Balancing goals
How can we improve our thinking about balancing long-term climate goals and the alleviation of near-term human suffering? Beyond working directly on how these goals are weighed against one another, we also produce information relevant to such decisions — on the costs, timing, and incentives that shape which trade-offs are actually available.
Illustrative recent work
Balancing goals
Weighing long-term climate objectives against near-term human welfare — and asking how that balance shifts with development, adaptation, and the rate at which the climate changes.
- An analysis of how economic development — through greater adoption of air conditioning — can offset the heat-related impacts of warming, introducing a "Cooling Deficit Index" to identify where high temperatures are most experienced without cooling (Wongel et al., 2025).
- Evidence that investments in climate adaptation deliver near-term economic returns that complement the long-term returns from emissions reduction (Duan et al., 2025).
- An analysis of how much more emissions would occur if only the wealthier countries mitigated their greenhouse-gas emissions — balancing climate and development goals (Duan et al., 2020).
- An analysis of how adapting to the rate of climate change differs from adapting to its amount, using sea-level rise as a case study (Shayegh et al., 2016).
Information relevant to balancing goals
Work that does not weigh the goals directly, but produces the cost, learning, and incentive information on which any such balancing depends.
- An examination of predictive skill in technology learning rates, finding that past learning rates are poor predictors of future learning rates (Carlino et al., 2025).
- An evaluation of the relative benefits of different types of research and development for clean-energy technologies (Shayegh et al., 2017).
- An examination of whether using a carbon tax to generate government revenue could create an incentive to continue carbon emissions (Wang et al., 2017).