Science & Technology

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements co-sponsored a webinar on March 30, 2021: “The Future of Green India: Energy and Climate Change.” Hosting the event was the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University. The other co-sponsors were the Environment and Natural Resources Program in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School — and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. The Harvard Global Institute provided support for the seminar and a larger project of which it is part.

Richard Revesz, the Lawrence King Professor of Law at New York University and co-founder of the Institute for Policy Integrity, shared his thoughts on how the transition to a new presidential administration later this month will impact U.S. environmental and climate change policy in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

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.

Harvard Project on Climate Agreements collaborator and Professor of Economics at Harvard University Martin Weitzman discussed the potential of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs to deal with climate change. He also expressed his concerns regarding geoengineering.

The introduction of the U.S. SO2 allowance-trading program to address the threat of acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 is a landmark event in the history of environmental regulation. The program was a great success by almost all measures. Ironically, cap and trade seems especially well suited to addressing the problem of climate change, in that emitted greenhouse gases are evenly distributed throughout the world's atmosphere. Recent hostility toward cap and trade in debates about U.S. climate legislation may reflect the broader political environment of the climate debate more than the substantive merits of market-based regulation.