I’m very pleased to announce that we have launched a new webinar series from the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements – “Conversations on Climate Change and Energy Policy,” which features presentations, interviews, and other engagements with leading authorities on climate change and related energy policy, whether from academia, the private sector, NGOs, or government.
I think it is fair to say that Professor O’Sullivan is the quintessential Harvard Kennedy School faculty member, because in addition to her extensive and relevant scholarly research, she has had abundant experience in the policy world as a practitioner, including work in policy formulation and negotiation as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush.
On location in the Middle East during the Bush 43 administration
The webinar begins with Meghan’s presentation on “The Geopolitics of the Global Upheaval in Oil Markets,” in which she touches on the recent impacts on global oil markets of both price competition and the demand shock associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Following her presentation, I pose some questions, drawing – in part – on ones submitted by webinar participants.
In conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2011 with Richard Haass, former State Department and National Security Council official, and President, Council on Foreign Relations
Again, a recording of the webinar with a complete transcript is available here. I hope you will check it out.
In my conversation with Dick Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he reflects on his many years working on environmental policy in public service and in academia. Abundant insights arise, including important lessons for current climate policy deliberations in the United States, Europe, China, and other countries.
Professor Schmalensee was Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management for 10 years, and Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research for 12 years. Before and during those years, his research and teaching were in multiple areas of application of industrial organization, including antitrust, regulatory, energy, and environmental policies.
Professor Schmalensee in his home study in Boston, 2020
In this latest Podcast episode, our conversation begins with Dick’s upbringing in a small town in southern Illinois, his move east to college and graduate school at MIT, his dissertation research, and the professional path that took him after receipt of his Ph.D. degree, first to California, and then back east to MIT’s Sloan School of Management. We turn to his career in regulatory economics and policy – both his scholarly research and his close involvement in policy development and implementation, where he was “in the words of ‘Hamilton,” in the room where it happened.”
Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School, 2020
You won’t be surprised that we take time to focus on: the pathbreaking cap-and-trade program launched by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990; and political changes in the United States that have moved environmental policy from being a truly bipartisan issue to a partisan one in today’s highly polarized politics. Much of our conversation is about the current state of climate change policy – and policy research – both domestically and globally.
Delivering Keynote Address at the Toulouse School of Economics, 2017
Throughout the interview, Dick is at home in his disarming style of candid conversation, with no punches pulled. He terms current U.S. climate change policy “a disaster,” saying it was a mistake “walking away from Paris, walking away from any sense that it’s important that we deal with our emissions and indeed walking away from the potential federal role in helping states and localities adapt to change.”
My conversation with Dick Schmalensee is the eleventh episode in the Environmental Insights series. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:
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.
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.”
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.
