Arjun Makhijani, PhD., Senior Fellow at Just Solutions, was President of the former Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. He has served as a consultant on energy issues to utilities, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Edison Electric Institute, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, & several agencies of the UN.
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD Unaffordable energy bills impact all of society—including those who can afford to regularly pay their own bills. The direct impacts of unaffordable energy for families experiencing economic stress include ill-health, hunger, utility shutoffs and even evictions because of their inability to pay all the
By Jennifer Moon, PhD., and Arjun Makhijani, PhD. With many of our partners, Just Solutions urges the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to take immediate action requiring that the home mortgages they back for new construction conform to the updated 2021 International Energy
Author: Arjun Makhijani, PhD, Senior Fellow, Just Solutions. President Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. VIEW THE PDF Hiroshima was obliterated on August 6, 1945 razed to the ground by just one bomb from a single plane. That day, Mitsuno Ochi1 had been waiting to withdraw money from a bank;
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Focusing on methane and natural processes to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations In my first blog post of this series, I had noted that we need to do more than eliminate greenhouse gas emissions to keep the temperature lid at 1.5°C. This is because decarbonizing
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Point-source carbon capture and sequestration: Also not the answer. In the first blog post of this series, I explored air capture of CO2 and found it unsuitable as a way to address mounting greenhouse gas concentrations due to cost as well as ecological considerations. In
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Nuclear Power: Not clean, not necessary, not affordable; not timely The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s think tank, claims “existing reactors as well as new advanced nuclear technologies will provide the backbone of our clean energy transition….” Is that right? Or is a dying industry
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Decarbonizing the U.S. electricity sector by phasing out existing nuclear is technically, economically, and environmentally better This post is a complement to a prior one, which dealt with: (1) Is nuclear clean? and (2) Can new nuclear power plants reasonably be expected to contribute significantly
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Keeping the lights on with solar and wind energy I’ve written two posts on nuclear – one on new plants and the other on existing ones – indicating we shouldn’t build new ones and phase out existing ones. Some people with impeccable credentials don’t agree.
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Three major electricity grid disasters in just over a year are exemplary of the havoc that climate extremes are causing and what needs to be done about it: (i) the howling winds of the 2020 derecho, when hundreds of thousands lost power in Iowa and Illinois
By Arjun Makhijani, PhD. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2017, about 50 million U.S. households were under such economic stress that they could not cover an unexpected $400 expense, like the breakdown of a car or a sudden health problem, without borrowing; many are unable to cover