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 14th 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:

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

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What Did (and Did Not) Happen at COP-25 Climate Talks in Madrid?

I recently returned from the climate negotiations in Madrid (the twenty-fifth Conference of the Parties – COP-25 – of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), and as I have done in previous years, I would like to provide you with my brief perspective on the outcome.  This year that means commenting both on what did and did not happen.

A Very Quick Overview

The press has characterized the Madrid climate talks in rather stark terms – as a failure, in contrast with the inspirational calls from youth activists and others for greater ambition.  For example, Somini Sengupta, writing in The New York Times, characterized COP-25 as “widely denounced as one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations …”  As usual, reality is somewhat more nuanced.

On the one hand, the inability of the climate negotiations to produce an aspirational statement calling for greater ambition in the next round of national pledges is not terribly significant in terms of its real effects, despite the fact that some members of civil society – ranging from Greenpeace to Extinction Rebellion – have framed this as the key task for COP-25.  On the other hand, there was a significant unfulfilled objective of the negotiations, namely writing meaningful rules (for Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement) that would help facilitate global carbon markets.  As I explain below, this was indeed a significant disappointment, but not the fatal failure that some have portrayed it to be.

So, there is good news and bad news.  I will begin with the latter.

But before I turn to the substance, I will note for the record that we – the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements – were busy at COP-25, including:  five speaking engagements focused on two topics – national and sub-national carbon-pricing policies (carbon taxes and emissions trading), and international linkage and the critical role of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement); and podcasts with key observers and participants in the negotiations (Andrei Marcu on December 8th and Paul Watkinson on December 11th).

The Bad News

From my recent essay at this blog just before I departed for Madrid (What to Expect at COP-25 in Madrid, December 5th), you know that a key task for COP-25 was to complete the so-called Rulebook on Article 6, in particular, Article 6.2, which can potentially  facilitate international carbon markets and other forms of cross-border cooperation.

As I have said before, there are two necessary conditions for ultimate success of the Paris Agreement.  First is adequate scope of participation.  This has been achieved, with meaningful participation from countries representing some 98% of global emissions – or some 85% if the U.S. withdraws in November, 2020 (compared with the 14% of global emissions from countries committed to emissions reductions under the current, second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol).

The other necessary condition is adequate ambition of the individual national contributions.  But the very element of the Paris Agreement that fostered such broad scope of participation – namely, that the individual national “pledges” (Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) are anchored in national circumstances and domestic political realities – implies that individual contributions may not be sufficient, due to the global commons nature of the climate change problem, and the attendant free-rider issues.

So, the challenge has been to identify ways to enable and facilitate increased ambition over time (not just to issue calls for greater ambition, but to devise ways of actually facilitating it).  Linkage of regional, national, and sub-national policies can be an important part of the answer – connections among policy systems that allow emission reduction efforts to be redistributed across systems.  Such linkage can bring down costs tremendously (in theory, to as little as 25% of what those costs otherwise would be), and thereby provide the latitude for countries to increase their ambition.

If such bilateral linkages among countries are to be correctly reflected when tallying countries’ emissions relative to their NDCs under the Paris Agreement, then the Agreement needs to include a robust accounting mechanism.  The obvious and clear home for this was (and is) Article 6.2, which provides for Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) and Corresponding Adjustments, which together can function as the international accounting mechanism to correctly reflect a multiplicity of international private-sector exchanges (under various international, intergovernmental linkages).  The negotiators needed to outline some brief and simple rules for double-entry bookkeeping.

Unfortunately, due to the insistence by Brazil and a few other countries for accounting loopholes that “would weaken transparency and mask emissions in a way that would undermine the integrity of the accord,” it turned out be impossible to reach agreement on Article 6.2, even after more than two weeks of extensive discussions and intense negotiations, which pushed the COP-25 proceedings 40 hours past their scheduled conclusion.

The Not-So-Bad News

This may sound like a rather technical, albeit unmet objective of COP-25, and that is not an unfair characterization.  But the press has focused on something else altogether, namely the demand from some countries – principally the smallest and some of the poorest nations – for an official decision at COP-25 endorsing significantly greater ambition than what is currently codified in the aggregation of the first round of NDCs under the Paris Agreement.  Such a consensus decision was not forthcoming, and that has been labeled as the great failure of the Madrid talks.

But how important is such an aspirational (even inspirational) statement of ambition, compared with putting in place sound rules to achieve the ambition to which the parties have already agreed?  As Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund recently wrote, “If merely adding “ambition” to a UN decision made a difference to what nations do, we would have solved the climate crisis long before COP-25.  What matters to actual ambition is the operational substance of the decision.”

The very strong press attention to the lack of an official decision regarding increased ambition at COP-25 was no doubt brought about, at least in part, by the forceful youth activists who have focused their energies on the urgency of what is characterized as the climate emergency, rather than on the hard and sometimes technical work of improving public policies, whether at the international, national, or sub-national level.  Surely, Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg’s speeches have been inspirational, as were Al Gore’s exhortations not very many years ago, but the primary outputs in Madrid were disruptive protests inside the conference (which led to the expulsion of some of the youth activists, and the temporary barring of all members of civil society), and the dumping of manure outside the conference venue.

The Good News

It is very important to understand that although clear accounting rules under Article 6.2 would be very helpful, they are decidedly not necessary for the successful execution and operation of bilateral international linkages and consequent carbon markets.  Let me explain.

There are three distinct but closely related levels of relevant policy action.  First, national (or regional) governments can establish emission-reduction policies, including carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems, and performance standards.  Second, these jurisdictions can link their policy instruments through mutual recognition of permits, allowances, or credits via bilateral agreements.  This allows trade among private-sector compliance entities of these units across international borders, which facilitates lower-cost achievement of the aggregate target.  But such transfers of emission reduction responsibilities and actions ought to be correctly counted toward compliance with respective NDCs under the Paris Agreement.  This is where Article 6 comes in!

In other words, the ITMOs of Article 6.2 would potentially be units of accounting for Corresponding Adjustments, not a medium of exchange for government-government purchase and sale.  Thus, international linkages among heterogeneous policies in different countries can continue to be executed, as they already have, and international carbon markets can and will proceed to grow!

It is surely unfortunate that the Madrid negotiators did not capitalize on their opportunity to define clear and consistent guidance for accounting for emissions transfers under Article 6.2, because such a robust accounting framework would increase confidence in successful linkages of climate policies across jurisdictions.  But if the guidance had extended much beyond basic accounting rules – such as implicit taxes on cooperation via what have been termed “share of proceeds” and “net global emission reduction” – then restrictive requirements would actually impede effective linkage, and thereby drive up compliance costs.

As Teresa Ribera, Minister for the Ecological Transition of Spain, observed at COP-25, “no deal is better than a bad deal” on carbon markets and Article 6.  Countries can now proceed to develop their own rules for international linkages that can foster high-integrity carbon markets.

 

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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, NOx trading in the eastern United States, and the NOx 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.

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