HEEP Faculty Fellows Participate in ASSA Roundtable on EPA's Clean Power Plan

James Stock, a Faculty Fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program—the Harvard Project's parent program—organized a roundtable discussion that took place on January 4, 2015, at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Association (ASSA), held this year in Boston, entitled "The Economics of the EPA's Proposed Regulation of CO₂ Emissions from Power Plants." Professor Stock was a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors in 2013–2014, where he worked on the development of this important regulatory proposal. Harvard Environmental Economics Program (HEEP) and Harvard Project Director Robert Stavins participated in the roundtable panel.

Roundtable participants focused on the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan, with which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would regulate CO₂ emissions from existing power plants. Existing coal-fired power plants are the largest single source of CO₂ emissions in the United States, and the Clean Power Plan—if implemented—would be an important element of U.S. policy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

A previous discussion of the Clean Power Plan hosted by the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, in which Professors Stock and Stavins also participated, is described here. (See also links to background documents and video at the bottom of this linked page.)

Other participants in the ASSA roundtable included: Paul Joskow, moderator (President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and former professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology);Meredith Fowlie (Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California-Berkeley); Lawrence Goulder(Department of Economics, Stanford University); andKevin Hassett(director of economic policy studies, American Enterprise Institute).

Links to Fowlie's, Goulder's, and Stavins' roundtable presentations are at the bottom of this page.

Also included below is a link to comments to the EPA on the Clean Power Plan, submitted by Fowlie, Goulder, Stavins, and several other economists, including Christopher Knittel, professor of economics at MIT and a HEEP Associate Scholar.

A related publication, "Legal and Policy Perspectives on EPA's Proposed Clean Power Plan" by Louisa Lund may be accessed here: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/24649/