New America on Energy and the Environment

Easy Access to Our Work and Experts on This Issue

New America's recent articles, events, policy papers and press coverage on these topics are available below, as is information on our staff and fellows with expertise in these areas.

While no single program at New America covers the full range of energy and environmental issues, our Climate Policy Program is a driving force in the field. And our American Strategy Program's Geopolitics of Energy Initiative focuses on structural shifts in global energy markets have important political and economic implications that are not adequately understood or discussed in the ongoing debate over American foreign policy.

Policy Papers

New America's latest official publications on this issue are featured below.

Time for a U.S.-Iranian 'Grand Bargain'

The next U.S. president, whether it is John McCain or Barack Obama, should reorient American policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon reoriented American policy toward the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. Nearly three decades of U.S. policy toward Iran emphasizing diplomatic isolation, escalating economic pressure, and thinly veiled support for regime change have damaged the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East. U.S.-Iranian tensions have been… more

Flynt Leverett | October 7, 2008 |

Promises, Promises: A Fiscal Voter Guide to the 2008 Election

The United States faces serious fiscal challenges. Large budget deficits have returned, and shifting demographics along with growing health care costs are putting intense pressure on the long-term federal budget outlook. Over time, sustained deficits will weaken the economy and adversely affect the American standard of living.

Maya MacGuineas, Marc Goldwein | August 20, 2008

An Energy Efficiency Trading System

Click here for a brief video discussion of this idea.

Reducing the economic and environmental risks of excessive energy use must become one of America's most important national goals. The most promising way forward is to reduce energy demand by spurring a revolution in energy efficiency. Indeed, efficiency is America's largest and most cost-effective potential energy resource.

Phasing in tough new energy standards for… more

Lisa Margonelli | February 1, 2007

Financial Markets Do Impact the Environment

The relation of financial flows and the environment has received much less attention than the impacts of trade, energy programs, sprawl, or pollution creating projects. Perhaps that is not surprising since activities in each of those areas are known to have direct and usually detrimental impacts on environment through changes in land use, soil degradation, pollution emissions, and contributions to global warming, etc. In contrast, both international and domestic financial markets appear relatively clean and detached from environmental impacts --… more

March 1, 2003

Sustainable Enterprise

The fundamental challenge for human institutions in the 21st century is to create and maintain a sustainable combination of economic, social, and natural environmental conditions in an increasingly global and commercial civilization.

This challenge is not now being met. The world economy so far is failing to meet even the basic needs of a large fraction of the human population, or to protect its natural resources and the ecosystems that produce them, even as it creates unprecedented wealth… more

February 28, 2003

The Role of Regulation in Mitigating the Impact of International Capital Flows on the Environment

The large scale movement of capital in the form of financial flows and foreign direct investment is a relatively recent phenomenon despite the fact that international trade has been an important part of commerce throughout the industrial era. Such flows have constituted a major and perhaps defining part of the process of globalization over the past two decades. At the same time, the environmental problems created by industrialization have also grown to have global range, particularly as they are replicated… more

October 22, 2002

Making Markets Pay for Stewardship

Executive Summary

Some of the most promising ways to bring about rural poverty alleviation and conservation around the world involve innovative ways to increase the control that the rural poor can exercise over their natural resource base and to pay them for their sustainable stewardship of environmental functions and services. These approaches can make use of market instruments… more

February 10, 2002

Stopping the Giveaway of Canada's Forests

Canadian provincial governments have a long-standing policy of subsidizing their lumber mills, to the detriment of the U.S. lumber industry, U.S. landowners and the environment. Recently, a coalition of Canadian lumber companies, some lumber consumers, and others have aimed to change the longstanding U.S. policy of combating those subsidies. Under the veil of protecting consumers, this group aims to terminate the current U.S.- Canada agreement, which contains the damage from Canada’s forestry regime, and ensure that no action is taken… more

Greg Mastel | September 30, 2000

Articles & Books

Recent New America-authored articles, op-eds and books on this topic are featured below.

Think Again: Green China

Two years ago, the New York Times reported that China was "choking on growth," with rapid economic development ravaging its environment. But in a recent column, the Times' Tom Friedman declared that "Red China [has] decided to become Green China," writing that the developing country now outpaces the United States in its pursuit of alternative energy.

Christina Larson | ForeignPolicy.com | November 13, 2009

China Confronts Global Warming Dilemma

China awoke to climate change with a storm. It was late January 2008, a time when people across the country were busily gathering recipes, stocking fireworks, and preparing to welcome relatives to celebrate the Lunar New Year. But suddenly, severe ice storms brought much of the nation to a standstill. For two weeks, fierce winds, sleet, and snow downed power lines, shuttered businesses, and razed more than 200,000 homes across southern and central China.

Energizing Peace

The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately disconnected -- despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a 600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.

Parag Khanna | ForeignPolicy.com | November 5, 2009

Drill Gas Here, Drill Gas Now

While environmentalists are keen to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions, rank-and-file voters seem more taken by the promise of energy independence. Last year, Republicans energized the conservative base by promising to "drill here, drill now," a rallying cry that promised to exploit domestic energy reserves to reduce America's reliance on foreign oil. Energy experts insisted, however, that because oil is a global commodity, exploiting offshore oil would have a trivial impact on our exposure to geopolitical instability in

Reihan Salam | Forbes.com | October 19, 2009

China Is Leaving the U.S. in the Dust as It Surges Ahead on Clean Energy

Even as China overtakes the U.S. in the dubious category of "world's leading greenhouse gas producer," it is also well ahead of the U.S. in developing the technologies and policies to solve the problem--and selling those solutions to us at massive profits which could have been ours.

Terry Tamminen | Grist Magazine | September 17, 2009

China’s Bright Future--and Filthy Present

Right now is a great time to be an environmentalist in China--especially if you're a foreigner. The politicians here care, at last, about your issues.

Christina Larson | Boston Globe | September 2, 2009

Green Jobs: Hope or Hype?

After the release of a miserable June jobs report, President Obama stood with a group of green company CEOs and told reporters that "men and women like these will help lead us out of this recession and into a better future."

But if the White House puts too many eggs in the green recovery basket, we may all be disappointed. The green sector is simply not large enough or competitive enough to be a major engine of job creation.

Samuel Sherraden | CNN.com | July 28, 2009

It Is Summer 2009, and John McCain is President

Picture, if you will, an America apparently like our own. A country like ours bogged down in war on two fronts and suffering from the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. An America indistinguishable from ours in every respect except that when you turn on the nightly news you see the face of President John Sidney McCain ...

Michael Lind | Salon | June 16, 2009

Don’t Pay the Rich to Scrap Their Cars

As someone who drove a clattering old pickup in the slow lane for nine years, I watched with interest earlier this month as House Democrats reached a compromise on “cash for clunkers” legislation that would give people vouchers worth as much as $4,500 to replace their older cars with new ones. But the plan, which would cost $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion, is a huge disappointment; any program that expensive should deliver much better mileage.

Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret

The unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, has little to recommend it to tourists. A scraggly outcrop of rocks and Joshua trees alongside Route 15, it has no kitschy landmarks like the 134-foot-tall thermometer that nearby Baker, California, installed in the Mojave Desert, and no casinos like Las Vegas has an hour up the road. But behind a Band-Aid-colored industrial gate lies an attraction of sorts: a 55-acre open-pit mine created by a 21st-century gold rush, one result of the… more

Doom or Gloom

As Earth Day approaches, environmentalists are bemoaning the impending death of cap-and-trade. The Obama White House offered ambitious revenue estimates for a cap-and-trade program in its proposed budget, but Congressional Democrats have made it fairly clear that they won’t risk following through, at least not this year. Whereas health care legislation has a chance of getting through Congress, any successful cap-and-trade legislation would have to secure at least sixty votes in the Senate--and that, simply put, is unimaginable.

Reihan Salam | Forbes.com | April 13, 2009

Obama's Timid Liberalism

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital,

Michael Lind | Salon | March 6, 2009

Green Power Struggle

In 1979 Gus Speth, a Yale-trained lawyer and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), became chair of President Carter's Council on Environmental Quality. He was 37. Approached by two scientists concerned about the rise in the earth's temperatures as a result of increased carbon emissions, Speth commissioned a study. "It created quite a stir," he says. "It got a lot of media attention.... In 1981 we knew enough that I'm quoted in the New York Times saying we ought to cap greenhouse [gases]

Christopher Hayes | The Nation | March 4, 2009

Beyond the Haze

Even as my plane was landing in Jinan, the capital of China's heavily industrialized Shandong province, I could see cranes. By the time I got to the city center I'd counted 76 more construction cranes along the way. There were probably more, but in the city proper the smog was so thick I couldn't see any farther than the sidewalk. When I visited, just a few weeks before last summer's Olympic extravaganza kicked off, Shandong had just been named to the Chinese EPA's "green blacklist" for its

Lisa Margonelli | California | January 30, 2009

Obama, Gulf Oil and the Myth of America's Addiction

Throughout the campaign that culminated in his inauguration yesterday, President Barack Obama called America’s dependence on oil its greatest threat and outlined ambitious plans for energy independence – the American politician’s favorite buzzwords. His energy plan has called for oil savings equivalent to the amount that the United States imports from the Middle East and Venezuela, and he expects these savings to eliminate entirely imports from the Middle East.

Afshin Molavi | The National (UAE) | January 21, 2009

The Next American System

The inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, along with the deepening of the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, marks more than a shift in the pendulum swings of partisan politics. In these pages I have suggested that it marks the dawn of a Fourth American Republic, in the way that the New Deal marked the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's Third Republic of the United States and the Civil War and Reconstruction began Lincoln's Second… more

Michael Lind | Salon | January 20, 2009

Learning from Europe

The inauguration of the 44th president of the United States looks like the most dramatic debut since the Beatles arrived in New York. But now that the buildup and the hype are over and it's time for Team Obama to produce, President Obama would do well to look to Europe for guidance, particularly when it comes to three of the president-elect's top priorities: energy and climate change, health care and jump-starting the economy.

Steven Hill | The Providence Journal | January 16, 2009

Events

Related New America events, both recent and upcoming (if any), are featured below.

Experts

Patrick C. Doherty

Patrick C. Doherty Deputy Director, American Strategy Program

Kristina Haddad

Kristina Haddad Senior Program Associate, Climate Policy Program

Kristina Haddad is Senior Program Associate for the Climate Policy Program at the New America Foundation. In this capacity, she is working to help create a national response to climate change by building state and local climate action plans. Previously, Ms. Haddad was the Forestry Project Manager for the Environment… more

Areas of Expertise: Energy & Environment

Christina Larson

Christina Larson Schwartz Fellow

Flynt Leverett

Flynt Leverett Senior Research Fellow, American Strategy Program and Director, Geopolitics of Energy Initiative
Flynt Leverett is a leading authority on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and global energy issues. From 1992 to 2003, he had a distinguished career in the U.S. government, serving as Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East Expert… more

Barry C. Lynn

Barry C. Lynn Senior Research Fellow, Economic Growth Program

Lisa Margonelli

Senior Research Fellow, California Program and Director, Energy Policy Initiative
Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy. Her book about the oil supply chain, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in 2007. Recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library… more

Terry Tamminen

Terry Tamminen Cullman Senior Fellow and Director, Climate Policy Program

Terry Tamminen is the Cullman Senior Fellow for Climate Change and Director of the Climate Policy Program at the New America Foundation. The goal of this program is to build a national response to climate change through the establishment of state and local action plans.

Areas of Expertise: Energy & Environment