CAMBRIDGE MA. – Esteemed economist Geoffrey Heal lauded recent technological advancements while also expressing frustration with the impact of international efforts to combat climate change during the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Listen to the interview here. Hosted by Robert N. Stavins, A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Environmental Insights is intended to promote public discourse on important issues at the intersection of economics and environmental policy.
Heal, the Donald C. Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, is author of approximately 200 academic articles and 18 books on environmental, energy, resource, economics, and related topics, including the pathbreaking 1979 book “Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources,” co-authored with Partha Dasgupta, which is widely viewed as an exceptionally important work in the field of natural resource and environmental economics.
“[Partha and I] enjoyed collaborating, and I think it's something that we just felt sort of intellectually compelled to write because we felt the time was right and we felt that we could make a contribution … particularly acting together,” Heal remarked. “But I don't think we had any sense of the impact it would have, quite frankly… It's had quite a big impact. And I find students still reading it today, which is quite remarkable.”
Heal also addressed the question of how much the field of resource and environmental economics has changed during his time in academia over the past 40 years.
“The field has been transformed, hasn't it? I mean, in the last decade or so, it's been transformed into a much more empirical field than it was before that. What they call the ‘credibility revolution’ in economics has taken hold in environmental and resource economics,” he said. “We've got a vast number of papers using interesting novel data sets to look at climate impacts or regulatory impacts, and I think they've increased our understanding of the impact of environmental issues and environmental policies… considerably.”
Serving as a coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report which was finalized in 2014, Heal has had a front row seat in the analysis of climate change policy. That said, Heal admitted he is a bit frustrated with the pace of collective efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat the effects of global climate change.
“I think that we know a lot about how to solve the climate problem. I think the technologies that we need to solve it are largely, perhaps not totally, but largely available… So, I think we know how to move to an electric grid which is powered entirely without fossil fuels,” he stated. “We have a lot of the pieces available. We're not just deploying them fast enough to reach the targets that we think we need to reach …so I find that frustrating. We're very close to being able to achieve the goal, but we're not actually doing what we need to [do it].”
Asked why current climate policies don’t seem to be accomplishing their goals, Heal mentioned politics.
“It's the enormous influence of the fossil fuel industry and the sense of mostly some conservatives that this is a plot to increase the powers of the state. And of course, the Ukraine war has really been a major problem too, because it's caused Europeans to move away from natural gas and in some cases back to coal, which is a terrible piece of backsliding, and it's understandable under the circumstances, but it's very regrettable from the climate perspective,” he said. “The Ukraine war, I hope, is a temporary phenomenon, whereas the power of the fossil fuel industry and the sort of conservative misapprehensions about what climate change is all about, I think are more real and more enduring.”
Heal’s interview is the fifth episode of 2023 in the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month.
“Environmental Insights is intended to inform and educate listeners about important issues relating to an economic perspective on developments in environmental policy, including the design and implementation of market-based approaches to environmental protection,” said Stavins. “We speak with accomplished Harvard colleagues, other academics, and practitioners who are working on solving some of the most challenging public problems we face.”
Environmental Insights is hosted on SoundCloud and is also available on Amazon Music, iTunes, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Spotify.
LINK TO PODCAST: https://on.soundcloud.com/2cLhK
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