Environmental impacts of demand-side technologies and strategies for carbon mitigation

As global leaders convened at the UN last week to sign on to the Paris climate agreement, they committed to a wide range of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Expectations are particularly high for two of the most widely recognized solutions to climate change: energy efficiency and renewable energy. But how much do we know about the environmental impacts of a large-deployment of these technologies—including the benefits or costs from a life-cycle perspective? And by how m