Maxwell School News and Commentary

“We try to explain the environmental, economic and social benefits as well as possible unintended consequences and risks of the net-zero transition to decision makers,” says Jay Golden, founder and director of the lab and the Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability and Finance in the Maxwell School.

"The Next Wave of Energy Innovation: Which Technologies? Which Skills?," co-authored by David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy.

“What is the path to market for these technologies?” asks David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs. He attributes the collapse of startups in cleantech 1.0 largely to the lack of demand for green products in highly competitive commodity markets.

David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, notes that while new factories will be needed to build electric vehicle batteries, the vehicles will require fewer suppliers producing parts. Many assembly workers will also need to be retrained. “We may also need fewer workers,” Popp says. But, he says, “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether that is the case.”

In his two-part essay on the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), Professor of Geography and the Environment Matthew Huber examines the labor question and assesses dubious campaign claims that BPRA is a climate victory.

“The UAW…strike action is ultimately trying to realize one of the Biden Administration’s core policy goals and political selling points: you can have good, family-sustaining union jobs alongside climate action. The problem is the automakers see EV production as a way to trim labor costs and shift production to non-union plants,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

"If we want to meet timelines to reduce emissions, we have to build wind and solar at a totally unprecedented rate,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

“This is a perfect sweet spot for a public power entity to take on some of that risk, to try to really get a technology that we need off the ground,” Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment, says of TVA’s small modular reactor program. ​“They have the resources and the social mission to do that, where private capital wouldn’t.”

“It’s a generational thing,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment. “A lot of younger generations are really fixated on climate and understand that nuclear is one our best options to deal with climate, so we gotta keep it on the table.”

"Exploring factors shaping transportation electrification in American cities," co-authored by Saba Siddiki, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition.