Economic Stimulus Policy Archives - Page 9 of 14 - An Economic View of the Environment

Bringing Ambition and Pragmatism to Climate Change Policy

In the world of environmental policy, it is frequently the case that pragmatism and effectiveness are framed as being at odds with passion and ambition. Even more so, in the realm of climate change, it is the rare individual who can successfully merge ambition and pragmatism in the pursuit of intelligent and effective public policy. Richard Schmalensee, my guest in the newest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” is just such a person.

In my conversation with Dick Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he reflects on his many years working on environmental policy in public service and in academia. Abundant insights arise, including important lessons for current climate policy deliberations in the United States, Europe, China, and other countries.

Professor Schmalensee was Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management for 10 years, and Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research for 12 years. Before and during those years, his research and teaching were in multiple areas of application of industrial organization, including antitrust, regulatory, energy, and environmental policies.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Directors of Resources for the Future. And I’m pleased to say that Dick is also an Associate Scholar of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, and in recent years, has been my frequent co-author (for example, here, here, and here).

In addition to all of this, during a leave of absence from MIT, he served as a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the George H.W. Bush administration.

*Professor Schmalensee in his home study in Boston, 2020*

In this latest Podcast episode, our conversation begins with Dick’s upbringing in a small town in southern Illinois, his move east to college and graduate school at MIT, his dissertation research, and the professional path that took him after receipt of his Ph.D. degree, first to California, and then back east to MIT’s Sloan School of Management. We turn to his career in regulatory economics and policy – both his scholarly research and his close involvement in policy development and implementation, where he was “in the words of ‘Hamilton,” in the room where it happened.”

*Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School, 2020*

You won’t be surprised that we take time to focus on: the pathbreaking cap-and-trade program launched by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990; and political changes in the United States that have moved environmental policy from being a truly bipartisan issue to a partisan one in today’s highly polarized politics. Much of our conversation is about the current state of climate change policy – and policy research – both domestically and globally.

*Delivering Keynote Address at the Toulouse School of Economics, 2017*

Throughout the interview, Dick is at home in his disarming style of candid conversation, with no punches pulled. He terms current U.S. climate change policy “a disaster,” saying it was a mistake “walking away from Paris, walking away from any sense that it’s important that we deal with our emissions and indeed walking away from the potential federal role in helping states and localities adapt to change.”

All of this and more is found in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” Listen to this latest discussion here, where you can also find a complete transcript of our conversation.

My conversation with Dick Schmalensee is the eleventh episode in the Environmental Insights series. 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.

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

Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Bring About Long-Term Societal Changes?

We have just released the newest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” In this latest episode, I engage in a conversation with Scott Barrett, who – more than any other environmental economist I can name – is exceptionally well equipped, based on his research and experience, to reflect intelligently on the coronavirus pandemic, and public policies to address it.

Scott is the Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Columbia University, where he also serves as Vice Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. Readers of this blog will recognize Scott as one of the world’s leading authorities analyzing alternative approaches to addressing the threat of climate change through international treaties, but he has also written for more than a decade on an economic perspective on global infectious disease policy.

In addition to his scholarly work, Scott has served as an advisor to many international organizations, including the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, and the United Nations, and he and I worked together when we were Lead Authors of the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Also, I’m very pleased to say that Scott has been a frequent participant in our programs and projects at Harvard, and has been my co-author on a number of occasions.

Scott Barrett, Ph.D. Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics Columbia University, New York

In this podcast episode, Professor Barrett assesses the massive global efforts underway to address COVID-19 and the potential impacts of the pandemic on our lives in the future. He describes how COVID-19 will be a “persistent challenge” and will result in “fundamental changes in society.” Turning to domestic U.S. policy, he comments that “what really stands out is the failure of the United States to be prepared. It’s clear that our inability to do testing has really compromised the health and well-being of Americans.” Calling it “an equitable scourge,” Scott notes that the pandemic is affecting people from all levels of income and wealth, and that “it’s in everyone’s best interest that we control it.”

Comparing the COVID-19 outbreak to the Plague in the 14^th century and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, Scott remarks, “I think this is going to have profound changes that will last at least a generation. It’s hard to know exactly what those changes will be, but there will be changes in terms of how we understand our relationship with each other, to technology, to science, to government, to international institutions. I think all of this is in play right now.”

All of this and much more is found in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” Listen to this latest discussion here, where, by the way, you can also find a complete transcript of our conversation.

My conversation with Scott Barrett is the eighth episode in the Environmental Insights series. 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.

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

Fifty Years of Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act

Fifty years ago, in 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established, and the U.S. Clean Air Act was passed. Much has transpired with air pollution policy in the United States since that time. Given the current state of Federal clean air policy in this country, it may be helpful to reflect on these fifty years of policy evolution, which is what Richard Schmalensee (of the MIT Sloan School of Management) and I do in a new article that appears in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Volume 33, Issue 4, Fall 2019), “Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act.” I hope this brief essay will stimulate you to download and read the full article.

Setting the Stage

In the article, Professor Schmalensee and I review and assess the evolution of air pollution control policy under the Clean Air Act with particular attention to the types of policy instruments used. After outlining key provisions of the 1970 act and its main changes over time, we trace and assess the historical evolution of the policy instruments used by EPA in its clean air regulations. This evolution was sometimes driven by the emergence of new air quality problems, sometimes by innovation and experimentation within EPA, and sometimes by changes in the Clean Air Act itself.

It is striking that until about 2000, EPA made increasing use of market-based instruments, enabled by major amendments to the Act in 1977 and 1990, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. In recent years, however, environmental policy has become a partisan battleground in the United States, and until now, it has not been possible to provide an effective response to climate change or to address other new and evolving air quality problems.

Policy Instruments Used under the Clean Air Act

Three major types of policy instruments have been employed under the authority of the Clean Air Act: technology standards, which specify the equipment or process to be used for compliance; performance standards, which specify the maximum quantity of emissions or maximum atmospheric concentrations that are allowed; and emissions trading systems, either in the form of emissions-reduction credit (offset) systems or cap-and-trade. In addition, taxes have sometimes been employed, although their use under the Clean Air Act has been peripheral.

The Evolution of Air Quality Policy Instruments

Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, all federal air pollution regulation involved either technology standards or performance standards. At that time, some environmental advocates argued that facilitating greater flexibility through tradable emission rights would inappropriately legitimize environmental degradation, while others questioned the very feasibility of such an approach. But over time, as the Clean Air Act was amended and as its interpretation by EPA evolved, air pollution regulation evolved from sole reliance on conventional, command-and-control regulations to greater use of emissions trading.

In the article, we examine EPA’s early experiments with emissions trading in the 1970s, and then turn to the leaded gasoline phasedown in the 1980s, implemented via a tradable performance standard by the Reagan administration. We also take a look at the U.S. approach to complying with the Montreal Protocol for stratospheric ozone protection, which involved both an excise tax and a trading system.

Next up in our review and assessment is the path-breaking sulfur dioxide allowance trading program, under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. We also examine several regional programs that were executed under the authority of the Clean Air Act, including the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM) in southern California, NO_x trading in the eastern United States, and the NO_x budget trading program.

To bring this up to date, Dick Schmalensee and I also examine climate change policies, including those of the Obama administration, as well as those of the current, Trump administration.

Conclusions

We conclude that the supporters of the 1970 Clean Air Act, who no doubt hoped that it would produce major environmental benefits, would be pleased that despite the fact that real U.S. GDP more than tripled between 1970 and 2017, aggregate emissions of the six criteria pollutants declined by 73 percent.

On the other hand, the original supporters of the 1970 Clean Air Act might be quite surprised by some aspects of the evolution of clean air regulation under the Act. For example, it is difficult to imagine that any of the supporters of the 24-page 1970 Act would have predicted how complex air pollution regulation would become over the subsequent half century. And we suspect that the evolution toward more intensive use of market-based environmental policy would also have been a surprise to those involved in passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act.

However, those involved in the bipartisan passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act would likely be disappointed that environmental policy has become a partisan battleground. It has become impossible to amend the Clean Air Act or to pass other legislation to address climate change in a serious and economically sensible manner.

The Path Ahead

In the final part of the article, we note that an implication of these five decades of experience may be that policies to address climate change and other new environmental problems should be designed in ways that make them more acceptable in the real world of politics. This could mean, for example, giving greater attention to suboptimal, second-best designs of carbon-pricing regimes, such as by earmarking revenues from taxes or allowance auctions to finance additional climate mitigation, rather than optimizing the system via cuts in distortionary taxes, or using such revenues for fairness purposes, such as with lump-sum rebates or rebates targeted to low income and other particularly burdened constituencies.

Economists might also be more effective by sometimes working to catch up with the political world by examining better design of second-best non-pricing climate policy instruments, such as clean energy standards, subsidies for green technologies, and other approaches. At some point the politics may change, of course, which is why ongoing economic research on climate policy instruments of all kinds is important.