The 2019 Mayors Forum (part of IREC held in Seoul in October) featured Seoul’s 1 GWp Solar City Initiative. FREE helped the City to design this ambitious program as part of the FREE-Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Dr. Byrne delivered the keynote at the Forum, which drew 37 mayors from 25 countries. […]
Read More »The Scale of the Energy Access Gap
By Benjamin M. Attia Access to electricity is a key catalyst correlated with economic development. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently estimated that over 1.5 billion people do not have access to affordable electricity, representing one quarter of the world’s population [1]. In the absence of aggressive new policies and significant financing, it is estimated that […]
Read More »Post-Paris Agreement: FREE’S Focus on Subnational Climate Action
By Job Taminiau and Joseph Nyangon Accelerating climate action and finance at subnational level based on the Paris Agreement. The 21st Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP 21 (also known as the Paris climate summit) closed in Le Bourget, France after two weeks of intense negotiations, with negotiators agreeing on […]
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 »Why the U.S. Urgently Needs to Invest in a Modern Energy System
By Joseph Nyangon Investment in ‘smart’ energy offers a viable and effective long-term solution that allows the energy industry to shift its supply sources, build new transmission and storage systems, and increase its energy efficiency goals. In a speech commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2009, former U.S. secretary of state, […]
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