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EPA’s Proposed Greenhouse Gas Regulation: Why are Conservatives Attacking its Market-Based Options?

This week, the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its long-awaited proposed regulation to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from existing sources in the electricity-generating sector. The regulatory (rule) proposal calls for cutting CO₂ emissions from the power sector by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The Fundamentals in Brief

Through a carefully designed formula, EPA’s proposal lists specific targets for each state, under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. States are given broad flexibility for how to meet their targets, including: increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel power plants; switching electricity dispatch from coal-fired generating plants to natural gas-fired generating plants; developing new low-emissions generation, such as new natural gas combined cycle plants, more renewable sources (wind and solar), nuclear, or coal with carbon capture and storage; and more efficient end-use of electricity.

States are also given flexibility to employ (in their implementation plans to be submitted to EPA) any of a wide variety of policy instruments, including but by no means limited to market-based trading systems. Furthermore, states can work together to submit multi-state plans.

The proposed regulation will be finalized after receipt of comments one year from now (June 30, 2015). Then states will have until July 2016 to submit their plans, and can request one-year extensions (or two-year extensions for multi-state plans). Compliance commences in 2020.

A Big-Picture Assessment of the Proposed Rule

Let’s start by acknowledging that the proposed policy will be less effective environmentally and less cost-effective economically than the economy-wide approach the Administration previously tried with the Waxman-Markey bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009, but failed to receive a vote in the U.S. Senate. Electricity generation is responsible for about 38 percent of U.S. CO₂ emissions, and about 32 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Given ongoing political polarization in Washington and the inability of Congress to approve that more comprehensive and more cost-effective approach, this is probably the best the administration could do. Together with the motor-vehicle fuel efficiency and appliance energy efficiency standards previously put in place, this is certainly a step in the right direction.

More broadly, the importance of these U.S. moves in the international context should not be underestimated. Although the United States accounts for only about 17% of global CO₂ emissions (second to China’s 26% in 2010), these steps by the U.S. government can help international efforts to bring the large emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, and Mexico) on board for a future (Paris, 2015) agreement under the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action.

Domestically, EPA’s proposed state-by-state approach does not guarantee cost-effectiveness, because under the formula employed, marginal abatement costs will initially vary across states. However, freedom is given to the states to employ market-based instruments, in particular, cap-and-trade systems (with carbon taxes presumably also an option). And EPA has emphasized its willingness to consider multi-state implementation plans (think, for example, of the existing Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative – RGGI – the cap-and-trade system operating in nine northeast states; and the likelihood of a future linked policy bringing together California’s AB-32 cap-and-trade system with policies in Oregon and Washington).

The ability of states to develop under EPA’s rule such linked systems of market-based instruments, as well as the freedom for states and regions to subsequently establish linkages means that although EPA may not be guaranteeing cost-effectiveness, it is certainly allowing for it, indeed it is facilitating it.

Response from Environmental Advocacy Groups and Industry

Much of the response this week has not been surprising. The major environmental advocacy groups have been supportive of the proposed rule, despite the fact that they would prefer even greater ambition. Many in industry have also offered praise for the approach, particularly because of the flexibility that EPA has given for the means of achieving emissions reductions. In fact, some electricity-sector executives have been supportive, precisely for this reason, and appear to be encouraging the adoption of cap-and-trade systems. At a minimum, leading electric utilities, including some that are fossil-heavy, such as FirstEnergy Corporation and American Electric Power, Inc., have taken a “wait-and-see” attitude, rather than attacking the proposal.

Also not surprising has been strong opposition from the coal industry, as well as some prominent industry trade associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Once the rule has become final (about a year from now), lawsuits will surely be filed by some of these private industry opponents and by a number of resistant states.

I will leave it to the lawyers to comment on the likely grounds of those anticipated lawsuits, as well as their probabilities of success. But, clearly, for the plan to succeed it will need to survive those legal challenges, which will work their way through the courts over several years.

Also, a significant change in the senate majority and in the party holding power after the next presidential election could result in progress being slowed to a crawl, if not the abandonment of the approach proposed by the current administration.

None of that is particularly surprising, but what should be surprising is the fact that conservative attacks on EPA’s proposed rule have focused, indeed fixated, on one of the options that is given to the states for implementation, namely the use of market-based instruments, that is, cap-and-trade systems. Given the demonization of cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax” over the past few years by conservatives, why do I say that this fixation should be surprising?

The Irony of Conservatives Targeting Cap-and-Trade

Not so long ago, cap-and-trade mechanisms for environmental protection were popular in Congress. Now, such mechanisms are denigrated. What happened? Professor Richard Schmalensee (MIT) and I recently told the sordid tale of how conservatives in Congress who once supported cap and trade had come to lambast climate change legislation as “cap-and-tax.” Ironically, in doing this, conservatives have chosen to demonize their own market-based creation.

In the late 1980s, there was growing concern that acid precipitation – the result of SO₂ and, to a lesser extent, nitrogen oxides (NOx) reacting in the atmosphere to form sulphuric and nitric acids – was damaging forests and aquatic ecosystems, particularly in the northeast U.S. and southern Canada. In response, the U.S. Congress passed (and President George H.W. Bush signed into law) the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Title IV of this law established the SO₂ allowance-trading system.

By the close of the 20th century, the SO₂ allowance-trading system had come to be seen as both innovative and successful. However, the successful enactment and implementation of the SO₂ cap-and-trade system in 1990 combined with the subsequent Congressional defeat of CO₂ cap-and-trade legislation 20 years later has produced a striking irony. Market-based, cost-effective policy innovation in environmental regulation – in particular, cap-and-trade – was originally championed and implemented by Republican administrations from that of President Ronald Reagan to that of President George W. Bush. But in recent years, Republicans have led the way in demonizing cap-and-trade, particularly as an approach to limiting carbon emissions.

For a long time, market-based approaches to environmental protection, such as cap-and-trade, bore a Republican label. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s EPA put in place a trading program to phase out leaded gasoline. It produced a more rapid elimination of leaded gasoline from the marketplace than had been anticipated, and at a saving of some $250 million per year, compared with a conventional no-trade, command-and-control approach. Not only did President George H.W. Bush successfully propose the use of cap-and-trade to cut SO₂ emissions, his administration advocated in international forums the use of emissions trading to cut global CO₂ emissions (a proposal initially resisted but ultimately adopted by the European Union). In 2005, President George W. Bush’s EPA issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule, aimed at reducing SO₂ emissions by a further 70% from their 2003 level. Cap-and-trade was again the policy instrument of choice.

From Bi-Partisan Support to Ideological Polarization

When the Clean Air Act Amendments were being considered in the Congress in 1989-1990, political support was not divided on partisan lines. Indeed, environmental and energy debates from the 1970s through much of the 1990s typically broke along geographic lines, rather than partisan lines, with key parameters being degree of urbanization and reliance on specific fuel types. Thus, the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 passed the Senate by a vote of 89-11 with 87% of Republican members and 91% of Democrats voting yea, and passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 401-21 with 87% of Republicans and 96% of Democrats voting in support.

But twenty years later, when climate change legislation was receiving serious consideration in Washington, environmental politics had changed dramatically, with Congressional support for environmental legislation coming mainly to reflect partisan divisions. In 2009, the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454) – the Waxman-Markey bill – that included an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to cut CO₂ emissions. The Waxman-Markey bill passed the House by a narrow margin of 219-212, with support from 83% of Democrats, but only 4% of Republicans. In July 2010, the Senate abandoned its attempt to pass companion legislation. In the process of debating this legislation, conservatives (largely Republicans and some coal-state Democrats) attacked the cap-and-trade system as “cap-and-tax,” much as an earlier generation of liberals had denigrated cap-and-trade as “selling licenses to pollute.”

It may be that some conservatives in Congress opposed climate policies because of disagreement about the threat of climate change or the costs of the policies, but instead of debating those risks and costs, they chose to launch an ultimately successful campaign to demonize and thereby tarnish cap-and-trade as an instrument of public policy, rendering it “collateral damage” in the wider climate policy battle.

Today that “scorched-earth” approach may have come back to haunt conservatives. Have they now boxed themselves into a corner, unable to support the power of the marketplace to reduce their own states’ compliance costs under the new EPA CO₂ regulation? I hope not, but only time will tell.

Understanding the IPCC: An Important Follow-Up

A week ago, I wrote at this blog about my recent frustrations with the government approval process of one part of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group III (WG3) report, namely the section in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM.5.2) on “International Cooperation,” for which I had major responsibility.

In that post, I described how the government approval process, which took place in Berlin in early April, had led to the deletion of a significant fraction of the text of SPM.5.2, not because governments questioned its scientific validity, but because they found various passages to be inconsistent with their respective positions and national interests within the ongoing international climate change negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (That post took the form of a letter to the co-chairs of WG3 – Ottmar Edenhofer, Ramon Pichs-Madruga, and Youba Sokona. They have since sent a thoughtful response and agreed for me to provide a link to their letter here.)

Why a Follow-Up Post?

My first post has been widely reported in the press. Some of this coverage was accurate and reasonable. Pilita Clark of the Financial Times, in particular, wrote an excellent article that accurately presented my views and conveyed some additional useful insights. Other press coverage, however, inaccurately stated or suggested that my critique of the IPCC process was much broader than it was. This was despite my very careful caveats in the first blog post, in which I tried hard to communicate clearly the limited focus of my critique, namely the effects of the government approval process on one section (SPM.5.2) of the Summary for Policymakers.

Some in the more fringe elements of the press and blogosphere quickly capitalized on the situation by distorting the message of my original post to meet their own objectives – by stating or implying that I found fault with the overall IPCC process and reports themselves, that I have positioned myself as an opponent of the important work of the IPCC, and/or that I am a skeptic of the science of climate change! Because of these over-the-top distortions, I am writing this second post to place my original critique in the context of the overall IPCC process and of the IPCC’s recent Fifth Assessment Report.

Understanding the IPCC Process and Reports

The central purpose of the IPCC Assessment Reports is to survey and synthesize the best published research on climate change, including its causes, consequences, and potential mitigation. Each of the last several reports has therefore consisted of three volumes, prepared by separate scientific working groups, which address respectively: (1) research from the natural sciences on climate change itself — whether, how, and to what extent it is happening; (2) the impacts of climate change on natural systems and on human society — and how society might adapt to climate change; and (3) approaches to the mitigation of climate change, including, importantly, policy options for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The chapter of which I was a Co-Coordinating Lead Author, “International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments,” fell into this third volume. (See my previous post for further details.)

Hundreds of the world’s leading scientists conducting research on the various topics addressed by the IPCC’s Assessment Reports spend countless un-compensated hours over several years preparing the reports, motivated only by a commitment to scientific rigor and the desire to better understand climate change and its implications. A core principle of the IPCC process is that the reports should be “policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive” and should synthesize the peer-reviewed literature as objectively as possible.

The IPCC’s three-volume reports — including the recent Fifth Assessment Report — largely succeed in accurately and objectively synthesizing the best scientific research. The reports are, as a result, absolutely essential resources for both understanding climate change and formulating responses to it.

In addition to being divided into three volumes along substantive lines, the recent Fifth Assessment Report is presented in three different “packages”: (1) the full volumes, each of which consist of multiple chapters totaling about 2,000 pages; (2) the Technical Summaries (TS), which condense the full volumes into documents of less than 100 pages each; and (3) the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), which at one-third the length of the TS, was the focus of my previous blog post.

I emphasized in that post that none of the deletions and revisions I described regarding the section on international cooperation in the 33-page SPM had any effects whatsoever on the key, foundational products of five years of work on AR5 WG3: the Technical Summary (three times the length of the Summary for Policymakers, but no more “technical” than the SPM), and – most important – the 2,000 pages of the 15 underlying chapters, including Chapter 13, “International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments” (with 79 pages of text, and 57 pages of references). Only the SPM is subject to the (line-by-line) government approval process.

Furthermore, even the severe cuts to the section on international cooperation in the SPM – the focus of my concerns – should be understood in context. The governments never added text to the section; rather they deleted text, because in the line-by-line approval process they could not agree among each other. As I explained in my previous post, the government representatives were doing their job – looking out for the interests of their respective countries. Any text that was considered inconsistent with their countries’ interests and positions in multilateral negotiations was treated as unacceptable.

Overall, my serious concerns about the effects of the government approval process on one section of the SPM should be considered in the much larger context of what is an exceptionally valuable scientific resource for those concerned with climate change.

A Word on the Government Approval Process

Notwithstanding the problems and challenges of the government approval process, which I highlighted in my previous post, it is important to note the merits of the process, as well, because there are some distinct advantages of the IPCC being an intergovernmental organization and having some aspect of the Assessment Reports requiring government approval (namely, the SPM).

First, as I emphasized in my previous post, government approval has brought political credibility to the IPCC that it would probably not otherwise enjoy. Second, this process forces member governments to pay attention to the reports, and agree that a substantial body of research on climate change is valid (which would not be the case with a non-governmental organization). It is hardly trivial that the world’s governments have formally (and unanimously) agreed — through the IPCC process — that climate change is real, caused by human activity, and poses significant threats.

My Bottom Line

In the short term, I am continuing to work within the IPCC, as I currently serve as a lead author of the AR5 Synthesis Report, which brings together the essence of the reports of Working Groups 1, 2, and 3. That work will be completed in October of this year.

In addition, I hope to work constructively with my colleagues within the IPCC, its member governments, and others to address our shared concerns about the SPM approval process — particularly with regard to policy-relevant material in the third (Working Group III) volume of the assessment reports, and most especially in regard to text on international cooperation, which is so intimately connected with the UN climate negotiations in which those same governments are deeply involved.

I conclude this post with the final paragraph of my previous one, which featured my letter to the IPCC WG3 leadership: “The mission of the IPCC is important, and the scientific work carried out by the hundreds of lead authors of AR5 Working Group 3 was solid and important, as validated by the Technical Summary and the underlying chapters. I hope this letter can be constructive and helpful for the future work of the IPCC.”

Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken?

Over the past 5 years, I have dedicated an immense amount of time and effort to serving as the Co-Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 13, “International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments,” of Working Group III (Mitigation) of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has been an intense and exceptionally time-consuming process, which recently culminated in a grueling week spent in Berlin, Germany, April 5-13, 2014, at the government approval sessions, in which some 195 country delegations discussed, revised, and ultimately approved (line-by-line) the “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), which condenses more than 2,000 pages of text from 15 chapters into an SPM document of 33 pages. Several of the CLAs present with me in Berlin commented that given the nature and outcome of the week, the resulting document should probably be called the Summary by Policymakers, rather than the Summary for Policymakers.

Before returning to the topic of today’s blog entry — the SPM process and outcome — I want to emphasize that the IPCC’s Working Group III “Technical Summary” and the underlying Working Group III report of 15 chapters were completely untouched by the government approval process of the Summary for Policymakers. So, the crucial IPCC products – the Technical Summary and the 15 chapters of WG 3 – retain their full scientific integrity, and they merit serious public attention. Now, back to the SPM process and outcome …

The process of the government approval sessions was exceptionally frustrating, and the outcome of that process – the final SPM – was in some regards disappointing. Two weeks ago, immediately after returning from Berlin, I sent a letter to the Co-Chairs of Working Group III — Ottmar Edenhofer, Ramon Pichs-Madruga, and Youba Sokona — expressing my disappointment with the government approval process and its outcome in regard to the part of the assessment for which I had primary responsibility, SPM.5.2, International Cooperation. At the time, I did not release my letter publically, because I did not want to get in the way of the important messages that remained in the SPM and were receiving public attention through the Working Group III release.

With two weeks having passed, it is now unlikely that the broader release of my letter will obscure the news surrounding the Working Group III release, and – importantly — it could be constructive to the process going forward, as the IPCC leadership and others think about the path ahead for future climate assessments. Rather than summarizing or annotating my letter, I believe it makes most sense simply to reproduce it, and let it stand – or fall – as originally written. It follows below.

==================================================================

From: Stavins, Robert
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 4:06 PM

TO: Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-Chair, Working Group III, AR5, IPCC

Ramon Pichs-Madruga, Co-Chair, Working Group III, AR5, IPCC

Youba Sokona, Co-Chair, Working Group III, AR5, IPCC

CC: Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman, IPCC

Jan Minx, Head of Technical Support Unit, Working Group III

FROM: Robert Stavins

SUBJECT: Thoughts on the Government Approval Process for SPM.5.2 (International Cooperation) of the Summary for Policymakers of Working Group 3, Fifth Assessment Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Dear Ottmar, Ramon, and Youba:

I am writing to you today to express my disappointment and frustration with the process and outcome of the government approval meetings in Berlin this past week, at which the assembled representatives from the world’s governments, considered and, in effect, fundamentally revised or rejected parts of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of IPCC Working Group 3 over a period of five long days (and nights). My focus in this letter is exclusively on one section of the SPM, namely SPM.5.2, International Cooperation. I am not representing nor referring to any other parts of the SPM.

Also, none of what I have to say should be taken as reflecting negatively on you (the Co-Chairs of Working Group 3), the WG 3 Technical Support Unit (TSU), nor the overall leadership of the IPCC. On the contrary, I thought that all of you did a remarkable job over the five years of work on AR5, as well as during the week in Berlin. The problems about which I’m writing arose despite, not because of your excellent leadership and support.

More broadly, the problems I identify in this letter are not a consequence of personal failings of any of the individuals involved. My intent is not to criticize the country representatives, the IPCC leadership, the TSU, the Lead Authors, or the Coordinating Lead Authors. The problems I seek to identify are structural, not personal.

Further, as Co-Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 13 (International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments) of the underlying report, I had primary responsibility – together with my Co-Coordinating Lead Author, Dr. Zou Ji – for drafting the text for Section SPM.5.2 (International Cooperation) of the SPM, and nothing in this letter should implicate Zou Ji, for whom I have great respect and with whom I have enjoyed working. He may or may not share any of the views I express below.

Another caveat is that none of the problems I describe in this letter apply to either the Technical Summary nor the underlying Chapter 13. Indeed, because of the problems with Section SPM.5.2 on international cooperation in the SPM, it is important that interested parties refer instead to the Technical Summary, or better yet, the original Chapter 13.

In this letter, I will not comment on the government review and revision process that affected other parts of the SPM, other than to note that as the week progressed, I was surprised by the degree to which governments felt free to recommend and sometimes insist on detailed changes to the SPM text on purely political, as opposed to scientific bases.

The general motivations for government revisions – from most (but not all) participating delegations – appeared to be quite clear in the plenary sessions. These motivations were made explicit in the “contact groups,” which met behind closed doors in small groups with the lead authors on particularly challenging sections of the SPM. In these contact groups, government representatives worked to suppress text that might jeopardize their negotiating stances in international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

I fully understand that the government representatives were seeking to meet their own responsibilities toward their respective governments by upholding their countries’ interests, but in some cases this turned out to be problematic for the scientific integrity of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers. Such involvement — and sometimes interference — with the scientific process of the IPCC was particularly severe in section SPM.5.2 on international cooperation. It is to that section of the SPM that I now turn.

In the early morning of Monday, April 7, 2014, a draft of SPM.5.2 was completed and approved by the assembled team of CLAs in Berlin. The draft, a copy of which is attached as Item A, had been extensively revised over the preceding months in response to comments received from governments around the world (to whom multiple drafts had been sent as part of the normal IPCC process). The draft in Item A was sent to governments on April 7^th through the IPCC’s PaperSmart system.

The plenary session of government representatives turned their attention to SPM.5.2 at approximately 10:00 pm on Friday, April 11^th. When it became clear that the country delegates were unwilling to move forward with the consideration of the text in plenary, you established a contact group to work on acceptable text. You gave the group 2 hours to come up with acceptable text. That group began its work at approximately 11:00 pm (and continued past 1:00 am on Saturday, April 12^th).

The contact group included representatives from of a diverse set of countries, ranging from small to large, and from poor to rich. Hence, I do not believe that the responsibility for the problems that arose are attributable to any specific country or even set of countries. On the contrary, nearly all delegates in the meeting demonstrated the same perspective and approach, namely that any text that was considered inconsistent with their interests and positions in multilateral negotiations was treated as unacceptable. In fact, several (perhaps the majority) of the country representatives in the SPM.5.2 contact group identified themselves as negotiators in the UNFCCC negotiations. To ask these experienced UNFCCC negotiators to approve text that critically assessed the scholarly literature on which they themselves are the interested parties, created an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Thus, the country representatives were placed in an awkward and problematic position by the nature of the process.

Over the course of the two hours of the contact group deliberations, it became clear that the only way the assembled government representatives would approve text for SPM.5.2 was essentially to remove all “controversial” text (that is, text that was uncomfortable for any one individual government), which meant deleting almost 75% of the text, including nearly all explications and examples under the bolded headings. In more than one instance, specific examples or sentences were removed at the will of only one or two countries, because under IPCC rules, the dissent of one country is sufficient to grind the entire approval process to a halt unless and until that country can be appeased.

I understand that country representatives were only doing their job, so I do not implicate them personally; however, the process the IPCC followed resulted in a process that built political credibility by sacrificing scientific integrity. The final version of SPM.5.2, as agreed to by the contact group, and subsequently approved in plenary (at approximately 3:00 am, April 12^th), is attached to this letter as Item B.

No institution can be all things for all people, and this includes the IPCC. In particular, in the case of the IPCC’s review of research findings on international cooperation, there may be an inescapable conflict between scientific integrity and political credibility. If the IPCC is to continue to survey scholarship on international cooperation in future assessment reports, it should not put country representatives in the uncomfortable and fundamentally untenable position of reviewing text in order to give it their unanimous approval. Likewise, the IPCC should not ask lead authors to volunteer enormous amounts of their time over multi-year periods to carry out work that will inevitably be rejected by governments in the Summary for Policymakers.

I hope I have made it clear that my purpose is not to condemn the country representatives, the IPCC leadership, the TSU, the Lead Authors, or the Coordinating Lead Authors. The problem is structural, not personal. In my view, with the current structure and norms, it will be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to produce a scientifically sound and complete version of text for the SPM on international cooperation that can survive the country approval process.

More broadly, I urge the IPCC to direct public attention to the documents produced by the lead authors that were subject to government (and expert) comment, but not subject to government approval. I believe that tremendous public good would arise from publicizing the key findings of the Technical Summary and the individual chapter Executive Summaries, instead of the Summary for Policymakers. I know that as the leaders of the IPCC, you see it to be your responsibility to convey to the public (and policy makers) the results of the hard scientific work that the hundreds of lead authors put into the report over the past five years, and not simply the constrained version of the Summary for Policymakers produced over the past week.

The mission of the IPCC is important, and the scientific work carried out by the hundreds of lead authors of AR5 Working Group 3 was solid and important, as validated by the Technical Summary and the underlying chapters. I hope this letter can be constructive and helpful for the future work of the IPCC.

Best wishes,

Rob

Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business & Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Director, Harvard Environmental Economics Program
Director of Graduate Studies, Ph.D. Programs in Public Policy and Political Economy & Government
Co-Chair, Harvard Business School-Kennedy School Joint Degree Programs
Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
Blog: An Economic View of the Environment SSRN Paper Downloads
Mail: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK St., Room L-306, Box 11, Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-495-1820 E-Mail: robert_stavins@harvard.edu
University Fellow, Resources for the Future Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research