David M. Hart

The U.S. government should triple its annual investment in energy innovation over the next five years to speed clean energy transitions around the world and build advanced-energy industries at home.

Recent advances in gene editing offer promising opportunities to mitigate emissions from agriculture and other sectors, and to capture carbon from the atmosphere. Governments should accelerate the development and deployment of these solutions.

When the world’s first carbon capture facility on a coal-fired power plant came online in Texas in 2017, it was touted as a big step toward transforming the dirtiest fossil fuel into a low-carbon power resource. Now, it’s been labeled “a nightmare for unsuspecting investors” and a “warning sign” for the industry. What happened?

The time is ripe for a serious reconsideration of the U.S. energy innovation system and the role of the federal government in it. An upcoming workshop series, sponsored by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Energy and Environmental Systems and open to the public, offers a valuable chance to think through many of the key questions.

A new, non-profit foundation that works closely with DOE could help fill the gap and help create partnerships to power new clean energy technologies through the "valley of death."

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) named the electricity grid the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.

Travel restrictions due to COVID-19 are already putting severe pressure on international student recruitment. Eliminating Optional Practical Training (OPT) would make the problem much worse.

Demonstrating the commercial viability of new technologies for deep decarbonization requires federal funding. But the government’s past record is decidedly mixed. So Congress should increase funding for demonstration projects while reforming how they are administered.

The United States is struggling to move innovative energy technologies from discovery to scale. This gap could put the climate and U.S. investments at risk. A nonprofit foundation working with the Department of Energy could help fill the gap.

In response to a bipartisan request by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, ITIF suggested 16 steps the federal government could take to stimulate clean energy and manufacturing if today’s public health emergency turns into a prolonged economic downturn.

A strange twist of fate has aligned to make a “strange bedfellows” coalition of red-state Republicans and environmentalist greens on oil tariffs.

The Murkowski-Manchin bill should become a building block of the durable climate policy we need. It deserves the support of everyone who understands the necessity of making radical reductions in global carbon emissions by 2050.