Climate Change
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Court-ing Growth in India: Cut Red Tape, Create Jobs
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India’s economy must create 1.1 billion well-paying jobs by 2050 before its “demographic dividend” window closes. However, neither the government’s current job-creation strategy nor a service-led approach addresses the magnitude of this problem. The fundamental solution lies in removing regulatory bottlenecks in Indian states and decongesting courts, thus creating conditions…
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The Policy Barriers to Reducing Meat Consumption
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The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has consistently emphasized the need to reduce animal-based food consumption in Western countries in its annual report, The State of Food and Agriculture. In particular, reducing red and processed meat for public health and environmental reasons1. The 2024 edition emphasizes sustainability and health,…
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Clean energy tech is struggling. Can catalytic capital save the day?
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As climate change proliferates, companies are looking to decarbonize, fueling investments in clean technologies. Venture capital investors (VCs) poured over $12 billion into clean energy start-ups in 2022, a six-fold growth from 2019 when the broader VC funding fell 53% year-over-year. But VCs focus only on a small subset of…
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Climate Crunch Time – The US’s Progress Towards Global Goals
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The world is making inadequate progress towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In November, climate institutes collaborated on the State of Climate Action report explaining that efforts to limit average global temperature increases are failing across almost all indicators. As one of the signatories to the Paris Agreement in 2015, the…
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CBAM: Climate Change Savior or Protectionist Ploy?
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While the EU carbon price recently broke the symbolic threshold of 100 euros per ton, China’s carbon market has been hovering at around seven euros per ton. This huge discrepancy creates an advantage for non-EU exporters as they don’t need to bear the high price for carbon emissions. The price…
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Human Behavior in the Presence of Wildfire Smoke: New Methods Reveal Differences in Group Responses
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There is a growing awareness about the harmful effects of wildfire smoke and how those effects vary across socioeconomic groups. A new study by Berke et al. in Nature Human Behaviour suggests that differences in groups’ behavior, influenced by socioeconomic realities, may help explain why disadvantaged groups are disproportionately impacted…
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UN Ocean Conference: It’s the best and last opportunity for us to take action
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Biodiversity, especially in marine and coastal ecosystems, is a core foundation for sustainable development and the source of livelihood for a large part of humanity. Currently, more than 3.5 billion people depend on the ocean as their primary food source, and 15% of all animal protein consumed by humans derives…
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China’s Coal Relapse – Is It Here to Stay?
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Ran Cheng is an MPP candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy. China is indulging in coal again. It built 38.4GW of new coal-fired power installations in 2020, three times as much as the rest of the world. The expansion continued in 2021 and early 2022. Given China’s proposed…
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Climate Change is Disproportionally Affecting Mental Health in Developing Countries
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Dharrnesha Inbah Rajah is a MA in International Development and Public Policy candidate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Beyond witnessing one of the worst pandemics in modern times, 2020 was also the warmest year on record and saw horrifying wildfires from the U.S. to Australia.…
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The Geopolitics of Renewables: The World in 2050
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Renewable energy is increasingly popular as the urgency for climate action intensifies around the globe. Meanwhile, ongoing technological and economic challenges dominate the debate over the deployment of renewables, marginalizing the discussion of the geopolitical consequences of a renewables-heavy future. However, a research group sponsored by the International Renewable Energy…
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How to Battle Misinformation in the Fight Against Climate Change
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Climate change poses a vast set of public policy challenges ranging from energy generation and resource extraction to food production and transportation. However, in the United States today, some policymakers and legislators regularly propagate misinformation around climate change. For climate activists, this has proven to be one of the biggest…