Energy Economics Archives - An Economic View of the Environment

Observations from Dubai Midway through COP-28

We’re half way through the 28^th Conference of the Parties (COP-28) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and so it’s a convenient time to assess developments. In a new podcast, I engage in conversation with Jonathan Banks, the global director of the Methane Pollution Prevention Program at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF).

This is a special mid-COP episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” which is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Listen to the conversation here.

COP 28, which began on November 30^th and is scheduled to run through December 12^th, has featured a great deal of discussion on a variety of issues, but with an unprecedented amount of attention given to methane emissions and mitigation.

At the beginning of our conversation, Jonathan Banks states, “I’m just so amazed at how much attention and action I’ve seen on methane mitigation, and that’s a huge change because I’ve been coming to the COP for a long time, and we’ve never ever seen anything like this.”

Leading up to COP-28, there have been growing efforts to have countries incorporate methane reduction pledges into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the terms of the Paris Agreement.

“Many times, countries will lump all greenhouse gases together and create one target for the total greenhouse gases, but the push has been to get explicit mentions of methane in their NDCs, and we’ve made a lot of progress in that space over the last year to get a really high percentage of members of the Global Methane Pledge with methane into their NDC,” Banks says. “The new push really is to go beyond that and to get countries to set specific targets for methane in their NDCs.”

In the recently announced Sunnylands Statement, the United States and China, two of the largest methane emitting countries, pledged to include methane emission pledges in their NDCs in the next round, representing one of the ways that bilateral and multilateral agreements can supplement the efforts taking place under the auspices of the UNFCCC.

Jonathan Banks notes that “for all its positives [the UNFCCC process] does have some faults in that it is extremely cumbersome. It is difficult to move things at any speed through that process, and speed is what we need when it comes to methane… The other day, Inger Andersen, the head of the United Nations Environment Program, described methane as our lifeboat and we have to take it. It is the thing that we need to do the fastest in order to start to bend the curve on methane emissions. And so being outside of the UNFCCC process at least gives the opportunity for greater speed.”

Banks says he is also encouraged by several announcements at COP-28 of major pieces of domestic legislation and regulation.

“The United States announced their final regulations for the oil and gas sector, which could achieve up to an 80 percent reduction from the regulated sources it will cover. We saw the Canadian government announce their draft regulations, which we’ll get about a 75 percent reduction from the oil and gas sector. And right before COP, we had the European Union finalize its regulations for oil and gas, and that also included, for the first time ever a methane import standard, which will apply to all gas that is bought and sold into the E.U.”

Much of the attention on methane up until now has focused on emissions from the oil and gas sector, partly because it the low-hanging fruit (low abatement cost sources) in many — but not all — jurisdictions around the world. But coal-bed methane, landfills (waste), and agriculture (both livestock and paddy rice) are very important in some countries. And as emissions from fossil fuels are cut, these other sources will become the predominant focus of policy. In particular, Banks emphasizes that there will be increased attention to the agriculture sector.

“2030 is when we need to hit our 30 percent reduction target to keep 1.5 [global temperature rise] in reach. But after 2030, most of the methane emissions reductions are going to need to come from the agriculture sector. That’s where the growth will be. That’s where we will have made the least progress,” he says. “Because the [mitigation] costs are typically high and then it’s just harder to deploy things, there really needs to be a lot of focus on developing more solutions and building out the science around this… Those are some big things [and I am excited to see] a lot more attention to this.”

On a broader issue of great consequence, Banks says he is also heartened by the improving relationship between the U.S. and China, which will most likely increase their cooperation on climate policy.

“What we saw for the last year and a half or so or almost two years is that China and the U.S. weren’t talking on climate or anything else, and that is never a good thing. When they’re not talking, we’re not making any progress. I know that [lead U.S. climate negotiator] John Kerry’s team put in a massive amount of work to develop the relationship again in a way that allows for the U.S. and China to speak and to reach agreement and make progress. I’m really excited about that,” he says.

For this and much more, I hope you’ll listen to our complete conversation in this 55^th episode of the Environmental Insights podcast series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. 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 Washington.
Spencer Dale, BP Group Chief Economist.
Richard Revesz, professor at the NYU School of Law.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment and Law at Yale University.
William Hogan, Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard.
Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
John Graham, Dean Emeritus, Paul O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.
Gernot Wagner, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University.
John Holdren, Research Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Goulder, Shuzo Nishihara Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, Stanford University.
Suzi Kerr, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund.
Sheila Olmstead, Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin.
Robert Pindyck, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Gilbert Metcalf, Professor of Economics, Tufts University.
Navroz Dubash, Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Paul Joskow, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics emeritus, MIT.
Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.
Orley Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University.
Jonathan Wiener, the William and Thomas Perkins Professor of Law, Duke Law School.
Lori Bennear, the Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.
Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and now Vice Chair of S&P Global.
Jeffrey Holmstead, who leads the Environmental Strategies Group at Bracewell in Washington, DC.
Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Environmental Engineering at Harvard.
Michael Greenstone, Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago.
Billy Pizer, Vice President for Research & Policy Engagement, Resources for the Future.
Daniel Bodansky, Regents’ Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.
Catherine Wolfram, Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, currently on leave at the Harvard Kennedy School.
James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University.
Mary Nichols, long-time leader in California, U.S., and international climate change policy.
Geoffrey Heal, Donald Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School.
Kathleen Segerson, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut.
Meredith Fowlie, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U.C. Berkeley.
Karen Palmer, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future.
Severin Borenstein, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management and Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School.
Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University.
Nathaniel Keohane, President, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES)

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

Adam Smith, Methane Emissions, and Climate Change

Most of my guests in my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” have been academic economists, but I’ve also had the privilege of talking with some leading lights from other disciplines, including ones that seem adjacent to economics, such as political science and law, and also some that are further afield, such as physics and chemistry. Most recently, I had the opportunity to delve into a realm that bridges the humanities (in particular, history) and social science (in particular, economics), by talking with a star in the field of economic history, Emma Rothschild, the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard, and Fellow at Magdalene College and Honorary Professor of History and Economics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Professor Rothschild, who serves as director of the Harvard Joint Center for History and Economics and a faculty contributor to the Visualizing Climate and Loss project, has devoted much of her academic career to research and teaching at the intersection of history, economics, and the environment, where she sees growing opportunities to affect thinking about climate change.

“One of the things that makes me very optimistic now about my field is that so many people interested in economic history are now seeing that the environment and climate [are] part of economic history and vice versa,” she states. “I’ve been … struck by how many of the top [academic job] candidates this year actually have either environmental papers, climate papers, or history papers as part of their portfolios, and in many cases, both actually. I just think the PhD students are kind of understanding this much faster than perhaps the educational establishment.”

Rothschild has focused a considerable part of her scholarly work on the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, credited for helping originate the study of free market economies. Specifically, Rothschild says she became intrigued by why some people blame Smith for today’s global climate change problem.

“I became interested in the question, ‘Well, did he say anything that could conceivably have led people to think this? And what did he, to the extent that we can discern this, think about the origins of the industrial revolution in relation to a more plausible, causal story about how industrial growth of the late 18th century actually did lead to contemporary climate change?,’” she says. Rothschild has written a series of papers about Smith to gain a deeper understanding of “the ways in which Smith’s ideas can be of interest in thinking about the discordant times in which we now live.”

Emma is also deeply involved in the Methane In 1,800 Histories project, designed to promote discussion and research on the 1,800 local sites of severe methane emissions around the world.

“This project came about really opportunistically when I saw a very good article that was the cover piece in Science a little over a year ago by some French climate scientists who were actually able to map almost 1,800 sites of ultra methane emissions worldwide. A lot of this has been done for the U.S. and for other countries. They were able, using satellite data, to give a literally worldwide overview of where the largest methane emitters were,” she states.

“And this turned into a collaborative project,” she continues. “We’d done a big visualization of all the sites. And the aspiration is that young historians [and] young economists will actually investigate each of these sites and thereby contribute to an understanding of the history of why climate change is happening. And, of course, thereby in turn, start to think in a practical and local way about what can be done about the sites.”

Rothschild goes on to argue that local solutions to climate change may seem more plausible to people who are daunted by the enormity of the challenge.

“Part of what’s so difficult about climate change is that the instruments, mainly global policy change, seem so beyond the capacity of individuals or groups to affect,” she remarks “Climate change is really immediate to people in their early 20s or late teens thinking about their own lives and thinking about, ‘What can I do with all the knowledge I’m acquiring, all the skills that I have, to do something?’”

For this and much, much more, I encourage you to listen to this 53^rd episode of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. 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 Washington.
Spencer Dale, BP Group Chief Economist.
Richard Revesz, professor at the NYU School of Law.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment and Law at Yale University.
William Hogan, Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard.
Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
John Graham, Dean Emeritus, Paul O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.
Gernot Wagner, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University.
John Holdren, Research Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Goulder, Shuzo Nishihara Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, Stanford University.
Suzi Kerr, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund.
Sheila Olmstead, Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin.
Robert Pindyck, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Gilbert Metcalf, Professor of Economics, Tufts University.
Navroz Dubash, Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Paul Joskow, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics emeritus, MIT.
Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.
Orley Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University.
Jonathan Wiener, the William and Thomas Perkins Professor of Law, Duke Law School.
Lori Bennear, the Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.
Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and now Vice Chair of S&P Global.
Jeffrey Holmstead, who leads the Environmental Strategies Group at Bracewell in Washington, DC.
Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Environmental Engineering at Harvard.
Michael Greenstone, Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago.
Billy Pizer, Vice President for Research & Policy Engagement, Resources for the Future.
Daniel Bodansky, Regents’ Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.
Catherine Wolfram, Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, currently on leave at the Harvard Kennedy School.
James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University.
Mary Nichols, long-time leader in California, U.S., and international climate change policy.
Geoffrey Heal, Donald Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School.
Kathleen Segerson, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut.
Meredith Fowlie, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U.C. Berkeley.
Karen Palmer, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future.
Severin Borenstein, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management and Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School.

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

Private Sector Initiatives to Address Climate Change

Over the past decade or more, there has been increasing attention to private-sector initiatives to address climate change, with scholarly research and considerable action being centered in business schools, particularly in the United States. This is the focus in the latest episode of my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.”

I engage in conversation with Michael Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management and Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS). We discuss the many ways in which business schools are giving much greater attention to climate change and other environmental issues, as well as how businesses and governments can and are working together to address climate change. The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Toffel, who is a Faculty Fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and hosts the Climate Rising podcast at HBS, cites several examples of climate initiatives that are bubbling up organically throughout the private sector.

“What’s very interesting are …. the movement on the finance side, where you’ve got a lot deeper pockets of capital, pools of capital that are seeking out climate solutions,” he says. “You’ve got this whole ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] area that’s evolved … [which is] putting new screens on the types of investments that they want to include in their portfolio. You’ve got companies making these net zero commitments, which include a combination of decarbonizing their operations and their supply chains, and then using carbon credits to offset the residual. And a bunch of commitments in that regard remains to be seen.”

Michael emphasizes that it is uncertain how much this climate talk will translate into action.

“That’s long been an interest of mine – are companies following up with action? Who is? Who isn’t? And so that continues to be an interest of mine. We will see. A lot of my research in this area has taken the form of case writing, because so much of this is so new, and we don’t have years and years of data sets to do the type of empirical work that my scholarly work tends to gravitate toward. We’re learning in real time through cases, and then doing some empirical scholarship as well.”

Toffel cites two recent projects he’s been involved with that he is especially proud of.

“On the scholarly research side, [there] is a study that’s just coming out in AEJ Applied Micro, a leading journal or field journal … that looks at the effectiveness of U.S. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s efforts to target companies for inspection. OSHA is dramatically underfunded in the sense that they can maybe inspect every establishment that they regulate [once] every 100 years, and so they really need to make some tough decisions about where to go,” he says.

“Traditionally, they’ve been making these decisions for a lot of their inspections, based on where the problems have arisen in the past … and we conjecture and find some evidence that if they change that [strategy by] using more modern techniques and machine learning to figure out and predict where are problems more likely to be in the future, or where might their inspections do the most good … they can really reduce injuries by the thousands, with millions of dollars of consequences of reduced injury, pain, and suffering.”

The other research he cites is a Case Study, co-written with his HBS colleagues Shirley Lu and George Serafeim, on BMW’s approach to decarbonization.

“It’s a very engineering focused company, so they have a very engineering orientation to carbon accounting, to carbon management, to reduction, and to even their publicity around all of this. And their CEO has taken a perspective that whereas other companies are having these phase out dates for the internal combustion engine … they’ve said, ‘We’re not going to make that claim because we don’t know if we can keep that promise, in part because we don’t know if the infrastructure is going to be there to power electric vehicles, and will it be electric or will it be hydrogen powered fuel cells? We’re not really sure where the technology will shake out.’ So, they’ve been reluctant … to make such promises, because they have a culture … where they [don’t] want to … make promises until they know they can keep them.”

Reflecting on his almost two decades at Harvard Business School, Toffel remarks on how far the field of environmental management has come in recent years.

“When I applied to Ph.D. programs, this topic was very fringe,” he says. “This whole thing has completely changed, where most business schools now are leaning into the idea of environment and climate in particular … and scholarship is really exploding on these topics. So, that’s been really heartening to see. In addition, students’ interest in this has really risen incredibly in the 17 years that I’ve been here. Originally, no one talked about environment. Now … students are bringing these [issues] up. They’re demanding more content.”

For this and much, much more, I encourage you to listen to this 52^nd episode of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. 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 Washington.
Spencer Dale, BP Group Chief Economist.
Richard Revesz, professor at the NYU School of Law.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment and Law at Yale University.
William Hogan, Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard.
Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
John Graham, Dean Emeritus, Paul O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.
Gernot Wagner, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University.
John Holdren, Research Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Goulder, Shuzo Nishihara Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, Stanford University.
Suzi Kerr, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund.
Sheila Olmstead, Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin.
Robert Pindyck, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Gilbert Metcalf, Professor of Economics, Tufts University.
Navroz Dubash, Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Paul Joskow, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics emeritus, MIT.
Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.
Orley Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University.
Jonathan Wiener, the William and Thomas Perkins Professor of Law, Duke Law School.
Lori Bennear, the Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.
Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and now Vice Chair of S&P Global.
Jeffrey Holmstead, who leads the Environmental Strategies Group at Bracewell in Washington, DC.
Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Environmental Engineering at Harvard.
Michael Greenstone, Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago.
Billy Pizer, Vice President for Research & Policy Engagement, Resources for the Future.
Daniel Bodansky, Regents’ Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.
Catherine Wolfram, Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, currently on leave at the Harvard Kennedy School.
James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University.
Mary Nichols, long-time leader in California, U.S., and international climate change policy.
Geoffrey Heal, Donald Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School.
Kathleen Segerson, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut.
Meredith Fowlie, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U.C. Berkeley.
Karen Palmer, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future.
Severin Borenstein, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

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