"With the pressures of climate change and the urgency to incorporate alternative energy resources like wind and solar, the fixation on the purported benefits of energy transition technologies overshadows the glaring reality — an absence of strategy around identifying and quantifying other life cycle externalities, such as waste disposal or environmental impacts," write fellow Rachel Meidl and research assistant Mathilde Saada. Read more on the Baker Institute Blog.
President Biden's foreign policy is colored by both decisiveness and a realism that falls short of his idealism, with a result that draws elements of Trump's and Obama's approaches together, writes fellow Joe Barnes. Read his post on our blog.
By subsidizing only electric vehicles and EV batteries produced by union labor in the U.S., the auto industry could face trouble in valuable trade partnerships with Canada and Mexico, writes fellow David Gantz.
Paris and Washington are past the immediate AUKUS crisis, but two major, related issues will remain high on Biden’s foreign policy agenda for the balance of his term, writes fellow Joe Barnes: China’s military expansion in the Pacific and the EU’s role in great power politics.
Read more at the Baker Institute Blog.
China’s request for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, from which the U.S. withdrew in 2017, creates diplomatic challenges for the U.S. as well as foreign policy hurdles for current CPTPP members, the authors write.
David A. Gantz, Jorge Huerta-GoldmanOctober 5, 2021
Circular processes cannot solve the sustainability problem, but critically implementing circularity with system-level thinking can help to urgently adopt a more resilient, regenerative model for avoiding resource scarcity while fostering economic growth, argues a Forbes piece co-authored by Rachel Meidl.
Rachel A. Meidl, Vilma Havas, Brita StaalAugust 9, 2021
Circular economy principles are oftentimes used in conjunction or synonymously with the term “sustainability.” However, although there is a relationship between sustainability and circularity, these two concepts are very different. Energy fellow Rachel A. Meidl explains the distinction in a new post for the Baker Institute Blog.
Amid recent disputes on oil trade, "fractious Saudi-UAE relations are ... better understood as a return to the pre-2015 status quo than a unique diplomatic breach," write Jim Krane and Kristian Coates Ulrichsen.
How did the pandemic impact energy markets around the world? The results of this year's bp Statistical Review of World Energy show how the U.S. led the widespread decline in energy production, oil was the energy type most impacted by shutdowns, and global trade for fossil fuels fell more rapidly than production.