Research Library

Taking a health-based approach toward curbing the rising use of synthetic cannabinoids, which has caused dangerous and sometimes fatal side effects in extreme cases, may be a more effective policy for the City of Houston, postdoctoral fellow Katharine A. Neill writes in this report.

This conference report summarizes findings from a lecture by Diego Rodriguez for the event "From the 'What?' to the 'How?' in the Water-Energy Nexus: Challenges, Opportunities and Lessons Learned."

This report summarizes the perspectives of panelists at the conference “Confronting Climate Change: Policies and Opporturtunities,” held Oct. 22, 2015, at the Baker Institute.

The cumulative impacts of U.S. liquefied natural gas exports is the subject of a new Department of Energy-sponsored study co-authored by Ken Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies. The study is one of two commissioned by the DOE "to inform [the department's] decisions on applications seeking authorization to export LNG from the lower-48 states to non-free trade agreement countries."

This paper reports the key climate change and public policy issues addressed by guest speakers during the 2014-15 Climate Lecture Series hosted by the Center for Energy Studies.

In this report, the authors analyze the potential benefits of expanding jail diversion programs for low-level drug offenses in Harris County.

This study examines the effects of lifting the 40-year-old U.S. crude export ban on crude pricing, energy security and energy sector investment. It includes a statistical analysis that explains what the relationship would be between the prices of crudes of different qualities in an unconstrained setting, which, according to author Ken Medlock, is important to providing a more accurate assessment of the impact of current U.S. policy.

This paper investigates how new potential and proposed regulations will influence the natural gas market in the United States in the coming decades, using the Rice World Gas Trade Model (RWGTM) to examine scenarios in which domestic natural gas development is stressed in a variety of ways. It considers a range of possible policy actions from the federal to the local level.

A conference report on "The Shale Revolution: What Do We Know and Where Are We Going?," hosted by the Center for Energy Studies on Oct. 30, 2014.

This paper examines the effects of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a one-time retroactive British “Windfall Tax” levied on 32 public utilities that were privatized between 1984 and 1996 was eligible for the US foreign tax credit (FTC). The decision could have far-reaching implications for the creditability of taxes that are not ordinarily thought to be income taxes, including various cash-flow business taxes that are key elements of several proposals recommending replacement of the income tax with a consumption-based tax.