Columbia | SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy

Heavy industry produces roughly 22 percent of global CO₂ emissions. Of these, roughly 40 percent (about 10 percent of total emissions) is the direct consequence of combustion to produce high-quality heat, almost entirely from the combustion of fossil fuels.

CGEP Senior Research Scholar Dr. Erica Downs examines the environmental and debt sustainability of China’s Belt and Road Initiative through the lens of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) power sector projects. 

In the Guide to Chinese Climate Policy, David Sandalow examines China's emissions, explores the impacts of climate change in China, provides a short history of China's climate policies and discusses China’s principal climate policies today. This up-to-date Guide is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in China, climate change or both as China is the world’s leading emitter of heat-trapping gases by a wide margin. Read an introduction and explore the table of contents.

John MacWilliams, Sarah La Monaca and James Kobus analyze the PG&E bankruptcy, assess how capital markets have reacted to the bankruptcy through the lens of valuations in the US utility sector, and discuss the policy implications of California’s recent legislative response to wildfire risk.

Rural Electricity Supply: Commodity or Entitlement is a summary of the work “Explaining Willingness to Pay for Pricing Reforms that Improve Electricity Service in India,” published by Dr. Johannes Urpelainen, Brian Blankenship and Jason Wong in Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy in January 2019, as part of CGEP’s Faculty Grant Program.  

This report reviews the 1982 Soviet Gas Pipeline episode, sets some lessons from it against the current US-European relationship and makes recommendations to modify current US sanctions practice in order to help manage partner concerns and avoid future crises. 

Justin Gundlach, CGEP Non-Resident Fellow Ron Minsk and Research Scholar Dr. Noah Kaufman propose a framework to consider the interactions between a federal carbon tax and salient energy and emissions policies. The paper provides policymakers information about how they might want to add, subtract, or change existing policies by using the framework to classify existing policies are either complementary or redundant to a federal carbon tax.