Impacts of the Jones Act on U.S. Petroleum Markets
A new CEEPR Working paper examines how the Jones Act—a 100-year-old U.S. regulation that constrains domestic waterborne shipping—affects U.S. markets for crude oil and petroleum products. The researchers find that eliminating the Jones Act would have reduced average East Coast gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel prices during 2018–2019, while the Gulf Coast gasoline price would increase by $0.30 per barrel. U.S. consumers’ surplus would increase by $769 million per year, and producers’ surplus would decrease by $367 million per year.
Beyond the Hype: The Rainbow of Hydrogen Technologies and Policies
The transition towards a sustainable energy system requires alternative energy carriers that reduce carbon emissions while meeting global demands. Hydrogen is a possible option for industrial heat, transportation fuels, and electricity production. This paper provides an overview of hydrogen production pathways, including gray, blue, turquoise, green, pink, and gold/white hydrogen, evaluating their economic and environmental impacts.
Good Spillover, Bad Spillover: Industrial Policy, Trade, and the Political Economy of Decarbonization
As a growing number of countries adopt trade restrictions to advance policy priorities, they risk creating spillover effects that increase the cost and time horizon of decarbonization. Careful policy design and strategic cooperation can help manage such spillover effects.
Deploying Plug & Charge Technology Can Speed EV Adoption
Charging is a documented pain point holding back EV sales. Plug & Charge makes initiating a charging session even easier than buying gasoline–simply plug the charging cord into the vehicle and charging begins. Leveraging input from stakeholders across the EV ecosystem, a team of MIT and Harvard researchers recommends how to speed deployment of this new charging technology to rapidly expand the EV market.
Climate Policy and Cartelization Risk for Critical Minerals
The demand for critical raw materials, such as copper, nickel, and cobalt, is surging due to the global shift toward cleaner energy systems. However, this growing demand raises concerns about potential market cartelization, as resource-rich countries could organize to control the supply. A new CEEPR Working Paper focuses on the copper market and assesses the potential consequences from cartelization.
Is the clean energy economy doomed?
Faculty Director Christopher Knittel recently guested on Make Me Smart, a podcast from public radio’s Marketplace and spoke about the reasons some policymakers are reluctant to eliminate the IRA entirely. “The world is switching to electric vehicles, the world is switching to solar and wind, and the less we do domestically, the less capability we build domestically to provide those clean energy resources, the worse off our industries will be in the future.” Listen to the full podcast here.
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Six from MIT elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 2025
Six MIT faculty members, including CEEPR faculty member Catherine Wolfram of the MIT Sloan School of Management, are among the nearly 250 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 23.
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What business needs to know about carbon border adjustments
Climate change is global problem. A ton of carbon emitted in one place affects the whole world, and so, in the language of economics, this creates a free-rider problem. If any individual country takes steps to reduce its carbon emissions, that country bears all the costs, but the whole world reaps the benefits. MIT economist and Professor Catherine Wolfram explains how the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism aims to level the playing field among trading partners.
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Clean Investment
Monitor
The Clean Investment Monitor (CIM) is a joint project of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) and the Rhodium Group. The CIM tracks public and private investments in climate technologies in the United States. Through this data and analysis, the CIM provides insights into investment trends, the effects of federal and state policies, and on-the-ground progress in the U.S. towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
The CIM covers dozens of different technologies and their input components across all sectors of the economy, including for clean electricity and transportation, building electrification, low-emission industrial production, and carbon management.
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Climate Action
Through Education
The MIT Climate Action Through Education (CATE) program, directed by Professor Christopher R. Knittel, has developed an MIT-informed interdisciplinary, place-based climate change curriculum for U.S. high school teachers in the following core disciplines: History/Social Science, English/Language Arts, Math, and Science.
Curricular materials – labs, units, lessons, projects – will be aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, and MA education standards. The solutions-focused curriculum aims to inform students about the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change, while equipping them with the knowledge and sense of agency to contribute to climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience.
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Driving Towards
Seamless Public
EV Charging
Widespread electric vehicle (EV) adoption is critical to confronting climate change – but a lack of sufficient public charging infrastructure is holding many potential EV drivers back. A team of researchers from Harvard and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research will work to accelerate progress on public EV charging as a gating requirement to achieving widespread EV adoption. The team will contribute by working directly with stakeholders and stakeholder groups to identify barriers to seamless public EV charging, build consensus for solutions, and advance those solutions.
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The Roosevelt
Project
Transitioning the United States economy toward deep decarbonization will have unequally distributed effects, positive and negative, across socio-economic groups, geographies and economic sectors. The concerns of workers and communities adversely affected by the transition must inform the discussion around decarbonization, associated policy changes and institutional development. The goal of the Roosevelt Project is to provide an analytical basis for charting a path to a low carbon economy in a way that promotes high quality job growth, minimizes worker and community dislocation, and harnesses the benefits of energy technologies for regional economic development.
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