Research Reports

There is a movement among companies to use more renewable energy and less energy obtained from fossil fuels. Some are pledging to go “100% renewable”, with companies joining such groups as RE100, signing on to Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles, and undertaking other initiatives. At least 150 large companies, including Apple, Facebook, and Google, among others, have set goals to rely exclusively on renewable energy. Many others have set goals to rely on substantial percentages of renewable energy in portions of their operations or in certain locations.

Policy professionals and the public who care deeply about the success of the United States’ environmental protection enterprise recognize that current challenges to the system demand both careful reflection and concerted action. Many changes over recent years have brought the United States to a point where our environmen­tal system may be ready for some fundamental realignments, including changes in states’ capacity, technological capabilities, and business behavior and expectations.

In cellular agriculture research, development and commercialization since 2013 have transformed the prospects for the future of food production, particularly regarding animal-based agriculture. With the first cultured burger taste-tested in London in August 2013, advances in cultivating meat through cellular agriculture have grown and expanded capturing the attention of the press, the public, and investors.

The hype around blockchains—the programming protocol originally created for the Bitcoin—is bidirectional, ranging from apocalyptic predictions of bitcoin energy use that will “destroy our clean energy future” to rosy scenarios that “blockchain technology can usher in a halcyon age of prosperity for all.” The question for policymakers, therefore, is how to ensure that the environment profits in the end.

In March 2018, we released a paper on “Coordination in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment Process: General Tools and Mechanisms,” which surveyed some of the general tools and mechanisms available to the Deepwater Horizon natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) trustees to help coordinate their activities. This paper builds on that work: it describes some additional tools that are available during project planning and selection that could help coordinate the trustees’ activities internally within the NRDA program and with external entities.