Volume 10, Issue 2
September 21, 2020 – September 27, 2020
Neha Chauhan '21 | Sabrina Reguyal ‘22 | Joe Kawalec '21 | Rei Zhang ‘21 | Amy Amatya '21

The Energy Crises Revealed by COVID
July 7, 2020 | Energy Research & Social Science Journal | Kathleen Brosemer
The socially disruptive nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought underlying energy justice issues to the fore of the social sciences. Energy, though not an explicit human need, is a means of accessing basic human necessities with a large stake in how we access food, transport water, provide education, and turn shelters into homes. COVID-19 has been a compounding, rather than causal, factor in our country’s already-existing energy crises, including: 1) insufficient power for providing basic health services, 2) increased vulnerability to the Coronavirus in those exposed to energy sector-produced pollution, 3) inability to meet basic energy needs in the wake of joblessness, and 4) corporate control over civilian energy fates and operations. -AA

“Energy sovereignty is defined as the right for communities, rather than corporate interests, to control access to and decision making regarding the sources, scales, and forms of ownership characterizing access to energy services."

Researchers Urge Federal Moonshot for Clean Energy
September 17, 2020 | Scientific American | David Iaconangelo
A research group at Columbia University has released a document that contains a road map of policies for the winner of this year’s presidential election to start developing clean energy technology. The group has prepared these recommendations to “hit the ground running” on the path to net-zero carbon emissions with the next administration. Some of the plan’s recommendations include tripling funding for energy research and increasing development of clean-tech like carbon capture and hydrogen fuel. This ramped-up funding would also be given to CO2 removal research, which involves “negative emissions” technology that could use direct air capture or bioenergy to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These “next wave” technologies should be developed rapidly “throughout the next decade,” they wrote. -JK

U.S. Department of Energy Announces Establishment of Office of Arctic Energy
September 17, 2020 | U.S. Department of Energy | U.S. Department of Energy
On September 17th, 2020, the US Secretary of Energy and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman jointly announced the re-establishment of a Department of Energy (DOE) Arctic Energy Office (AEO). The office was officially established in 2001, but work lapsed due to a lack of funding. The new, reinvigorated AEO will be focusing on the energy future of the Arctic, such as international cooperation on Arctic issues, research on fossil fuels, and development of advanced micro grids and nuclear power systems. The office will be staffed by three interim members in partnership with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. -RZ