Economy

On a cool, fall evening on Lake Tahoe, researcher Sudeep Chandra stands at the back of a small boat anchored in the south end of the clear blue lake. He’s holding a device called a dredge, which looks like a large metal clamshell. “So, we’re basically going to drop this in the water,” Chandra says as he lightly tosses the dredge into the glassy lake and watches it sink to the bottom. A few seconds later, after the device snaps shut and scoops up a sample of the lakebed, Chandra reels it in and cracks it open into a shallow bucket. “We first see, of course, invasive Asian clams,” Chandra says, plucking a small shell from a pile of sediment. “These things can live two to four years old, and they can reproduce hundreds of thousands to millions of little villagers or tiny clams that go spread around the lake.” Asian clams are an invasive species that showed up in Tahoe more than 20 years ago. They give of...

Russia’s war on Ukraine has cast a shadow over this week’s meetings of world leaders at the G-20 summit in Bali and the United Nations climate change conference in Egypt. The war has dramatically disrupted energy markets the world over, leaving many countries vulnerable to price spikes amid supply shortages. Europe, worried about keeping the heat on through winter, is outbidding poor countries for natural gas, even paying premiums to reroute tanker ships after Russia cut off most of its usual natural gas supply. Some countries are restarting coal-fired power plants. Others are looking for ways to expand fossil fuel production, including new projects in Africa. These actions are a long way from the countries’ pledges just a year ago to rein in fossil fuels, and they’re likely to further increase greenhouse gas emissions, at least temporarily. But will the war and the economic turmoil prevent the world from meeting the Paris climate agreement’s lon...

Herman Daly had a flair for stating the obvious. When an economy creates more costs than benefits, he called it “uneconomic growth.” But you won’t find that conclusion in economics textbooks. Even suggesting that economic growth could cost more than it’s worth can be seen as economic heresy. The renegade economist, known as the father of ecological economics and a leading architect of sustainable development, died on Oct. 28, 2022, at the age of 84. He spent his career questioning an economics disconnected from an environmental footing and moral compass. In an age of climate chaos and economic crisis, his ideas that inspired a movement to live within our means are increasingly essential. The seeds of an ecological economist Herman Daly grew up in Beaumont, Texas, ground zero of the early 20th century oil boom. He witnessed the unprecedented growth and prosperity of the “gusher age” set against the poverty and deprivation that lingered...

The planet is heating up as greenhouse gas emissions rise, contributing to extreme heat waves and once-unimaginable flooding. Yet despite the risks, countries’ policies are not on track to keep global warming in check. The problem isn’t a lack of technology. The International Energy Agency recently released a detailed analysis of the clean energy technology needed to lower greenhouse gas emissions to net zero globally by 2050. What’s needed, the IEA says, is significant government support to boost solar and wind power, electric vehicles, heat pumps and a variety of other technologies for a rapid energy transition. One politically popular tool for providing that government support is the subsidy. The U.S. government’s new Inflation Reduction Act is a multibillion-dollar example, packed with financial incentives to encourage people to buy electric vehicles, solar panels and more. But just how big do governments’ clean energy subsidies need to be to...

The European Union is embarking on an experiment that will expand its climate policies to imports for the first time. It’s called a carbon border adjustment, and it aims to level the playing field for the EU’s domestic producers by taxing energy-intensive imports like steel and cement that are high in greenhouse gas emissions but aren’t already covered by climate policies in their home countries. If the border adjustment works as planned, it could encourage the spread of climate policies around the world. But the EU plan – which members of the European Parliament preliminarily agreed to on Dec. 13, 2022 – as well as most attempts to evaluate the impact of such policies, is missing an important source of cross-border carbon flows: trade in fossil fuels themselves. As energy analysts, we decided to take a closer look at what including fossil fuels would mean. In a newly released paper, we analyzed the impact and found that including fossil fuels in...