Transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States and, thus, a critical sector to address in the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. New technological innovations—from the growth in hybrid and electric vehicles, to increases in parcel delivery, to advances in supply change management, to the potential emergence of autonomous vehicles—are rapidly changing the sector. These advancements create the need for new analysis about the role of cars, trains, trucks, and planes and the role transportation will play in energy system decarbonization.   This grant provides funds for a graduate student fellowship program aimed at supporting the work of doctoral students at two universities, University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University, who are interested in studying the energy and environmental implications of changes in the U.S. transportation sector. Run by economist Joshua Linn at the University of Maryland and engineer Kate Whitefoot at Carnegie Mellon University, the program will award seven one-year fellowships to early-career scholars wishing to pursue interdisciplinary, policy-relevant transportation research.

Responsibly evaluating different paths toward decarbonization of the energy system requires understanding how the benefits and burdens created are distributed across racial, economic, and geographic groups. This grant, led by Catie Hausman at the University of Maryland and Arik Levinson at Georgetown University, funds an initiative by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to stimulate high quality research that examines the distributional equity dimensions of energy decarbonization in the United States.  NBER will hold two broad and open call for new research papers on these topics, one focusing on research examining the distributional effects of new energy technologies and the other focusing on the distributional effects of new energy policies.  The initiative expects to produce a total of 16 original high-quality papers on these topics, and the papers for each call will be shared with other scholars and experts at dissemination workshops.

Negative emissions technologies aim to combat rising atmospheric carbon emissions by capturing and removing carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere and sequestering it safely underground or for reuse. Assessing the potential of these technologies requires insights from the social sciences—including economics, public policy, political science, sociology, and life cycle assessment, among others—on issues like how they might integrate with existing energy systems and how energy consumers and producers would respond to their deployment. Funds from this grant support the creation of a social science research fellowship program across multiple universities that will aim to foster research by young scholars interested in studying negative emissions technologies. Coordinated by Peter Schlosser at Arizona State University, a multidisciplinary committee will review and select four promising postdoctoral researchers for support and embed them for two years at one of a number of partner universities involved in negative emissions social science research.  In addition to salary support for each fellow, grant funds will support networking, learning, and professional development activities for the fellows, including opportunities for fellows to present their research to one another and to other scholars and practitioners in the energy community at large.

Industrial sources account for one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Despite their important contributions to emissions, many industrial sub-sectors—such as cement, iron and steel, chemicals, and construction—are poorly represented in key integrated assessment models that are used to inform decisions about how to decarbonize the economy. In particular, these models do not reflect emerging low-carbon advancements in these sub-sectors that might improve decarbonization rates and affect overall emissions reductions in these sectors. One of the most often used integrated assessment models is GCAM, a popular open source model used by researchers to simulate how various decarbonization approaches and scenarios would affect both the environment and the economy over the long term. The GCAM module that represents industrial decarbonization has not been updated for nearly a decade and currently reflects only minimal information from a small number of industrial sectors and thus fails to capture new low-carbon developments across a range of industries. This grant funds a team of scholars led by Andres Clarens at the University of Virginia and CGAM developers based at the University of Maryland to update critical components of GCAM’s industrial decarbonization module. The focus of this project will be to combine information from high quality data sources, life cycle assessments, and expert elicitations to improve GCAM’s representation of five crucial industrial sectors: cement (one of the largest industries from a decarbonization perspective), chemicals production, construction, nonferrous metals, and mining.  

Founded in 2013 by Jason Bordoff, the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University has quickly become one of the leading academic research centers focused on analyzing all aspects of the U.S. energy system. A first class research institute in its own right, CGEP also excels at bridging the researcher-policymaker divide.  It accessibly condenses and summarizes complicated research, connects research results with their implications for policy, and creates venues to effectively disseminate research to decision-makers, media, and the public.  Funds for this grant support the creation of two additional professional positions at CGEP: a senior research director and a managing editor.  The research director will be responsible for managing all components of research production and will oversee CGEP’s research quality control procedures, including its internal and external review processes. The managing editor’s role will be to assist in the research review process and generate various outputs for dissemination that will help make CGEP’s work more relevant and accessible to decision-makers. Both the research director and managing editor positions are critical in overseeing the variety of research outputs produced by CGEP and will cement CGEP’s central role of bringing high quality, objective research to those stakeholders entrusted to act in the public interest. Grant funds will support these positions for their initial two-year period to help inaugurate these roles.