address critical gaps in our knowledge in this area. Grant funds will allow Bazilian to improve, upgrade and expand an empirically-informed model he has created of the metal and mineral needs of a wide range of clean energy technologies. Drawing both on industry sources and on published work by researchers, the model will eventually cover 25 technology areas and 55 distinct metals and minerals.  Bazilian will then use the improved model to conduct an analysis of critical metal and mineral demand and re-use scenarios under a range of different assumptions about growth rates, supply constraints, and recycling options. The project will pay particular attention to the prospects for recycling previously used critical metals and minerals so they can be re-utilized in the clean energy sector.  The analysis will produce a more robust picture than ever before about how different scenarios of clean energy growth will affect demand for, and productive lifecycle of, critical metals and minerals.

The core of the Sloan Energy and Environment program is to advance our understanding of how best to transition U.S. energy systems from fossil fuel power generation to alternative sources that produce net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide. Beyond understanding alternative routes toward decarbonization—zero-carbon energy sources, improved transmission infrastructure, and reduced energy use—we also need to understand how the costs and benefits of each of these pathways will be distributed across different populations, especially those that have been historically marginalized or underrepresented, such as Black, Hispanic, or Native American communities. This grant supports the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in launching a study focusing on how to accelerate the transition to low carbon energy systems across the United States. Drawing on a committee of 20-30 independent researchers with broad expertise across multiple facets of the energy system, the study will explore how the U.S. can accelerate climate mitigation, facilitate energy system transitions, and promote adaptation strategies that take seriously how costs are distributed, with particular attention to marginalized and vulnerable populations. Grant funds will support information gathering in the form of outreach, interviews, and listening sessions with stakeholders from relevant communities; the production of two reports, one identifying equitable emissions-lowering policies by sector and another focused on similar cross-sector policies; and dissemination efforts for both reports designed to ensure these outputs reach key stakeholders in academia, government, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector.

Available energy and environment data can be rather siloed, with datasets from different federal and state agencies difficult to link with one another due to differences in what data is collected, how it is structured, what formats are used to store it, and what metadata is attached. Connecting such disparate datasets so that they can be jointly and meaningfully analyzed represents a significant and time-consuming effort for researchers, particularly those from different disciplines who want to address broader questions of climate change, environmental justice, social welfare, or public policy. This grant supports a team of multidisciplinary team of social scientists across multiple institutions, led by Jonathan Fisk, to begin to address this issue.  Funds will support a broad initial survey of researchers across a wide range of social science disciplines to identify the most used and useful data sources in this area, gain insight into the questions researchers are attempting to answer, and understand the barriers they face in linking different datasets.  The survey will then lead to a workshop where survey responses will inform discussion of where the most pressing needs for data integration are and development of a plan for addressing them. The workshop will then be followed by an iterative process of researcher consultation that ensures future data integration plans continue to be tightly bound to researchers’ needs.

Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs) are a series of week-long interdisciplinary conferences focusing on advancing cutting-edge research across biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering, bringing together early-career and more established researchers. The purpose of these meetings is to share early-stage results and provide networking and collaboration opportunities among the participants. Many GRCs are preceded by a two-day graduate student seminar held the weekend before the conference to engage early-career researchers. This grant supports the fourth in a biennial series of conferences on Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) taking place this fall, which will bring together scientists from multiple disciplines to share novel research about developments related to removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. Grant funds will cover registration and travel costs for up to 20 early-career researchers, including 10 from the United States and 10 from other countries, who will each attend the week-long CCUS GRC and the preceding seminar.

There are many complex societal questions associated with the development and deployment of negative emissions technologies, which are designed to remove carbon dioxide from the air, and solar radiation management technologies, which attempt to reflect sunlight from the atmosphere and thereby reduce warming. These include, but are not limited to, issues related to public perception and acceptance, willingness to site such novel technological infrastructure in different communities, and analyzing how costs and benefits might accrue differentially across populations. This grant will support high-quality social science research to understand community stakeholder views on negative emissions and solar radiation management in different regions of the country. Researchers will conduct interviews and focus groups across five geographically diverse regions where negative emissions or solar radiation interventions are likely to be located.  The multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research team, led by Holly Buck at the University of Buffalo, will supplement the local perspectives garnered through these interviews by fielding a nationally representative survey to examine public perceptions of both technologies and provide baseline information across a wide cross-section of the population. The team expects to produce up to six research papers that report on their results, train at least one postdoctoral scholar, and disseminate findings to practitioners and local communities.

The Clean Energy Program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is one of the leading research efforts examining the energy innovation ecosystem in the United States. This grant, led by energy policy scholar David Hart, funds two projects at ITIF—one training, one research. The training project involves organizing a week-long energy innovation policy “boot camp” in 2022 in Washington, D.C. that will involve a cohort of approximately 20 early-career social scientists.  Participating researchers will be introduced to the practicalities of how energy policy is made and will encourage them to highlight the potential connections between research and decision-making in their own work. The second project involves advancing a collaborative research effort that ITIF is undertaking with scholars at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy (BU-ISE) and the BU-based Fraunhofer USA Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI) to examine the decarbonization potential of two industrial subsectors.  Researchers will conduct technical, economic, and policy analysis for each chosen subsector, and they will collect data and conduct interviews with industry and regulatory stakeholders that explore relevant energy innovation policy issues, such as financial incentive structures, global competitiveness, and innovation diffusion patterns. The research is expected to result in at least two reports and academic papers, and it will form the basis of a number of policy briefs that the team will provide to industry and governmental stakeholders.

Digital technology developments—including new technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things, and behavioral shifts like the rise in digital platform use—can have profound implications for energy and the environment. In 2018, the Foundation supported an emerging effort to study these impacts, and this grant supports the continuation and expansion of this network. Led by Reid Lifset at Yale University, Jordan Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kasantha Moodley and Dave Rejeski at the Environmental Law Institute, this research network is now known as the Network for Digital Economy and Environment (nDEE). Having already explored the direct effects of digital technologies on energy and the environment, they will now conduct research projects to explore the indirect effects of these digital technologies on energy systems. Three specific research projects will be supported at the outset, with a process designed to further source additional research ideas. The first project will study how the rise of short-term rental services like Airbnb is impacting carbon emissions. The direct effects on emissions through, say, increasing tourism, are well documented, but there are also indirect effects to consider, such as increased travel from Airbnb locations that may be located at the outskirt of cities, thereby increasing overall emissions. The second project will look at the energy implications of product returns. Many product life-cycle analysis calculations stop short of assessing what happens when a product is returned to the seller, and this analysis does not continue to follow a returned product’s continuing environmental impact beyond that point. The third project will seek to design improved personal environmental footprint calculators that integrate robust privacy preserving features. While exploring indirect effects is more challenging than exploring direct effects, completing this work will improve our understanding of how the digital economy contributes to global carbon emissions and what steps we might take toward reducing its impact.

Today’s energy, environmental, and natural resource challenges require rigorous and independent research and analysis to inform the design of effective policies. This grant supports Resources for the Future (RFF) in co-organizing Energy Insights 2022, a conference that will emphasize the connection between energy research and policy decision-making, in partnership with the Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. Following a successful collaboration in organizing the Energy Research Insights for Decisionmaking conference in 2018, this event will feature a range of Sloan-funded energy-related research exploring key issue areas including new technologies, transportation, energy infrastructure resiliency, and distributional equity and environmental justice. By drawing on Sloan’s grantee network and RFF’s connections to policy audiences, the private sector, and the wider research community, Energy Insights 2022 aims to build and strengthen networking opportunities among energy and environment researchers and connect their research to decision-makers.