Political Strategies to Overcome Climate Policy Obstructionism

Great socio-economic transitions see the demise of certain industries and the rise of others. The losers of the transition tend to deploy a variety of tactics to obstruct change. We develop a political-economy model of interest group competition and garner evidence of tactics deployed in the global climate movement. From this we deduce a set of strategies for how the climate movement competes against entrenched hydrocarbon interests. Five strategies for overcoming obstructionism emerge: (1) Appeasement, which involves compensating the losers; (2) Co-optation, which seeks to instigate change by working with incumbents; (3) Institutionalism, which involves changes to public institutions to support decarbonization; (4) Antagonism, which creates reputational or litigation costs to inaction; and (5) Countervailance, which makes low-carbon alternatives more competitive. We argue that each strategy addresses the problem of obstructionism through a different lens, reflecting a diversity of actors and theories of change within the climate movement. The choice of which strategy to pursue depends on the institutional context

Spatial-temporal dynamics of employment shocks in declining coal mining regions and potentialities of the 'just transition'

The United States, much like other countries around the world, faces significant obstacles to achieving a rapid decarbonization of its economy. Crucially, decarbonization disproportionately affects the communities that have been historically, politically, and socially embedded in the nation's fossil fuel production. However, this effect has rarely been quantified in the literature. Using econometric estimation methods that control for unobserved heterogeneity via two-way fixed effects, spatial effects, heterogeneous time trends, and grouped fixed effects, we demonstrate that mine closures induce a significant and consistent contemporaneous rise in the unemployment rate across US counties. A single mine closure can raise a county's unemployment rate by 0.056 percentage points in a given year; this effect is amplified by a factor of four when spatial econometric dynamics are considered. Although this response in the unemployment rate fades within 2-3 years, it has far-reaching effects in its immediate vicinity. Furthermore, we use cluster analysis to build a novel typology of coal counties based on qualities that are thought to facilitate a successful recovery in the face of local industrial decline. The combined findings of the econometric analysis and typology point to the importance of investing in alternative sectors in places with promising levels of economic diversity, retraining job seekers in places with lower levels of educational attainment, providing relocation (or telecommuting) support in rural areas, and subsidizing childcare and after school programs in places with low female labor force participation due to the gendered division of domestic work

Revoking Coal Mining Permits:An economic and legal analysis

Achieving mitigation targets under the Paris Agreement will depend on the early retirement of coal mines and plants over the next decade. In the absence of sufficiently stringent demand-side policies, supply-side injunctions provide a potential avenue to expedite the decline of coal. In many coal-producing jurisdictions, the law provides grounds to revoke coal mining permits. Recent plans to phase out coal use in Germany provide an interesting testing ground for this concept. We study the case of permits granted to RWE Power AG to continue operating Europe’s largest opencast lignite mine, situated at the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). We conduct two complementary assessments: (i) a legal analysis finding that German law provides several grounds for the revocation of coal mining permits, particularly when linked to quantifiable damages to local ecosystems and communities; and (ii) an economic analysis using natural capital accounting to quantify the environmental and societal costs associated with alternative scenarios of continued and halted mining activity. We find the net present value of gains from immediately halting operations at the Hambach lignite mine to be €98–208 billion over 34-years, equivalent to 13–30% of NRW’s annual GDP. Health-related savings from avoided air pollution are 6.5 times greater than costs of replacing lost capacity with new renewable energy and battery storage infrastructure and two orders of magnitude greater than costs of compensating laid-off mining workers. Key policy insights The revocation of coal mining permits could be a legally plausible and replicable means of expediting the decline of coal. Natural capital accounts highlight the third-party costs of coal mining, quantifying the often-ignored health-related damages from polluting activities. Legal criteria adopted by agencies when assessing coal mining permits should be modified to accurately reflect considerations of climate change, local ecology, human health, and national policy. Independent and externally reviewed natural capital assessments should be required as standard protocol for the issuance of fossil fuel exploitation permits. Debates about appropriate levels of compensation to coal companies for premature mine closures should factor in the implicit and explicit subsidies such companies have received in the past

Making Carbon Pricing Work

Carbon-pricing initiatives are spreading at an unprecedented rate, but a considerable gap remains between actual prices and those required to achieve ambitious climate change mitigation. This perspective shows that much of this gap could be closed by enhancing the public’s acceptance of carbon pricing through the effective use of the substantial revenues raised. We synthesize findings regarding the use of carbon revenues both from recent behavioral and political studies as well as from economic analyses of equity and efficiency. We then compare real-world carbon pricing regimes with insights derived from theory. We find that uniform lump-sum recycling of carbon revenues to citizens is favored among behavioral and political studies that emphasize the importance of distributional fairness, revenue salience, political trust, and policy stability amid partisan changes in government. It is also successfully employed in several real-world recycling schemes, although alternative uses of revenues such as green spending may be appropriate in different national contexts

Making Carbon Pricing Work

Carbon-pricing initiatives are spreading at an unprecedented rate, but a considerable gap remains between actual prices and those required to achieve ambitious climate change mitigation. This perspective shows that much of this gap could be closed by enhancing the public’s acceptance of carbon pricing through the effective use of the substantial revenues raised. We synthesize findings regarding the use of carbon revenues both from recent behavioral and political studies as well as from economic analyses of equity and efficiency. We then compare real-world carbon pricing regimes with insights derived from theory. We find that uniform lump-sum recycling of carbon revenues to citizens is favored among behavioral and political studies that emphasize the importance of distributional fairness, revenue salience, political trust, and policy stability amid partisan changes in government. It is also successfully employed in several real-world recycling schemes, although alternative uses of revenues such as green spending may be appropriate in different national contexts

Allocation, allocation, allocation! The political economy of the development of the EU ETS

The European Union's pioneering carbon Emissions Trading System, the EU ETS, has inspired countries around the world to launch their own CO_{2} markets. This paper analyses the evolution of the EU ETS from a political economy perspective, emphasizing the interaction of economic principles and political interests at pivotal moments, and showing how each compromise changed the scope for future design choices. We focus on the allowance allocation issue, which provides a window into the complex tug-of-war between economic efficiency and the politics of distribution. Our account highlights the dynamic nature of CO_{2} market reform, and provides lessons that can help inform the design of more stable and effective CO_{2] markets in the future

Technology Transfer and Innovation for Low-Carbon Development.

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