Economic Policy Archives - Page 14 of 39 - An Economic View of the Environment

Is the Oil-and-Gas Industry Undergoing a Transformation?

It is probably fair to say that there are some environmental advocates, at least in the United States, who consider the oil and gas industry to be the moral equivalent of tobacco companies, that is, simply out to maximize profits, without any consideration given to the broader, social implications of the use of their products. Furthermore, some such critics may paint the oil and gas sector with a broad brush –ignoring ways in which the various companies may differ from one another.

My guest in the latest episode of my podcast, released today, Spencer Dale, and – more to the point – his employer, may provide a counter-example. Spencer is Group Chief Economist of BP, the multinational oil & gas company based in London, where he leads BP’s global economics team. As readers of this blog will know, in these podcasts – “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program – I talk with well-informed people from academia, government, industry, and NGOs. Spencer Dale has had very significant experience in two of these realms – government and industry.

In his current role at BP, Spencer Dale manages the company’s global economics team, and is responsible for advising the board and executive team on economic drivers and trends in global energy. He previously served in a number of roles at the Bank of England, including as executive director for financial stability, a member of the Financial Policy Committee, and ultimately Chief Economist. You can hear our complete conversation here.

The swift and sharp decline in oil demand experienced in recent months, driven by the global coronavirus pandemic and policy responses to it, has had profound impacts on the oil and gas industry, due to falling prices and reduced revenues. But Spencer Dale notes that it may also create opportunities for companies and countries to support the transition to cleaner energy sources as they strive toward net-zero emissions in the coming decades.

“I think the pandemic has highlighted the fragility of the planet and the unsustainable way in which we are living on the planet today. Moreover, the scale of the government interventions we are seeing around the world give us an unprecedented opportunity to use those government interventions to boost the economy in such a way that the growth we see going forward is greener and more sustainable than it otherwise would have been,” he says.

Spencer predicts that the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to take its toll on oil demand as people and businesses conclude that they and their employees can work just as productively at home as in an office, and can save considerable amounts of time and money via reduced business travel.

“I think the far greater impact on oil demand is not through these behavioral changes, however, it’s through the economic impacts,” he says. “Hopefully the pandemic will be brought under control within the next year or so, but the economic scars from the pandemic are likely to last far longer, and in particular, those economic scars are likely to fall disproportionally on emerging markets around the world.”

Dale says he is proud of the leadership role BP is playing in the industry by pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and by shifting its business profile away from being an “international oil company” toward being an “integrated energy company.”

“The nature of energy demand is likely to shift materially over the next 20 to 30 years, away from fossil fuels,” he observes. “And that’s to be replaced by very significant growth in renewable energy led by wind and solar power, and so we want to pivot away from those fossil fuels into a wider energy company.”

Dale also acknowledges the difficult challenge facing policymakers as they try to revive their economies and address the threats posed by climate change.

“If you ask governments today, with levels of unemployment…going back to levels not seen since many decades, if you ask them to trade off near-term jobs versus long-term climate issues, that’s a hard challenge,” he states. “But there doesn’t need to be a tradeoff between those two. You can design smart policies which are both good for long-run sustainability and also generate jobs in the near-term.”

All of this and more is found in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” I hope you will listen to this latest discussion here. You can find a complete transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

My conversation with Spencer Dale is the 18th episode in the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change
Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition
Paul Watkinson, Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Jos Delbeke, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and formerly Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Climate Action
David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, and founding co-director of the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School.
Sue Biniaz, who was the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator for the United States from 1989 until early 2017.
Richard Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kelley Kizier, Associate Vice President for International Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.
David Hone, Chief Climate Change Adviser, Shell International.
Vicky Bailey, 30 years of experience in corporate and government positions in the energy sector.
David Victor, professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.
Lisa Friedman, reporter on the climate desk at the The New York Times.
Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environmental policy for The New York Times from the Washington bureau.

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Prospects for Climate Policy under the Incoming Biden Administration

It is now more than two weeks since the November 3rd U.S. election, and 12 days since the Biden-Harris ticket was declared the victor in the electoral college by all of the major news media, but President Trump still refuses to concede, citing (totally discredited) claims that the election was stolen from him by widespread voting fraud. While litigation continues, as well as the war of words, in my most recent podcast, recorded yesterday and released today, we examine the implications of the Presidential and the Congressional elections for climate change policy – both domestic and international.

Usually in my podcast – “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program – I talk with well-informed people from academia, government, industry, or NGOs. But, as I wrote in my blog last week, I worry that advocates and other well-informed people may engage in wishful thinking when making predictions about the next administration’s future climate policy initiatives. It is better for this purpose that I engage with people who are knowledgeable and make it their business to examine such questions objectively – I’m talking about practicing journalists, and not ones from the opinion pages, but rather reporters.

I was therefore delighted to welcome someone whom I greatly respect and with whom I have had the pleasure of working – from my perch in academia – for many years, Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environmental policy for The New York Times from the newspaper’s Washington bureau. You can hear our complete conversation here.

Coral Davenport joined the New York Times in 2013, having first covered environment for Congressional Quarterly, then Politico, and then the National Journal, which is where she was when she and I first spoke. I should note that she began her ascendency in the profession of journalism at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, fresh out of Smith College.

Our conversation in the podcast is wide-ranging and nearly comprehensive on the prognosis for climate change policy during the next two to four years, including: how the climate issue may have affected the election outcome; the international dimensions of climate change policy, including the Paris Agreement; the outlook for major climate legislation in the Congress; other, non-climate legislation that can have significant impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, such as economic stimulus packages and infrastructure bills; and regulatory approaches to climate change, including executive orders (Oval Office directives) and rulemaking, as well as the court challenges they may face. That is a great deal of territory, but all of it is covered!

At the outset of our conversation, Coral Davenport credits President-elect Biden with tapping into voter sentiment on climate change, and using it to his advantage during the campaign.

“This is the first presidential election with climate change emerging as a top-tier issue, and a lot of that was because Biden as a candidate chose to do that. He chose to bring it up in a way that no other candidate ever has,” she says. “It’s clear that the political calculus had changed on that [issue] and campaign advisers saw it as something that would at least not drive away voters, and could attract and excite other voters.”

Despite the Biden victory, Coral expresses skepticism that the new administration will muster the support that it needs, both from the left and the right, to pass meaningful energy and climate legislation in the near-term. She notes, however, that the president is expected to re-commit the United States to the Paris Agreement immediately, which will be one step toward reestablishing U.S. credibility on the issue.

“The U.S. has a long way to go to build back its credibility on the world stage on climate, and I think that the Biden Administration will be received with open arms in the international climate community,” she says. “The Biden Administration, I know from interviewing people on the transition [team] and during the campaign, anticipates from day one starting to move forward aggressively with executive authority to put back in place at least some of the big climate regulations that the Trump Administration rolled back.”

For example, she cites the incoming administration’s likely move to reinstate aggressive vehicle fuel economy standards, which were scaled back by the Trump Administration.

“Trump didn’t eliminate it, but he rolled it so far back that essentially he basically canceled it out. We do expect to see a Biden Administration come in and reinstate it very quickly, probably with some new stronger terms. That one is actually pretty straightforward. The federal government has imposed fuel economy standards for decades. And I don’t think it’s ever been questioned that it has the legal authority to do that.”

Coral also expresses some cautious optimism that Congress might agree on a Clean Energy Standard, which would mandate a percentage of zero-carbon sources in the U.S. electricity grid, and for the possibility of green energy components to be folded into a COVID-19 economic relief package and an infrastructure funding bill.

All of this and much more is found in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” I hope you will listen to this latest discussion here. You can find a complete transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

My conversation with Coral Davenport is the 17th episode in the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change
Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition
Paul Watkinson, Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Jos Delbeke, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and formerly Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Climate Action
David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, and founding co-director of the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School.
Sue Biniaz, who was the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator for the United States from 1989 until early 2017.
Richard Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kelley Kizier, Associate Vice President for International Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.
David Hone, Chief Climate Change Adviser, Shell International.
Vicky Bailey, 30 years of experience in corporate and government positions in the energy sector.
David Victor, professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.
Lisa Friedman, reporter on the climate desk at the New York Times.

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Prospects for Energy and Climate Change Policy under the New U.S. Administration

In my previous blog post, earlier this week, I offered my personal views regarding “What Do the 2020 U.S. Election Results Portend for Climate Change Policy?” Today, I’m pleased to turn to the views of someone else, Jason Bordoff, a well-informed academic lawyer, who spent considerable time in important climate-policy positions in the Obama administration, and who I assume (and hope, but no hints have been forthcoming from him) will be a candidate for key energy-climate-policy positions in the Biden-Harris administration.

My conversation (interview) with Jason is the most recent webinar in our series, Conversations on Climate Change and Energy Policy, sponsored by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA). As you know, in this webinar series we feature leading authorities on climate change policy, whether from academia, the private sector, NGOs, or government. Jason Bordoff has had significant experience in three of those realms: academia, government, and NGOs. A video recording and transcript of the webinar are available here.

The ultimate professional compliment that I can offer someone after having read something they’ve written is to think to myself, “Gosh, I wish I had written that.” There are two people about whose work I’ve thought that regularly, and neither is an economist like me. One is a political scientist – David Victor at the University of California, San Diego, with whom I engaged recently in my podcast, as described in a previous post at this blog. The other is a lawyer, Jason Bordoff, my guest in yesterday’s webinar

Jason is the Founding Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he is Professor of Professional Practice. In the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2013, he served as Special Assistant to the President, and Director for Energy and Climate Change at the National Security Council, and before that, he was at the National Economic Council and the Council on Environmental Quality. Prior to joining the administration, he was the Policy Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, which is where, I believe, we originally met, when I was commissioned to write a proposal – intended for the incoming Obama administration – for a U.S. cap-and-trade system to address climate change. So, it was a great pleasure for me to welcome Jason to our series, “Conversation on Climate Change and Energy Policy” (with both of us displaying our relatively recent COVID beards).

In our discussion, Jason maintains that the incoming Biden-Harris Administration will have the opportunity to both lift the nation out of recession and combat global climate change by crafting a thoughtful economic stimulus plan containing a significant green energy investment component.

“There is a need for fiscal stimulus and smart government investments that help the economy recover, particularly when the cost of government borrowing is so low. Now is the time to make investments that both help the economy today and help to deliver economic returns in future investments in infrastructure.”

He uses the metaphor of a Venn diagram to illustrate the way he looks at the new administration’s challenge when it assumes power in January.

“If you take a circle of things that are good fiscal stimulus to support economic recovery and a circle of things that are good to advance clean energy, there is certainly overlap with, for example, investment and support for renewable energy, and building infrastructure that will support a transition toward electrification of the transport sector.”

Jason Bordoff admits that President-elect Biden’s proposed $2 trillion of investments in clean energy won’t be an easy sell, particularly if Republicans hold the Senate. However, he notes that during the campaign, President-Elect Biden called for significant increases in funding for research and development on clean energy technologies including grid-scale energy storage, small modular nuclear reactors, and capturing carbon dioxide from power plants. A number of Senate Republicans, including Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), have called for the same. Indeed, Jason notes, during the past four years, despite Trump administration proposals for deep cuts, federal budgets for clean energy innovation actually increased by 25 percent, due to broad bipartisan support.

“But as difficult as it may be to move forward on climate legislation, I think the economy simply needs a lot of help from Washington, and I think both sides of the aisle are going to have to come together,” he remarks, pointing to likely bipartisan support for wind energy projects in the Midwest, and carbon capture and nuclear power in other parts of the country.

Aside from the stimulus package, Bordoff notes that the Biden-Harris Administration will have a number of other policy tools at their disposal to address climate change, including rolling back some of the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders, issuing new Executive Orders, and promulgating smart and effective regulation of local pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is that executive authority agenda, and still, hope springs eternal that there may be an opportunity at some point to work across the aisle on legislation,” he says, citing recent remarks by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Murkowski in which they spoke about the possibility of establishing a national carbon price as one part of comprehensive energy legislation. “I think a well-designed carbon price can do a lot more than many people appreciate, complemented by a range of other tools, to address our market failures.”

Beyond the domestic climate change agenda, Bordoff also emphasizes the need for the United States to reengage with its allies on climate policy, beginning with Biden’s promise to rejoin the Paris Agreement shortly after he assumes office.

“One of the things that really gets me excited about the potential to make progress on climate in the Biden-Harris Administration is that President-Elect Biden has such deep experience in international affairs and takes so seriously the need to rebuild American leadership and cooperation with our allies in the world. “This is the most global of problems. Every ton [of CO₂ emissions] contributes equally to the problem, and 85 percent of the emissions come from outside the U.S., so we are not going to solve this problem unless we engage in and elevate the importance of climate change in all of our matters of foreign policy and diplomacy.”

Finally, following our one-on-one discussion, Jason Bordoff fielded questions from a number of the 200 participants viewing the Forum, eliciting thoughts on issues ranging from environmental justice to international trade. All of this and more can be seen and heard at this website. I hope you will check it out.

Previous webinar in this series – Conversations on Climate Change and Energy Policy – have featured Meghan O’Sullivan’s thoughts on Geopolitics and Upheaval in Oil Markets, Jake Werksman’s assessment of the European Union’s Green New Deal, Rachel Kyte’s examination of “Using the Pandemic Recovery to Spur the Clean Transition,” Joseph Stiglitz’s reflections on “Carbon Pricing, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Green Economic Recovery,” and Joe Aldy reflecting on “Lessons from Experience for Greening an Economic Stimulus.”

The next HPCA Conversation on Climate Change and Energy Policy will take place in January. Please register in advance for that event at the HPCA website.