Bringing Ambition and Pragmatism to Climate Change Policy

In the world of environmental policy, it is frequently the case that pragmatism and effectiveness are framed as being at odds with passion and ambition.  Even more so, in the realm of climate change, it is the rare individual who can successfully merge ambition and pragmatism in the pursuit of intelligent and effective public policy.  Richard Schmalensee, my guest in the newest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” is just such a person.

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.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Directors of Resources for the Future.  And I’m pleased to say that Dick is also an Associate Scholar of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, and in recent years, has been my frequent co-author (for example, here, here, and here).

In addition to all of this, during a leave of absence from MIT, he served as a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the George H.W. Bush administration.

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.”

All of this and 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 you can also find a complete transcript of our conversation.

My conversation with Dick Schmalensee is the eleventh 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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Global Climate Change Negotiations: Learning from the Past to Think Carefully about the Future

I’m pleased to say we have 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 Sue Biniaz, long-time legal expert and lead negotiator for the U.S. Department of State in the international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Sue is currently a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. Before that, she served for over thirty years in the State Department’s Legal Adviser’s Office, where she was a Deputy Legal Adviser, as well as the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator from 1989 until early 2017.  She is also a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation, and has taught at Columbia Law School and the University of Chicago Law School.  She attended Yale College and Columbia Law School, and subsequently clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Sue Biniaz speaking at Harvard Kennedy School, April 2018

In this podcast episode, we talk about Sue’s extensive experience in the climate negotiations.  Commenting on COP-25 in Madrid last December, after Sue had left the State Department, she takes note of the disappointment that surrounded the failure to reach agreement on the “Rulebook” (detailed guidance) for the one article (of twenty-nine) in the Paris Agreement which had not already been resolved:  Article 6, which deals with modes of international cooperation, and provides the potential home for linkage of policies in different countries, including so-called carbon markets:

“It was unfortunate that they didn’t reach agreement on Article 6.  I think the compromises were all pretty evident and they ran out of time. I think there wasn’t enough kind of political oomph put into it at the end. That’s an example of if the U.S. had been there at a political level, they would have been able to sort of bang some heads together and get it done.”

With COP-26 having been postponed from November 2020 to sometime in 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Biniaz believes that international climate negotiators may now wish to take advantage of this hiatus to consider ways to improve the annual climate talks.

“One of the reasons I think the COP needs to be re-thought is because I think the metric that’s been used by many people including the press has been the negotiating issues that are on the table,” Biniaz argues. “If you only look at those, it just puts too much pressure on what should be kind of a minor aspect of a COP compared to everything else that’s going on.”

With the U.S. elections looming in November, Biniaz says hopes are high that a new presidential administration will rejoin the Paris Agreement, and reengage in a productive way.

“If you’re going to rejoin the Paris Agreement, do it in a way that isn’t going to just be reversed four or eight years later. Try to make sure you have enough domestic buy-in so it’s harder for a future administration to just reverse it again,” she states. “And…if you’re going to come back into the agreement, try to use whatever leverage the United States has at that point to get other countries to do more.”

As you will quickly realize when you listen to this podcast episode, Sue Biniaz is not only very smart and exceptionally knowledgeable; she is also unusually clear and articulate.  You will not regret listening!

Sue Biniaz (center) with Todd Stern, then the U.S. lead climate negotiator, at COP-17 in Durban, South Africa, in 2011.

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 Sue Biniaz is the tenth 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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How Have Companies Responded to the Coronavirus Pandemic and Climate Change?

We have just released the latest 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 Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University.  She shares her perspectives on how large organizations are changing in response to the coronavirus pandemic and global climate change.  A full transcript of our conversation is available here.

Rebecca makes her home at Harvard Business School, where she was the founding co-director with Professor Forest Reinhardt of the Business and Environment Initiative.  She is also a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

In this podcast episode, we first discuss how the attention given to environmental matters has changed at business schools in the three decades since she received her Ph.D. in Business Economics at Harvard and joined the faculty at the MIT Sloan School of Management, prior to moving on to Harvard Business School.

Henderson’s research and writing explore how organizations respond to large-scale technological shifts, most recently in regard to energy and the environment.  This has also given her a special perspective to think about the role of the private sector in responding to the Covid-19 crisis.  In this regard, she notes that she is reminded that “when organizations decide they must change, they can change,” pointing to the quick shift to remote work across many sectors, the effort by biomedical firms to speed up supply changes, and the ways in which retail and grocery distribution channels are mobilizing their resources. “You’re seeing profound changes in methods of operation across the economy,” she remarks.

“The potential upside is that this emergency is making it very clear that the stability of the entire community is critical to the success of business,” Rebecca states. “I think the emergency is also highlighting that one needs a strong, effective federal government to deal with problems like this. I think both of those insights could conceivably translate into business pressure for coherent climate policy in ways that could be very helpful.”

“Climate change can seem distant; it can seem invisible. Why should I worry about it? To see the whole economy mobilized when the threat becomes very, very concrete reminds me that, as we think about climate change, we have to find a way to make that threat as concrete as possible. So that’s one thing I take away from the current moment.”

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 Rebecca Henderson is the ninth 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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