Robert Stavins interviews Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition, at COP-25 in Madrid, Spain.

How do the two major approaches to carbon pricing compare on relevant dimensions, including efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and distributional equity? This paper addresses this question by drawing on theories of policy instrument choice pertaining to the attributes — or merits — of the instruments.

An exclusive interview with Lord Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change.

The 1970 Clean Air Act established the basic architecture of the U.S. air pollution control system: It was the first environmental law to give the federal government a serious regulatory role, and it became a model for many subsequent environmental laws in the United States and abroad. In this article, the authors describe the evolution of air pollution control policy under this legislation with particular attention to the types of policy instruments used.

Robert Stavins responds to "Climate Change's Unknown Costs" by Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern, which appeared in the New York Times on October 25, 2019.

The authors highlight why resolving double counting — counting the same emission reduction more than once to achieve climate mitigation targets — is critical for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and identify essential ingredients for a robust outcome that ensures environmental effectiveness and facilitates cost-effective mitigation.

In this interview, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy discusses her many years of experience in community health, statewide government, and at the EPA, where she focused on initiatives relating to public health and the environment, including work on domestic climate policy, and the historic 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, in which more than 150 countries committed to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

“Environmental Insights: Conversations on policy and practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program” is hosted by Robert Stavins, A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

Robert Stavins has written a brief intellectual biography of distinguished climate-change economist Martin Weitzman, who recently passed away. The essay appears on Stavins’ blog here, and also on VOX. See also a previous Harvard Project article on Weitzman’s passing here. Weitzman’s many contributions to the field of climate-change and broader environmental economics have changed the way scholars and policymakers approach the field. 

GrowthPolicy’s Devjani Roy interviewed Robert Stavins, the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School, on climate policy.