JSIS 495C Scott Montgomery – Global Trends in Energy and Emissions: Key Points for Policy Decision-Making

How much progress is the world actually making in the shift away from fossil fuels and in reducing global emissions? The energy transition, as this shift has been called, is decidedly underway: since 2001, more than $4 trillion of global investment has gone into expanding renewable energy, above all wind and solar. What, however, do global energy trends tell us has been achieved? To make intelligent, realistic policy decisions, national leaders need to know facts on the ground about such trends and what they mean. This Task Force will assemble an accurate picture of global energy use and emissions for each region of the world over the past two decades, with a focus on major emitting nations, such as China, the U.S., India, the EU, Russia, Japan, and Indonesia. Trends will be analyzed in light of recent energy policy decisions, to identify the degree to which progress toward emissions reductions have or have not occurred and are set to occur in the next few decades. A concluding aim will be to define whether any nations, or a group of nations, appear to offer models for how other countries might proceed.

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