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An Eminent Economist Talks About Climate Change

In my 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 four years with a significant number of truly outstanding economists who have carried out important work in the realm of environmental, energy, and resource economics, and have been real leaders in the profession. In my most recent podcast, we topped that, because I was joined by someone who has made important contributions not just in the realm of environmental and resource economics, but has been a global leader in the discipline of economics broadly, across numerous sub-fields, and has ventured and published well beyond economics in seemingly disparate realms, ranging from contract bridge to Italian Rennaisance painting. All in all, he is the author or editor of 14 books and more than 300 scholarly articles.

I am, of course, referring to my Harvard colleague – and good friend – Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of Public Policy and Management, and the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis. Beyond that, I want to acknowledge that he is celebrated at Harvard and beyond as a marvelous classroom teacher, and a valued mentor to generations of students and faculty colleagues.

Near the beginning of our conversation, Richard laments a phenomenon he terms “the pumped equilibrium,” in which people hold exaggerated expectations about confronting the challenge of climate change if we do not drastically increase our efforts.

“People started at least three decades ago saying, ‘Climate change is a terrible problem, but we can control it by cutting back on our greenhouse gases, and this is the last decade that we can do that. If we don’t do it this decade, we’re dead.’ And then, the next decade they said … the same thing. And this decade they’re saying … the same thing. And they keep telling us that we’re going to be able to [limit the global temperature increase to] two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, or even more recently, 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. I think that’s unrealistic.”

Richard maintains that instead a realistic assessment of the current state of climate change requires new approaches to make an impact.

“The United States has done a so-so job of cutting our emissions by about 10 percent over a number of years, but at the same time, China has increased its emissions by 13 percent, and you can expect that countries like India will be growing much faster in its emissions [levels],” he remarks. “So, I think that we should take a sober look at these problems and say, ‘What else can we do?’”

Climate adaptation, Zeckhauser states, holds the potential for greatly reducing the impacts of climate change. He cites one example in which scientists have proposed building a 100-foot-tall berm around a fjord in Greenland where warm water currently flows in and melts the ice sheets.

“This is very speculative. Will this work? I sure hope so. It’s within our realm of technological capability, but I think we should be looking for many solutions like this that could enable us to deal with … what I consider to be [the] catastrophic track that we’re on,” he says. Other potentially effective adaptation measures, he states, include increasing the alkalinity of the oceans and enforcing smarter logging policies to protect mature trees.

When I question Richard about the distributional implications of climate change, he remarks, “I think dealing with climate change and reducing its impact will automatically have very beneficial distributional consequences. The places that are currently suffering the most from climate change are the hottest places in the world, which are both suffering under [rising] temperatures and having their weather patterns shifted. So, you would be doing God’s work in restoring or preserving the planet, and you’d be doing work that’s to the benefit of the most affected people in the world.”

He also refers in this context to the challenges posed by massive migrations of people who want to escape rising temperatures in the south by heading north.

“Those [migration patterns] are very uncomfortable for the people in both places – the people who have to do the migration, which is frequently very dangerous and expensive, the people who are still trapped in the old place because they don’t have enough resources, and the people whose areas are being affected by the new people who are coming.”

Zeckhauser says that ultimately, it is up to policymakers around the world to confront the climate change challenge.

“This is a political problem on a global scale. So, even if you didn’t want to worry about it, as a political actor, as the president of the United States has to be and our climate envoy has to be, and the UN has to be, you have to pay serious attention to it.”

My conversation with Richard Zeckhauser is the first episode of 2024 and the 57^th episode over the past four years 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.
Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University.
Nathaniel Keohane, President, C2ES.
Amy Harder, Executive Editor, Cypher News.

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

The Social Cost of Carbon Redux

We find ourselves in a period when concerns about climate change impacts are increasing (see the report just released of the IPCC’s AR6 WG3 Summary for Policymakers), federal climate legislation seems less and less likely, the U.S. Supreme Court may significantly restrict EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, and other U.S. courts are at least temporarily preventing the administration from using the Social Cost of Carbon. In the midst of all this, it’s worthwhile thinking critically and dispassionately about the benefits and costs of environmental protection. There is no one better to reflect on this than my podcast guest, Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. You can listen to our conversation in the latest episode of my podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” Our full conversation is here.

In these podcasts, I converse with leading experts from academia, government, industry, and NGOs. Maureen Cropper fits well in this group. In addition to her professorship at the University of Maryland, she is a Senior Fellow with Resources for the Future, a (very active) member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

She has long focused her research on valuing environmental amenities (particularly in regard to environmental health effects), the discounting of future health benefits, and the tradeoffs implicit in environmental regulations. Her current research focuses primarily on the costs and benefits of air pollution control efforts in India, and on the valuation of climate amenities.

When I ask Maureen Cropper to assess the Biden Administration’s environmental and resource policies, she remarks that it seems to be heading in the right direction, at least on one important component.

“I do think that there has been momentum to further the cause of estimating and using the social cost of carbon. After all, on Biden’s first day [in office], he actually reinstated the Interagency Working Group, which had been disbanded by President Trump and … announced that we were going to make progress in revising the social cost of carbon. I do think that a lot has been done along those lines,” she says. “Although … what we see and how it’s used may be affected, is likely to be affected … by recent [court] rulings.”

Current estimates of the social cost of carbon range between 50 and 60 dollars a ton, but Cropper notes that it could be increased to 100 dollars per ton or more if the discount rate is changed from three percent to two percent.

She goes on to express some doubt about the effectiveness of current U.S. climate policies, noting that she is “not particularly optimistic about the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions are being reduced.” But she also expresses her admiration for recent youth movements of climate activism.

“I actually do see the attitudes that they have which really are very encouraging to me in terms of what’s happening in the country as a whole,” she says. “It does seem like a very good indicator perhaps, or bellwether one hopes of things to come.”

For this and much more, I hope you will listen to my compete conversation with Maureen Cropper, the 33^rd episode in 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.

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

What Do the 2020 U.S. Election Results Portend for Climate Change Policy?

In the November 3^rd U.S. election, the Democratic team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris defeated incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, signaling a major change in the executive branch of the U.S. government. At the same time, it now appears that Republicans are likely to maintain their majority control of the Senate, pending a pair of January 5^th runoff elections for the two Georgia Senate seats. If the Democrats take both seats, the Senate would be tied 50-50, with the Democratic Vice President (who serves as president of the Senate) breaking the tie, thereby turning Senate control over to Democrats. In the House of Representatives, Republicans are likely to gain a relatively small number of seats, but Democrats will maintain their control of that body. More important for the long term, Republicans managed to maintain or flip enough state legislatures to continue to dominate the once-a-decade redistricting process.

There will be numerous changes — many rather significant, and some quite dramatic — in U.S. climate change policy under the Biden administration. But in a variety of ways it will be an uphill battle, just to return to the pre-Trump status at the time President Obama departed the White House, let alone to move beyond that point. The details matter, so please read on.

Significant Changes in Policy Priorities and Norms of Conduct

Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris will be inaugurated on January 20^th, 2021, and will immediately face an unprecedented set of national challenges. As the Biden-Harris transition website indicates, the greatest challenges – and presumably top policy priorities – are: the pandemic, the economic recession, racial justice, and climate change (listed in that order).

The failure of Mr. Trump to be re-elected to a second term brings a dramatic change in leadership at the very top. For the first time in four years, honesty and civility will be hallmarks of behavior, as will fundamental trust in expertise, including in the realm of science. The dozens of political and behavioral norms that have been abandoned by President Trump and his administration will be respected once again. Democratic norms will be restored, racism denounced, and diplomatic relationships will be reestablished with allies. There will be a turn away from xenophobia and hostility toward immigrants, and perhaps some movement toward free trade.

Others have greater expertise than I do to comment on anticipated changes in norms, as well as broader legal and policy issues. I focus in this essay on anticipated changes in public policies regarding climate change, both in the international and domestic domains. Four years ago, it was rather straightforward for me to predict what the newly-elected Trump administration would bring in the climate change realm, as I discussed in the New York Timesand in this blog in November, 2016. This time, however, it is a bit less obvious, because of the moving parts.

I caution readers to beware of advocates on either side making predictions at this very early date about the new administration’s future climate policy initiatives. Predictions from those who advocate particular policies are likely to be infected with some degree of wishful thinking. That may be true not only of professional environmental advocates, but also of academics, like myself, who would like to claim some degree of objectivity. The best I can offer is that I have “no skin in the game,” and so I will try to offer what I hope is an objective assessment of what I honestly believe is most likely to emerge over the next two to four years.

International Dimensions of Climate Change Policy

Readers of this blog probably do not need to be reminded that because climate change is a global commons problem, international cooperation is necessary in order constrain (if not suppress) free-rider incentives. On January 20^th (inauguration day) or shortly thereafter, Mr. Biden is likely to initiate the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement (from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States on November 4^th, the earliest date permitted by the Agreement). Thirty days after the necessary paper work is filed with the United Nations, the United States will again be a Party to the Agreement. That’s the easy part. The hard part is coming up with a quantitative statement of how and how much U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) will be reduced over time.

This “Nationally Determined Contribution” (NDC) will need to be sufficiently ambitious to satisfy (at least to some degree) both domestic green groups and some of the key countries of the international community. This essentially means that the NDC will need to be at least as ambitious as the Obama administration target of a 26-28 percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2025, compared with 2005. And it will need to compare favorably with the targets now being announced by other major emitters. For example, the European Union is coming close to enacting a new target to cut its emissions 55% below their 1990 level by 2030. And China recently said it will achieve carbon neutrality (zero net emissions) by 2060.

If significant ambition is one necessary condition for the new Biden NDC, the other necessary condition is that it be credible, that is, truly achievable given existing and reasonably anticipated policy actions. The only way that both of these necessary conditions can be achieved is with aggressive new domestic climate legislation.

Of course, the Paris Agreement is not the only possible avenue for international action on climate change, and the administration’s participation in that key agreement may be complemented by bilateral agreements, as well as plurilateral efforts via the G7 or G20.

Domestic Climate Legislation

With a Republican-controlled Senate – or even with a Democratic-controlled Senate with the one-vote margin, which is the best Democrats can hope for – meaningful and ambitious climate legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. The “budget-reconciliation process,” whereby only a simple majority is needed to pass legislation, rather than the 60 votes required to cut off Senate debate, will be available only if every Democrat supports the given legislation, and only for climate measures that are connected to the tax code or mandatory spending.

Under these circumstances, it will be challenging, to say the least, for Democrats to enact President-Elect Biden’s climate plan, including its $2 trillion in spending over four years with the goal of making all U.S. electricity carbon free in 15 years. Keep in mind that the Obama administration’s major climate legislation – the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (the so-called Waxman-Markey bill) – failed to receive a vote in the Senate, despite the fact that Democrats (and independents who caucused with Democrats) then held a total of 59 seats. On the other hand, climate change is now taken more seriously by the public and receives considerably greater attention in political circles than it did twelve years ago. That said, it is fair to say that the prospects over the next two to four years for comprehensive climate legislation – such as a truly meaningful carbon-pricing system – are not very good.

But other legislation that would help reduce GHG emissions in the long term appears more possible. That includes a post-COVID economic stimulus bill, which might have a green tinge, if not a fully green hue. The Obama administration’s stimulus package enacted twelve years ago in response to the Great Recession included some $90 billion in clean energy investments and tax incentives. Another candidate will be a future infrastructure bill, something both parties seem to recognize is important to upgrade aging U.S. infrastructure. This could include funding for improvements in the national electricity grid, which will be necessary to facilitate greater reliance on renewable sources of electricity generation.

Finally, there are possibilities for bipartisan climate legislation, although with stringency and scope much less than what Biden’s climate plan calls for. The key approaches here might involve tax incentives, that is, nearly every politician’s favorite instrument – subsidies. This may fit well with President-Elect Biden’s moderate approach to governing and his stated desire to work with both parties in Congress. Specific bipartisan options could include policies targeting wind and solar power, carbon capture and storage/utilization, nuclear power, technology initiatives via the government laboratories, and even an electric vehicle rebate.

But such modest, bipartisan initiatives are unlikely to satisfy either the demands of domestic climate policy advocates or international calls for action. Because of this, the new administration – like the previous Obama administration – may have to opt for regulatory as opposed to statutory approaches.

Regulatory Approaches

The new President, under existing authority, could “quickly” take actions through executive orders (Oval Office directives) in a number of areas to reverse many of Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. Will Democrats use the Congressional Review Act, which allows the Congress to nullify a rule within 60 legislative days of its adoption? Republicans used this at the end of the Obama administration, but the law then prohibits Congress from adopting a regulation that is “substantially the same” in the future.

More generally, new oil and gas leasing on federal lands could again be prohibited, and the White House could attempt to block the Keystone XL pipeline from being completed. More promising, the President could direct that the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) be revised, presumably returning it the Obama administration’s use of global (not just domestic) damages and a 3% (rather than 7%) discount rate in the calculations, thereby increasing the SCC from about $1 to about $50 per ton, and directing federal agencies to use the revised SCC in their own decision making.

Presumably the new administration will move to reinstate and move beyond the Obama administration’s ambitious Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. In addition, EPA could reverse the Trump administration’s attempts to deny California its waiver under the Clean Air Act to put in place more stringent air-quality regulations than are required under federal law.

Also, there is the possibility of using the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to use financial regulation of publicly-traded companies to raise the cost of capital for fossil energy development, or to set standards for disclosure of climate-related corporate information. Likewise, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has itself begun to explore options via its Market Risk Advisory Committee.

Regulatory approaches under existing statutory authority through rulemaking often appear to be an attractive approach, but using new regulations under existing legislation rather than enacting new laws raises another problem – the courts. Rulemaking entails lengthy notice and comment periods, extensive records, and inter-agency consultation, and the rules are subject to potential litigation. The Obama administration promulgated its Clean Power Plan after the Senate failed to deliver on the administration’s comprehensive climate legislation. Note that the Clean Power Plan was subject to a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court even before Trump entered office. Then Trump arrived, and killed the regulation outright.

The real challenge to the regulatory approach is that new regulations are much more likely to be successfully challenged in federal courts in 2021 than they were during the Obama years. This is partly because there are now more than 200 Trump-appointed federal judges. But more importantly, the Supreme Court now has a 6-3 conservative majority, which is very likely to favor literal reading of statutes, giving executive departments and agencies much less flexibility to go beyond the letter of the law or to interpret it in new “innovative ways.” In particular, it is possible that the newly-constituted Supreme Court will move to modify or even overrule the critical Chevron Doctrine (1984), under which federal courts defer to administrative agencies when Congress was less than explicit in a statute on some issue (such as whether carbon dioxide can be regulated under particular sections of the Clean Air Act of 1970, as amended in 1990).

There is also talk of a “whole of government” approach to climate change, in which the White House pushes virtually all departments and agencies to put in place changes that are supportive of decarbonizing the economy. This would be beyond or instead of the focused statutory and regulatory policies described above. Of course, the critical question is what such an approach could actually produce in terms of short-term emissions reductions and/or long-term decarbonizing of the economy.

Sub-National Climate Policy

Even if less than what is hoped for can be accomplished with climate policies at the Federal level over the next two to four years, surely the new administration will not be hostile to states and municipalities taking more aggressive action. Indeed, as I have written about previously in this blog and elsewhere, climate policies at the state level (California) and regional level (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the northeast) have become increasingly important, particularly during the four years of the Trump administration. Bottom-up evolution of national climate policy may continue to evolve from the Democratic-leaning states in the recent election – the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, Upper Midwest, Southwest, and West Coast (and possibly Georgia!) – which together represent more than half of the U.S. population and an even larger share of economic activity and GHG emissions.

The Path Ahead

The new administration may find creative ways to break the logjam that has so far prevented ambitious national climate change policies from being enacted (or, if enacted, sustainable). My greatest source of optimism is that the Biden-Harris team, in sharp contrast with the Trump-Pence administration, gives every indication that it will embrace scientific and other expertise across the board – whether that means the best epidemiologists and infectious disease experts designing an effective strategy for COVID-19, or the best scientists and economists designing sound climate policies that are also politically feasible.