The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality recently released the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan to significantly reduce greenhouse gases from electricity production over the next decade. The goal is to get to zero emissions by 2050, starting with a 60 to 70 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

We are pleased to welcome you to the new online home of Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions!

This newly redesigned website incorporates an extensive review of site usage data and visitors’ feedback to better present the Nicholas Institute's most-visited pages, while improving overall site usability.

Duke hosted The Coming Storm conference for journalists, policymakers, and community leaders to hear about ways to make North Carolina communities more resilient to hurricanes. The group of experts who spoke at the conference included Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and Lydia Olander, the Nicholas Institute's Ecosystem Services Program director.

Tensions over melding the existing power market system in New York with Gov. Cuomo's ambitious renewable energy goals are poised to break into the open. Senior counsel Jennifer Chen told POLITICO that carbon pricing can help ensure that energy markets reflect the real costs of generating power, but it cannot replace targeted state policies for local or flexible resources like solar or energy storage.

Hundreds of millions of people across South and Southeast Asia depend on waters that originate in the long-frozen reaches of the Tibetan plateau. Yet, a sobering study shows that the melting of Himalayan glaciers has doubled in the last decade.

Nicholas Institute Senior Counsel Jennifer Chen was recently invited to speak before the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Her remarks focused on how regional energy markets could help cut greenhouse gas emissions while providing consumer savings and economic opportunities to all states—regardless of individual state climate ambitions.

The New Republic reports that the massive Aliso Canyon storage field, which contained more than 110 underground wells, is just a small part of America’s much larger natural gas infrastructure. Approximately 15,000 such wells are active across the United States, and nearly half of them are concentrated in six states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Michigan, New York, and California.

Results from a new statewide poll of 400 registered voters in Wyoming and an online focus group of 20 Wyoming residents on topics related to wildlife and migration corridors are now available from the Ruckelshaus Institute and Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

Adding "green" projects to China's global infrastructure push won’t be enough to make the effort environmentally sound, concluded a panel of experts at a June 19 event on the ecological considerations of China's Belt and Road Initiative. Senior fellows at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions Jackson Ewing and Elizabeth Losos were among the panel speakers.