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1. Combining Technology-Push and Demand-Pull Policies to Create More and Better Energy Jobs

Author:
Alejandro Nuñez-Jimenez, Christof Knoeri, Joern Hoppmann, and Volker H. Hoffmann
Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Policymakers guiding their economies to a low-carbon, prosperous future must strike the right balance between technology-push and demand-pull. The rapid build-out of solar photovoltaics (PV) in recent years has revealed the benefits of generous demand-pull policies, but also their limits. Here, we show why combining robust demand-pull and technology-push policies results in more effective policy mixes that go beyond innovation and deployment to help competitive domestic industries create more and better jobs.
Topic:
Energy Policy, Science and Technology, Carbon Emissions, and Energy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Technical Difficulties of Contact Tracing

Author:
Amy Robinson and James Waldo
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
In mid-October, thousands of English and Welsh citizens received phantom alerts that they had potentially been exposed to COVID-19. A quick Twitter tour reveals the spiraling fear, frustration, and confusion that ensued. Even though National Health Service (NHS) later updated the app, built using an Exposure Notification System (ENS) developed by Apple and Google, the incident still amplified mass hysteria and confusion.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Public Health, COVID-19, and Contact Tracing
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. The Geopolitics of Renewable Hydrogen

Author:
Nicola De Blasio and Fridolin Pflugmann
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
The transition to a low-carbon energy system will likely shake up the geopolitical status quo that has governed global energy systems for over a century. Policymakers need to rethink the role their country could play in a new energy world. Renewables are widely perceived as an opportunity to shatter the hegemony of fossil fuel-rich states and democratize the energy landscape. Virtually all countries have access to some renewable energy resources (especially solar and wind power) and could thus substitute foreign supply with local resources. Our research shows, however, that the role countries are likely to assume in decarbonized energy systems will be based not only on their resource endowment but also on their policy choices. Renewable hydrogen is enjoying growing political and commercial momentum as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier with the potential to play a key role in the global transition to a low-carbon economy; and it is often described as the ‘missing link’ in global decarbonization—especially for energy intensive sectors where emissions are hard to abate and electrification is not the preferred solution, such as steel production, high-temperature industrial heat, shipping, aviation, and heat for buildings. But making renewable hydrogen a significant part of the world’s future energy mix will require defining new and innovative national and international policies while developing appropriate market structures aimed at spurring innovation along value chains; scaling technologies while significantly reducing costs; and deploying enabling infrastructure at scale. Success is possible, but this transformational effort will require close coordination between policy, technology, capital, and society to avoid falling into the traps and inefficiencies of the past. Renewable hydrogen can be used for both mobility and stationary applications. As a sustainable mobility energy carrier, it can power fuel-cell electric vehicles or be the base for synthetic fuels. In stationary applications, it can be used to store renewable energy, both at utility scale or off-grid, providing backup to intermittent renewable energy sources and serving as a carbon-free heating source. From a geopolitical perspective, whether future renewable hydrogen energy systems will be as concentrated as today’s oil and gas supply or decentralized like renewables is strongly related to future market structures, technology, and enabling infrastructure availability.
Topic:
Security, Energy Policy, Science and Technology, Geopolitics, Renewable Energy, and Hydrogen
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. Using Advance Market Commitments for Public Purpose Technology Development

Author:
Alan Ho and Jake Taylor
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Over the last year, there has been a renewed focus on improving American competitiveness in key fields of science and technology. Numerous bills and executive initiatives have been implemented or proposed to dramatically increase investment into science and technology. Recent examples, including the Endless Frontiers and the Clean Futures Act, use a wide variety of policy tools to advance research and development (R&D) along multiple axis. Here we consider the free market portion of these tools, in which the private sector plays a key role in determining topic and direction, while the public sector supports these activities through high-level directives, conditional contracts, and other mechanisms. While other approaches such as public purpose consortia and R&D tax credits have been considered elsewhere, here we focus on Advance Market Commitments. Advance Market Commitments (AMCs)are a powerful policy tool that can be used to ensure that America can retain leadership in technology fields such as climate change, computing, and medicine. In an AMC, a U.S. agency commits to buying some specified new technology before that technology exists. This provides a price, specification, and framework for evaluation that can streamline decision making and funding approaches in the private sector and accelerate progress towards well defined technical outcomes without being directed about the underlying solution and steps along the path. As such, AMCs represent a powerful option for ground-up technological building where private investment replaces the role of more traditional, blue sky government funding, and the larger market for the resulting product is jump-started by an initial government market.
Topic:
Markets, Science and Technology, and Vaccine
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. The Government Technology Silver Bullet: Hiring In-House Technical Talent

Author:
Mark Lerner
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
We have seen software failures across every layer of government over the course of this pandemic. State governments have had significant issues with their unemployment insurance websites. Local governments have had outages and troubles with vaccine distribution services. Software systems at the Federal level have experienced significant security breaches. Trust in government is at “near-record lows,” in no small part because modern public services continually fail to meet people’s needs. The past year has shown that our public services continue to fail in the traditional ways: they cost too much, take too long to deliver, have a subpar quality, and regularly face security breaches. We have not made significant enough progress in improving government technology to prevent these troubles, let alone to provide effective, modern digital tools and technologies. Government services have largely not kept up with the raised expectations of the digital era, leaving many people without access to critical services they need. And yet, there is incredible momentum growing in the government technology space. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we are seeing a wave of technologists from the private sector expressing deep interest in working in the government, with many actually coming into government for the first time. Anecdotally, I’ve personally heard from all manner of technologists—from fresh graduates to high-level executives— looking to work in the public sector for the first time. Thousands of technologists are applying for jobs at the U.S. Digital Service, and thousands more are signing up to volunteer with the U.S. Digital Response. These people are deciding to work and make public services better after years of becoming more aware of the ways in which our public infrastructure is failing our neighbors in most need. The federal government is also allocating more money towards these problems, in recognition of their severity. The American Rescue Plan gave $200M to the U.S. Digital Service, and $1B to the Technology Modernization Fund. The Biden-Harris Administration’s FY2022 budget request calls for even more money for tech modernization programs. These massive investments show that Congress and the Administration take these challenges seriously, and are looking for ways to address this years-long problem. If we want to have a lasting impact on the way that our country serves its people, we need to make the most of this momentum to address the root causes beneath these repeated failures. We need to focus our efforts onto the long-term work of addressing the systemic problems that cause our most critical services to fail when they are most needed. I believe that hiring more in-house technical talent might be a silver bullet to addressing the federal government’s technology problems. In this report, I hope to convince you that we need to make hiring in-house technical talent our number one technology priority in building better digital services.
Topic:
Government, Science and Technology, COVID-19, and Information Technology
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

6. The Need for Greater Technical Talent in the Government: A Case Study

Author:
Catherine McAnney
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Lessons from the software behind America’s immigration system show us why modern technologists, from product managers to designers, are needed in government now more than ever. We know government tech projects often fail. Timelines get pushed out, contractors rapidly turn over, costs increase, and, ultimately, public services fail to meet the needs of the American people—often just as they need them most. One of the major reasons for these problems is that the federal government does not have the modern technical talent necessary to deliver large-scale IT programs that consistently work for the end user. This does not just include software engineers, but designers, researchers, and product managers too. In this case study, we’ll look at this issue through the lens of one of the most storied federal IT programs—the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) Electronic Immigration System (ELIS). We found that the program had challenges with its technical talent through the burdensome, nontechnical oversight and the lack of technical expertise on the ground. This case study pulls information from 13 GAO and OIG reports between 2005 and 2021, as well as interviews with 6 current or former senior leaders within USCIS, with a particular focus towards the technical talent associated with the project.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Immigration, Governance, and Information Technology
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

7. Supporting a Public Purpose in Research & Development: The Role of Tax Credits

Author:
Jake Taylor
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Tax credits for research and development are a means of incentivizing the private sector to invest their own resources on challenging problems. However, in practice, the fungibility of tax credits and other monetary elements can lead to misalignment between the public good represented by R&D and the actions of the company. In this policy brief, we consider the existing mechanism of tax credits. We see how they can encourage private sector risk-taking to enable research and development (R&D) outcomes. However, our goal is to go beyond economic growth benefits, and to include the less tangible considerations of public good and public purpose in the research and development domain. We then suggest an expansion of tax credits focused on supporting the researchers involved in the R&D and encouraging innovation in both large organizations and in startups and small businesses. This approach builds upon the existing framework of agency-led, mission-defined support of the private sector used by the U.S. government, as occurs in other programs such as America’s Seed Fund (sometimes known by its acronyms, SBIR and STTR). The integration of specific agency- and mission-focused elements to the credit system ensures that these additive credits support research and researchers whose R&D outcomes will improve the health, prosperity, and opportunity for the U.S. as a whole. Specific means of implementing this public-purpose R&D credit system under existing authorities within the executive branch are suggested, along with the public-facing mechanisms for creating and maintaining the evaluation approach of what constitutes “public purpose” as science and society progress.
Topic:
Economics, Science and Technology, International Affairs, Tax Systems, and Tax Credits
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

8. The Role of Blockchain in Green Hydrogen Value Chains

Author:
Nicola De Blasio and Charles Hua
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
A rainbow of colors currently dominates almost every conversation on the transition to a low-carbon economy: green, grey, blue, turquoise, pink, yellow[1] - an ever-increasing palette to describe the same colorless, odorless, and highly combustible molecule, hydrogen. The only difference is the chemical process used to produce it. The colors of hydrogen are crucial for the energy transition because each production pathway generates different amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while grey hydrogen, produced from fossil fuels, yields up to 20 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of hydrogen, green hydrogen, produced from renewable energy sources like solar and wind, yields no emissions. Furthermore, although these colors all refer to the same molecule, production costs differ: green hydrogen remains substantially more costly today. With aggressive development and deployment of electrolyzers and other hydrogen technologies at scale, green hydrogen could become cost-competitive with blue hydrogen, produced from natural gas with carbon capture, by 2030 in many countries.[2] Overall, the rate at which green hydrogen costs decrease will also depend on government policies and incentives, such as carbon pricing and tax credits. Therein lies a critical challenge for the successful transition to a low-carbon economy. As energy systems increasingly evolve from centralized to decentralized, from “grey” to “green,” stakeholders will need to efficiently account for and track emissions and green molecules in a transparent, secure, and standardized way, and must be able to do so along value chains from production to consumption.
Topic:
Environment, Science and Technology, Natural Resources, Innovation, Renewable Energy, Hydrogen, and Energy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

9. The Public-Purpose Consortium: Enabling Emerging Technology with a Public Mission

Author:
Jake Taylor
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Imagine a speculative technology, one that is destined to change lives and improve the world, but also one where many scientific and practical questions remain to be answered. Companies and entrepreneurs, already seeing the potential, have begun spinning up new efforts and launching startups to realize products and services. You know that investors are likely underestimating both the difficulty posed by the technology and the long-term impact. The science and engineering remain far from that necessary to achieve those goals, much less understand the unintended consequences. You are now tasked with enabling the economic growth implied by these opportunities while ensuring both scientific progress and minimizing unintended negative outcomes. What do you do? Faced with this challenge in the still esoteric field of quantum information science, leaders in the Government and I worked with stakeholders from across the United States and around the world to build a foundational approach for this new technology. Rather than using a roadmap with product or milestone driven development, we instead focused on building a community around the emerging technologies and scientific challenges necessary to build quantum computers. These are devices that operate at the very limits set by nature in what and how they compute and are fantastically hard to create – so much so that their basic operation and architecture are areas of active research. And their impact is fantastically broad, thus the need to both temper expectations and enable cooperation. In executing a program to enable this new sector, we developed a specific approach for solving the challenge of blending profit motive and public good that leverages the mechanism of consortia. We are at a moment in time where cooperation between public-purpose stakeholders and profit-motive stakeholders can be an effective means of integrating public purpose into technology as it emerges. This brief covers the basic concept of a public-purpose consortium (PPC), examination of what combination of factors lead to their use for emerging technologies, and considers the key principles for organizing PPCs and enabling their success: Build Community, Enable Cooperation, Ensure Value, Institute Governance, and Keep It Lightweight.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Stakeholders, and Engineering
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. Technology Factsheet: Synthetic Biology

Author:
Colin O'Leary
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Synthetic biology (sometimes referred to as “SynBio”) is broadly defined as the application of engineering principles to biology, and in practice, refers to emerging technology that allows living organisms to be modified to serve user-defined purposes. While traditional biotechnology involves the transfer of smaller amounts of genetic material from one biological species to another, synthetic biology will permit the inten- tional construction of an entire organism.1 It has the potential to allow scientists to design living organisms distinct from any found in nature and to redesign existing organisms to have novel or enhanced qualities.2 The use cases of synthetic biology range from developing new therapeutics and vaccines for infectious disease to manufacturing novel biomaterials, biosensors, and biofuels. As scientists better understand biological systems, the potential applications of SynBio are anticipated to expand in scale and scope. The continued growth of the bioeconomy—defined as the “production, utilization and conservation of biological resources, including related knowledge, science, technology, and innovation, to provide information, products, processes and services across all economic sectors”—is giving space for synthetic biology technology to become a more significant part of the overall economic landscape.3 As with any technology that has a high potential for impact, SynBio presents a variety of pronounced opportunities, as well as risks. As the technology continues to mature and the number of market-ready applications grows, it is important for policymakers to consider how to promote the large number of opportunities the technology presents in the space of health and medicine, energy production, environmental recovery, food production, and more, while simultaneously protecting the public from foreseeable negative impli- cations and risks, such as weaponization, consumer safety, and ecological stability. Since synthetic biology bears significant similarities to previous biotechnology research on genetical- ly-modified organisms and recombinant DNA, existing regulations in the United States place the majority of synthetic biology products into the current biotechnology regulatory framework. As SynBio becomes more prominent though, it will be important for regulatory schemes to uniquely target the technology and its implications beyond those captured through biotechnology frameworks. Policymakers must continue to engage in the progression of the technology, understanding how regulation and governance must evolve to ensure the public can realize the opportunities, while being protected from the risks.
Topic:
Health, Science and Technology, and Biology
Political Geography:
Global Focus

11. A Vision for Nuclear Security

Author:
Matthew Bunn, Nickolas Roth, and William H. Tobey
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
The goal of global nuclear security efforts should be a world in which all countries with nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium (HEU), separated plutonium, and nuclear facilities whose sabotage could cause a major radiation release have reduced the risk of nuclear theft and sabotage to the lowest possible level. This will require policymakers, regulators, and operators to commit to a continuous process of striving for excellence in nuclear security performance.
Topic:
Security, Environment, Science and Technology, International Security, Natural Resources, and Nuclear Power
Political Geography:
Global Focus

12. Combating Complacency about Nuclear Terrorism

Author:
Matthew Bunn, Nickolas Roth, and William H. Tobey
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Complacency about the threat of nuclear terrorism—the belief that nuclear and radiological terrorism threats are minimal and existing security measures are sufficient to address them—is the fundamental barrier to strengthening nuclear security. Many factors can lead to complacency, but the most significant contributors are lack of knowledge about: events related to nuclear terrorism; weaknesses of nuclear security systems; and the capabilities demonstrated by thieves around the world. People will be more likely to take action to strengthen nuclear security if they believe that nuclear terrorism poses a real threat to their own country’s interests and their actions can significantly reduce the threat. There have been many incidents in recent years that demonstrate the need for strong and sustainable security at both military and civilian nuclear facilities.
Topic:
Security, Environment, Science and Technology, International Security, Natural Resources, and Nuclear Power
Political Geography:
Global Focus