Research Library

COP28 brought together world leaders, climate experts, and other key stakeholders to discuss progress on global climate goals. As a member of the Turkish delegation, Rice faculty scholar Gökçe Günel offers her take on the summit’s outcomes.

Almost all of the progress the U.S. has made toward its Paris Agreement target for 2025 has come from falling CO2 emissions from energy use. But greater declines in other greenhouse gas emissions are needed to reach our goal, writes fellow Mark Finley.

This report explains Europe's failure to secure long-term liquefied natural gas supplies, the likely implications, and provides ideas for better ensuring energy security moving forward.

As climate change becomes an increasingly prominent driver of migration, this report investigates possible pathways to ensure that “climate refugees” receive adequate legal protection.

The authors write that enormous volumes of “energy transition waste” — waste from wind turbines, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, etc. — are anticipated in the coming decades. To cope with this waste and ensure a sustainable energy transition, they call for more data, planning and coordination across the entire global supply chain, in addition to waste management and recycling policies that align with environmental and sustainability goals.

The authors take a realistic look at what's needed for the global energy transition to succeed and warn that moving away from fossil fuels too quickly could backfire — stranding climate progress in the so-called “valley of death.”

This report explores Houston's substantial comparative advantage in finding and developing low-carbon solutions and creating opportunities to efficiently and effectively deploy the region’s vast resources to produce and deliver cleaner, greener fuels to the nation and the world.

Using a framework based on vulnerability, risk and offsets provides valuable insights for evaluating the security of an energy system in transition, writes energy fellow Mark Finley.

Fossil fuel subsidies have allowed energy exporting countries to distribute resource revenue, bolstering legitimacy for governments, many of which are not democratically elected. But subsidy benefits are dwarfed by the harmful consequences of encouraging uneconomic use of energy. Now, with consumption posing a threat to long-term exports, governments face a heightened need to raise prices that have come to be viewed as entitlements. While reforms of state benefits are notoriously politically dangerous, previous experience shows that subsidies can be rolled back without undermining government legitimacy — even in autocratic settings — given proper preparation.

Energy Study Working Paper - Energy Market Consequences of an Emerging U.S. Carbon Management Strategy

Peter Hartley…