Tag: revenue-neutral taxes

Crude Oil Prices, Climate Change, and Global Welfare

A few weeks ago, I participated in a panel session titled, “The Remarkable Transformation of the Energy Sector: Does it Also Transform Our World.” The motivating question was: “Is the dramatic decline in oil prices a complete gift to the West because of the enormous funds being saved, or is it an unintended Trojan horse because development of renewable energy as well as new fossil-fuel sources will decline in the West, posing longer new challenges?”

The other members of the panel – from private industry – had vastly more expertise (and relevant insights) on fossil-fuel markets, but here’s what I had to say. This is hardly at the sweet spot of my professional competence, so I welcome your comments and corrections! In general, how would you answer that question?

Causes

I start (and started) from the premise that the dramatic decline in crude oil prices that took place from August, 2014 ($96/barrel), to March, 2015 ($44/barrel), was due – on the one hand – to decreased demand, a function of slow economic growth in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, endogenous, price-driven technological change leading to greater fuel efficiency, and policy-driven technological change that also has been leading to greater fuel efficiency, such as more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the United States; and – on the other hand – was due to increased supply, partly a function of the growth of unconventional (tight) U.S. oil production (a product of the combination of two technologies – horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing).  And, in the presence of all of this, Saudi Arabia decided not to restrict its output to prop up prices.

[Before proceeding, I should note that since May of this year, crude oil prices have increased by about 30% from their March low, but as of May ($60/barrel) are still far below their August 2014 level.]

Consequences

When one examines virtually any significant price change from an economic perspective, there inevitably seems to be both good news and bad news. So with the fall in crude oil prices.

The Bad News

First of all, I assume that low crude oil prices are problematic for the economic and political stability of some of the oil-producing/exporting countries, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria.  (For details, see Bordoff and Losz 2015, below.)

Second, it’s frequently been asserted that low oil prices are bad news for the development of alternative forms of energy, including renewable sources. Of course, in the United States, there isn’t much effect on electricity generation from renewable (wind and solar), because in the U.S. electricity sector, renewable supplies compete with coal and natural gas, not with fuel oil (but in other countries, which use more fuel oil for electricity generation than we do, there can be a disincentive for renewable dispatch – and hence development).

Third, there can be – indeed, has been – a major impact in the U.S. motor fuels sector, where the market for biofuels (mainly ethanol) is negatively affected by low conventional gasoline prices. However, these impacts must be somewhat muted by public policies, which directly or indirectly subsidize (or, in fact, require) the use of biofuels.

Fourth, low gasoline prices have resulted in decreased demand by consumers for motor vehicles with high fuel efficiency, and SUV and pickup truck sales have rebounded from previous lows. But these effects are also muted, to some degree, by public policies, including U.S. CAFE standards.   Finally, low gasoline prices also have short-term effects in the form of more driving and fuel use by the existing fleet of motor vehicles, which is bad news in terms of emissions (and congestion).

Differences across Sectors

Before turning to the “good news” about low crude oil prices (and there surely is good news), it’s worthwhile noting that whether individual businesses find these low prices to be good or bad depends largely upon the economic sector in which they operate. For example, whereas commercial airlines are finally making profits, due to the low price of jet fuel (their most important variable operating cost), manufacturers of commercial aircraft will see lower demand for new planes if low jet fuel prices become the long-term norm. The primary factor driving the larger airlines to replace aircraft in their fleets is the lower operating costs due to the much greater fuel efficiency of new models.

And, of course, low oil prices are systematically bad news for oil producers, including the major U.S. companies.

The Good News

Finally, here is the upside of these significant changes in crude oil markets.

Low oil prices are unambiguously good for aggregate global welfare. This includes consumers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. And, at least temporarily, OPEC seems to have lost its ability to set a price floor.

Low oil prices mean an increase in consumers’ disposable income, amounting to nearly $2,500 per U.S. household annually, according to Stephen Brown (see below).  If we subtract the income losses to U.S. oil producers, the net gain per U.S. household amounts to a bit more than $800 per year, with gains accruing disproportionately to low-income households.

Turning to the environmental realm, there is also good news, or at least the possibility of good news. An opportunity for new, sensible energy and climate change policies has emerged with these low oil prices.

First, now is the time to reduce – or better yet, phase out – costly and inefficient fuel subsidies, which exist in many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries.

Second, with gasoline prices relatively low – and natural gas supplies holding down electricity prices, at least in the United States – there has never been a better time to introduce progressive climate policies in the form of carbon-pricing, whether via carbon taxes or through carbon cap-and-trade. Unfortunately, none of us should hold our breath waiting for that to happen.

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For further reading, I recommend:

Bordoff, Jason, and Akos Losz.  “Oil Shock: Decoding the Causes and Consequences of the 2014 Oil Price Drop.”  Horizons, Spring 2015, Issue No. 3, pp. 190-206.

Brown, Stephen P. A.  “Falling Oil Prices: Implications in the United States.” Resources, Number 189.  Washington:  Resources for the Future, 2015, pp. 40-44.

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A Challenge for the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement

At the recent climate negotiations at the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Lima, Peru, a very important issue was left on the table, unresolved: Will the 2015 Paris Agreement (scheduled to be signed in December of this year at COP-21) facilitate – or at least avoid inhibiting – international linkage of national (and for that matter, sub-national) climate policies?

Brief History

In the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, adopted by COP-17 in 2011, negotiators agreed to develop a new legal instrument “under the Convention applicable to all Parties,” for adoption at COP-21 in December, 2015, in Paris. With the Lima talks now behind us, it appears that the 2015 agreement will reflect a hybrid climate policy architecture—one that combines top-down elements, such as for monitoring, reporting, and verification, with bottom-up elements, including “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), describing what a country intends to do to reduce emissions, based on domestic political feasibility and other factors. (I wrote about this in Assessing the Outcome of the Lima Climate Talks, posted on December 14, 2014.)

Can the Aggregation of INDCs be Cost-Effective?

A major question facing negotiators is how can the new hybrid policy architecture encourage greater ambition, while remaining true to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” A key answer to that question is to allow for the linkage of heterogeneous national policy instruments. Why do I say that?

Here’s the reason. An attribute of the Paris architecture that will encourage greater ambition over time is cost-effectiveness. (Another key attribute to encourage greater ambition is comparability of INDCs, a topic on which we’re also working at the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, about which I will write in the future.) To enhance the cost-effectiveness of the new system, a key feature will be linkages among regional, national, and sub-national climate policies. By linkage, I mean formal recognition by a greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation program in one jurisdiction (a regional, national, or sub-national government) of emission reductions undertaken in another jurisdiction for purposes of complying with the first jurisdiction’s mitigation program.

Linkage can be straightforward, as with the bilateral recognition of allowances under two cap-and-trade regimes, but – importantly — linkage can also take place among a heterogeneous set of policy instruments, such as between systems of performance standards, carbon taxes, and cap-and-trade.

Linkage in the Paris 2015 Agreement

In a new paper that was released by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements at a packed “side event” in Lima, my co-authors – Daniel Bodansky of Arizona State University, Seth Hoedl of Harvard Law School, and Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University – and I analyze theoretical issues relating to linkage among heterogeneous climate policy instruments and apply this analysis concretely to the 2015 Paris agreement. In “Facilitating Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and Sub-National Climate Policies Through a Future International Agreement,” we examine how the agreement can help facilitate the growth and operation of a robust system of international linkages of regional, national, and sub-national policies, as well as how inappropriate or excessive rules could obstruct effective, bottom-up linkage. Importantly, both economic and legal perspectives are represented in this research (which was supported by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and six of its member companies: Chevron, GDF-Suez, Global CCS Institute, Rio Tinto, Shell, and TransCanada)

Key Findings from Research

I encourage you to take a look at the full paper or, at least, its executive summary, but here – in very brief form — are the key findings.

First, there are a number of design elements the 2015 agreement should avoid, because they would inhibit linkage. These include “supplementarity requirements” that require parties to accomplish all or most of their emissions-reduction commitments within their national borders. The 2015 agreement also should avoid including detailed linkage rules in the core agreement; an agreement with more flexibility would allow rules to evolve on the basis of experience.

Second, to advance linkage, the 2015 agreement should: define key terms, in particular the units that are used for compliance purposes; establish registries and tracking mechanisms; and include default or model rules, from which nations are free to deviate at their discretion.

The most valuable outcome of the Paris Agreement regarding linkage may simply be including an explicit statement that parties may transfer portions of their emissions-reduction contributions to other parties—and that these transferred units may be used by the transferees to implement their own commitments.

It sounds simple, but a small but vocal set of (largely socialist) countries – including Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba – have vehemently opposed in the climate negotiations anything that looks remotely like a market, and will try hard to prevent such provisions from appearing in the 2015 agreement.

Next Steps

As the negotiating teams from 195 countries prepare to meet this month in Geneva, Switzerland, and in June in Bonn, Germany, the question remains of whether the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement will allow for and indeed facilitate international linkage of national and sub-national policies, and thereby encourage cost-effectiveness and greater environmental ambition. Over the next several months, the answer to this question will become clear.

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The UN Climate Summit and a Key Issue for the 2015 Paris Agreement

World leaders converged at the United Nations in New York City this past week for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s much anticipated Climate Summit, a lead-up to global negotiations that will take place in Lima, Peru, in December of this year, and culminate a year later in Paris.  The challenge before negotiators is great, because there are significant obstacles to reaching a meaningful agreement, as I describe in an Op-Ed that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, September 21st, “Climate Realities.”

However, partly because of the new path that is being taken under the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, in which all countries will be included under a common legal framework in a politically realistic hybrid policy architecture, the prognosis for a meaningful international agreement is better now than it has been in decades.  I discuss this briefly at the end of the Times article, and emphasize it in a follow-up Op-Ed that appeared in The Boston Globe on September 23rd, “UN summit can accelerate momentum to a new approach to climate change.”  (Also, for my overall assessment of the UN Climate Summit, see this interview carried out by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Doug Gavel.)

A New Development at the UN Climate Summit

The most significant development at the UN Climate Summit this past week was the degree to which carbon pricing became central to so many discussions, including with leaders from the business community.  As carbon pricing – in particular, cap-and-trade systems – have emerged as the policy instrument of choice in many parts of the world, interest in linking these systems together has grown.  Linkage (unilateral or bilateral recognition of allowances) among carbon markets — and, for that matter links with non-market-based systems — can reduce the aggregate cost of achieving climate targets.  And lower compliance costs can in turn encourage countries to increase the ambition of their contributions under the 2015 Paris agreement.

New Research from Harvard

Because of this, the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements has been collaborating with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) to explore the role of linkage in the new international climate change agreement to be completed in Paris.  In this new research, my co-authors (Daniel Bodansky of Arizona State University, Seth Hoedl of Harvard Law School, and Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University) and I examine linkage — not only among cap-and-trade systems, but among cap-and-trade, carbon tax, and non-market regulatory systems — and the role that linkage should play in the 2015 agreement.  We look both at what would inhibit or even prevent linkage and should therefore be avoided in the 2015 agreement, and what – in a positive sense – should be included in the agreement to facilitate effective linkage of regional, national, and sub-national climate policies.

We released an Executive Summary of our research paper (“Facilitating Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and Sub-National Policies Through a Future International Agreement”) in New York City on September 22nd at an event co-sponsored by IETA and the Harvard Project, on the sidelines of UN Climate Summit, “Carbon Pricing and the 2015 Agreement” (the agenda of the event is available here).

In the executive summary (which can be downloaded in full here), we conclude that among the design elements the 2015 agreement should avoid because they would inhibit linkage are so-called “supplementarity requirements” that require parties to accomplish all (or a large, specified share) of their emissions-reduction commitments within their national borders. The 2015 agreement also should avoid including detailed linkage rules in the core agreement; an agreement with more flexibility would allow rules to evolve on the basis of experience.

Importantly, we also find that, to advance linkage, the 2015 agreement should:  define key terms, in particular the units that are used for compliance purposes; establish registries and tracking mechanisms; and include default or model rules, from which nations are free to deviate at their discretion.  Overall, the most valuable outcome of the Paris Agreement regarding linkage may simply be including an explicit statement that parties may transfer portions of their emissions-reduction contributions to other parties — and that these transferred units may be used by the transferees to implement their own commitments.

Looking Forward

We will release the complete research paper in November of this year, prior to the Twentieth Conference of the Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Lima, Peru, in December 2014, where the Harvard Project and IETA plan to conduct a side-event that will focus on this work.

When the full paper is released in November, I will provide a more complete description at this blog of our research methods and our findings.

[Additional press coverage is here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

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