November 12, 2020 - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern Time (ET)

What Role for Second-best Climate Policies?

Event Description:

Economic theory offers widely accepted prescriptions for optimal policy interventions against climate change. Political economy constraints and institutional, regulatory and sociocultural barriers frequently impede adoption of such first-best policies, however, raising difficult questions about how to approach research, academic discourse, and policy advice on a broad range of fallback – or second-best – policies. In this webinar, two leading experts with extensive track records of academic and advisory work on climate policy draw on recent research to discuss how they have addressed this issue in their own work, and to offer insights on the appropriate role of second-best policies in a climate policy portfolio or ‘instrument mix.’

Participants

Speaker:
Lawrence Goulder
Stanford

Lawrence H. Goulder is the Shuzo Nishihara Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center for Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Precourt Institute for the Environment, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and a University Fellow of Resources for the Future.
Speaker:
Christopher Knittel
MIT

Christopher Knittel is the George P Shultz Professor of Energy Economics and a Professor of Applied Economics in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He directs the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) at MIT. CEEPR, established in 1977 is the hub for social science work related to energy and the environment. Knittel is also the Deputy Director for Policy of the MIT Energy Initiative, the hub for energy research at MIT. Finally, along with Meredith Fowlie at UC Berkeley, he co-directs the Environmental and Energy Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Formerly, Knittel was on the faculty at UC Davis and Boston University. He is the former co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics, and an associate editor of the Journal of Transportation Economics and Policy, and Journal of Energy Markets, having previously served as an associate editor of The American Economic Journal — Economic Policy and The Journal of Industrial Economics.
Moderated by:
Michael Mehling
MIT

Dr. Michael Mehling is Deputy Director of MIT CEEPR and a Professor at the University of Strathclyde Law School. He is also a non-executive director with Ecologic Institute in Berlin, a Manager of the Konrad-von-Moltke Fund in Berlin, and a founding board member of Ecologic Institute in Washington DC, the Blockchain & Climate Institute (BCI) in London, and the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition (ERCST) in Brussels. In his work, Dr. Mehling focuses on comparative and international climate policy design and implementation, including its intersections with environmental, energy, and trade policy.