The Challenge Posed to U.S. Climate Policy by Political Polarization

In my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” I’ve enjoyed chatting with economists who have been leaders in the realm of environmental, energy, and resource economics.  My most recent guest fits in that group, because I was joined by Kathleen Segerson, who in addition to her academic and scholarly research and teaching, has served on numerous state, national, and international advisory boards.  The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.  You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Segerson, the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut, is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and the Bayer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm. Her advisory roles have included time spent as a Member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), where she had a close-up view of Washington political battles over environmental issues, including climate change policy. She acknowledges that the politics have only gotten worse.

“I think that it is really quite concerning how polarized we are now in this country, at least, on some of these issues,” Segerson remarks. “Some approaches, or at least concerns that might have been bipartisan in the past have become quite polarized now and that makes it very difficult to think about policy and how to move forward.”

Segerson says that many of the policy tools currently used to address climate change in the United States are less than ideal.

“One of the things that we’ve done, of course, recently is to enact the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes a lot of climate measures. Many of those are subsidy based. And as you know, economists wouldn’t typically be looking to subsidies as the ideal policy instrument to use to try to foster transformational change,” she states. “That, I think is a concern because it sets a precedent for policy. It obviously has large budgetary implications. We’ll see whether those subsidies can be effectively phased out if and when [they are] no longer needed. Let’s hope they’re no longer needed at some point, that they’ve been sufficiently successful, that they aren’t needed in the future.”

Segerson also addresses the issue of environmental justice and the Justice40 Initiative, which seeks to ensure that a certain level of investment is targeted for disadvantaged communities that have historically been underserved or highly affected by pollution.

“The challenge is identifying those communities. Which communities should be considered eligible for helping to meet the Justice40 goals? How do you define that? How do you measure it? Of course, the challenges are very different across different communities. So, how do you compare [and] calculate cumulative burdens?,” she asks. “There are a lot of … challenges associated with implementing policies to try to address the environmental justice concerns that are out there, and obviously very legitimate and need to be addressed.”

Segerson also expresses her optimism about the increase of youth movements of climate activism in recent years, saying that while she may question some of the tactics, she supports the objective of focusing attention on important climate policy issues.

“We need the young generation to be the ones who are, in some sense, drawing increased attention because the older generations, at least some parts of them, are not stepping up to that challenge,” she states. “I know that the people who are young parents … or teenagers or college students now, it’s really about their future and their right to feel indignant that those of us who are much older are not doing what we can or should be doing to try to ensure that future.

“I think at this point, they’re sufficiently young that they can try to demand it, but actually putting it in place is more challenging. Let’s hope that they can translate that activism or that it does translate into some real change at some point.”

For this and much, much more, I encourage you to listen to this 48th 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:

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

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An Expression of Hope and Frustration re Climate Change Progress

In our podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” I’ve had the pleasure of engaging in conversations over the past three years with a significant number of truly outstanding economists who have carried out important work in the realm of environmental, energy, and resource economics.  My most recent guest is no exception, because I am joined by Geoffrey Heal, the Donald Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, where he previously served as Senior Vice Dean, essentially the chief academic officer of the School.

More to the point, Geoff Heal is the author of 18 book and some 200 articles, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, where he served as President.  And Geoff has also held – and continues to hold – important advisory and other positions with governmental, multi-governmental, and non-governmental organizations.  I hope you will listen to our complete conversation here.

Among his writings is the pathbreaking 1979 book “Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources,” co-authored with Partha Dasgupta, which is widely viewed as a seminal work in the field of resource and environmental economics.  I asked Geoff how the book came about.

“Partha and I enjoyed collaborating, and I think it’s something that we just felt sort of intellectually compelled to write because we felt the time was right and we felt that we could make a contribution … particularly acting together,” Heal remarks. “But I don’t think we had any sense of the impact it would have, quite frankly.  And I find students still reading it today, which is quite remarkable.”

Heal also addresses the question of how much the field of resource and environmental economics has changed during his time in academia over the past 40 years.

“The field has been transformed, hasn’t it? I mean, in the last decade or so, it’s been transformed into a much more empirical field than it was before that. What they call the ‘credibility revolution’ in economics has taken hold in environmental and resource economics,” he said. “We’ve got a vast number of papers using interesting novel data sets to look at climate impacts or regulatory impacts, and I think they’ve increased our understanding of the impact of environmental issues and environmental policies… considerably.”

Serving as a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which was finalized in 2014, Heal had a front row seat in the analysis of climate change policy. That said, he admits he is a bit frustrated with the pace of collective efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat the effects of global climate change.

“I think that we know a lot about how to solve the climate problem. I think the technologies that we need to solve it are largely, perhaps not totally, but largely available… So, I think we know how to move to an electric grid which is powered entirely without fossil fuels,” he states. “We have a lot of the pieces available. We’re not just deploying them fast enough to reach the targets that we think we need to reach …so I find that frustrating. We’re very close to being able to achieve the goal, but we’re not actually doing what we need to do.”

When I ask Geoff Heal why current climate policies don’t seem to be accomplishing their goals, he cites politics.

“It’s the enormous influence of the fossil fuel industry and the sense of mostly some conservatives that this is a plot to increase the powers of the state. And of course, the Ukraine war has really been a major problem too, because it’s caused Europeans to move away from natural gas and in some cases back to coal, which is a terrible piece of backsliding, and it’s understandable under the circumstances, but it’s very regrettable from the climate perspective,” he says. “The Ukraine war, I hope, is a temporary phenomenon, whereas the power of the fossil fuel industry and the sort of conservative misapprehensions about what climate change is all about, I think are more real and more enduring.”

For this and much, much more, I encourage you to listen to this 47th 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:

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

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Forty-Plus Years of Leadership on Climate and Sustainability

In our podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” I’ve had the pleasure of engaging with a number of real stars from the environmental policy world, asking them not only to comment on relevant policy issues, but also to reflect on their own experiences over the years.  To have done an adequate job of this with my most recent guest, I would have needed an entire day, not just the 30 minutes that we had for a podcast recording.  I say that because my guest was Mary Nichols, whom I first became aware of some 40 years ago in the early-1980s when I was working at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in Berkeley, California, before I moved across the country to enroll in the PhD program in economics at Harvard.  What is astonishing to me is that at the time Mary Nichols already had a prominent and highly successful career in environmental protection and regulation, and she has accomplished so much more in the decades since then!  I hope you will listen to our complete conversation here.

Mary is the former Chair of the California Air Resources Board, having served on the Board under Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. (1975–1982 and 2010–18), Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (2007–2010), and Governor Gavin Newsom (2019–2020).  She also served as California’s Secretary for Natural Resources (1999–2003), appointed by Governor Gray Davis.  If that’s not enough, let me note that when not working directly for the State of California, she founded the Los Angles office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and held the Senate-confirmed position of Assistant Administrator for U.S. EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, in the administration of President Bill Clinton.  Suffice it to say that as an environmental lawyer and leader in government and NGOs over 45 years, she has played a key role in U.S. progress toward healthy air and a clean environment, including having led CARB in crafting and implementing California’s internationally recognized climate action plan.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Mary Nichols was first appointed to CARB by then-Governor Jerry Brown in 1975, and played a key role in the State’s intensive efforts to mitigate urban air pollution, and much later returned to leadership of the Board to help craft and then implement California’s climate action plan, including its well designed cap-and-trade system.

“I have had a lot of good fortune as a lawyer to be in places where there was important work going on and where it was an opportunity to actually make changes happen,” Nichols says. “For me, it was more a question of not wanting to join the corporate establishment, not wanting to do what at that time seemed like the default, which was to go join a big law firm, but to do something that was more aimed at making the world a better place, which is why I had gone to law school in the first place.”

In our conversation, Mary notes that her early work on environmental regulation was focused on clean air, but eventually progressed to climate change policy as well.

“My focus was, and pretty much always has been, on implementation, on taking the statutory enactments laws and using them to actually make something happen in the real world, as we like to say, and climate just seemed to be too esoteric as well as distant. Obviously, my views changed on that and so has those of most of the rest of the world. But it took a while,” she says. “The key was recognizing that when it came to dealing with the causes of climate change, what was actually causing the increasing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it was essentially the same root causes, the same fundamental issues about how we use energy, how we use electricity, how we move ourselves around.”

“The combustion of fossil fuels is at the heart of it all. It’s obviously more complicated and nuanced than that, but to me, the recognition that if you were doing your job correctly in terms of dealing with air pollution that hurts people’s health and that they can see you were also potentially going to be able to make a real dent in the climate problem as well,” she says.

Nichols argues that the early work on environmental regulation in California, including the path-breaking Global Warming Solutions Act, has had an important impact on national policy (and – I will add – on international climate policy) in the subsequent decades.

“Our goal, of course, was to try to push the US government to adopt meaningful climate legislation. And while we’re still only, I think in some ways, working around the edges of that in terms of having a single comprehensive climate law, the work that we’ve done absolutely has formed the basis for other states to act, as well as help to give some of the backdrop and provide the experience that enabled the federal government to pass President Biden’s very ambitious agenda,” she states.

When I ask Mary where she places herself on the spectrum of hope for climate policy today, she describes herself as an optimist.

“I see that there are signs all over the world of people demanding action to deal with the climate change, which is now no longer theoretical but real, and the massive disruptions in patterns of weather are evidence. It’s not something that requires statistics or a deep knowledge to see what’s happening,” she remarks. “I think politicians are being increasingly pushed to do something meaningful, and it’s not just a matter of mitigation versus adaptation, which used to be the big question. The big argument was, are we going to do things that will protect ourselves against climate change versus trying to stop it. We have to be doing both, and I think there’s a lot of interest in doing that, certainly among the larger financial institutions in all of the countries and companies that do business around the globe.”

For this and much, much more, I encourage you to listen to this 46th 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:

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

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