An update on recent activity at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change

Grantham Annual Lecture

We are delighted to announce that Dr John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will deliver this year’s Grantham Annual Lecture.

Dr Holdren is President Obama’s assistant for Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Prior to joining the Obama administration Dr Holdren was Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Energy Efficiency in Industry 2012

Dr Tamaryn Napp, Mitigation Research Associate at the Grantham Institute, will present a paper on industrial energy efficiency policies at the ECEEE Industrial Summer Study conference taking place in Arnhem, The Netherlands this week. This is the first Summer Study to focus entirely on the industrial sector and the conference will bring together representatives from industry, academia and government to discuss this important topic.

In the conference paper, Dr Napp and co-authors, Ajay Gambhir and Mirabelle Muuls, have addressed the question ‘Is UK policy making industries more energy efficient?’. This paper was a background study undertaken prior to carrying out a more detailed interview-based investigation of the effectiveness of policies in industry.

This work forms part of a broad Grantham Research Theme investigating CO₂ emissions reduction in heavy industry. If you are interested in knowing more about this topic, we recommend that you read our recent briefing paper ‘Reducing CO2 emissions from heavy industry: a review of technologies and considerations for policy makers’.

BRICS 2050 in Beijing

Members of the Grantham Institute policy team, Neil Hirst (senior Policy Fellow) and Ajay Gambhir (Research Fellow), will attend the “BRICS 2050” conference in Beijing next week, 18 and 19 September. The conference, organised by China’s Energy Research Institute, will showcase China’s new 2050 pathways calculator to delegates from the emerging BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

Based on DECC’s UK 2050 calculator, this tool allows policy makers and others to test different technological pathways towards a low-carbon economy in China by 2050. A prototype of the tool has been reviewed by the Grantham Institute, who (in partnership with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) recently undertook their own study into China’s energy technology options to 2050. A full copy of the report is available here: www.imperial.ac.uk/climatechange/publications/reports .  

Building on this work, it is hoped that other BRICS countries will be encouraged to develop their own 2050 calculators in order to explore different strategies to decarbonise their rapidly growing economies. The Grantham Institute has recently completed an analysis (in partnership with University College London) on India’s energy technologies to 2050, a report on which will be published soon.