Welcome to my personal home page. I’m a senior fellow affiliated with the Climate Realism Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor emeritus at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where I served on the faculty from 2004 to 2025. The primary focus of my work is clean energy and climate innovation policy. In addition to publishing academic work, I collaborate with think-tanks, non-profits, and other interested organizations to develop and advance policies. My recent partners include the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, ITIF’s Center for Clean Energy Innovation, Clean Tomorrow, EFI Foundation, Federation of American Scientists, and RMI.
On this site, you’ll find information about my past teaching, publications, research interests, and service activities. (I no longer maintain these pages. For my current activities, please visit my CFR and consulting home pages.) You can find my full c.v. here and my bio here. I welcome contacts from scholars, students, and policy practitioners. You can follow me on X and Bluesky @ProfDavidHart and find me on LinkedIn, too.
Highlights:
I joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in climate and energy, where I’m helping to lead the Climate Realism Initiative. Please find my recent work for CFR here.
I received the Schar School’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025.
I welcomed the third cohort of early career researchers (assistant professors, postdocs, etc.) to an Energy and Climate-Tech Innovation Policy boot camp with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
I was named a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
I moderated a fireside chat on the main stage of the 2023 ARPA-E summit with Arati Prabhakar, President Biden’s science advisor.
Featured Work:
“Compete, Don’t Retreat – A Smarter U.S. Response to China’s Automotive Revolution,” Council on Foreign Relations, December 2025.
“Global Energy Innovation Index” (with Colin Cunliff, Mia Beams, and Akkshath Subrahmanian), Council on Foreign Relations, November 2025.
“Re-Energizing America” (with Claire C. Cody, Marcella Mulholland, Alex Breckel, and Evan Chapman), Clean Tomorrow, November 2025.
“To Boost Energy Innovation, Strengthen Policies That Pull Technologies Into the Market” Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2024, 91-94.
Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission (Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy) with Varun Sivaram, Colin Cunliff, Julio Friedmann, and David Sandalow, September 2020.
Unlocking Energy Innovation (with Richard K. Lester), (MIT Press, 2012).