Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency in 2025, his administration has aggressively downsized the federal workforce, which has disrupted key agencies, especially those responsible for environmental protection and climate action. Through executive orders and agency actions, tens of thousands of federal employees have been dismissed—some of which has been ruled illegal— posing serious risks […]
Read More »Takeaways from NERC’s 2024 Reliability Assessment
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation is a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring the stability of the continent’s grid system. Originally formed as the North American Electric Reliability Council and founded in 1968, its successor, also known as NERC, launched in 2006. The group’s mission is to “assure the effective and efficient reduction of risks to […]
Read More »China’s Cap-and-Trade Decisions
By Joseph Nyangon How China Can Shape the Future of Carbon Markets In the lead-up to the 2015 Paris climate change conference, policymakers stressed the need for creation of integrated carbon markets and called for linking new climate financing mechanisms with the United Nations-organized Green Climate Fund (GCF) based in South Korea. Both the U.S. and […]
Read More »Paris Agreement: A Landmark Climate Change Policy Architecture Reached
By Joseph Nyangon “History is written by those who commit, not those who calculate,” declared François Hollande, France’s president, after all nations reached a new climate change agreement in Paris. The 21st UN climate conference opened in Paris on November 30, 2015 and ran over its original deadline, closing a day late on December 12. Unlike […]
Read More »Two Very Different Perspectives on Carbon Emissions Trading
By Jeongseok Seo In an effort to address climate change, carbon emissions trading schemes (hereafter, ETS) have been widely championed as an instrument for mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Currently there are about 40 countries where a regional or national scheme is in operation, including 31 countries in Europe. Several states in the United States, the […]
Read More »