Real World Environmental Policy
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM (PST)
- Chair: Robin Hahnel, American University
Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out and Just Transition
Abstract
This paper focuses on transition policies targeted at supporting workers now employed in the fossil fuel industries and ancillary sectors within high-income economies. As a general normative principle, I argue that the overarching aim of such policies should be to protect workers against major losses in their living standards resulting through the fossil fuel industry phase-out. The impacted workers should be provided with three critical guarantees to accomplish this, in the area of jobs, compensation and pensions. Just transition policies should also support workers in the areas of job search, retraining and relocation, but these forms of support should be understood as supplementary. The overall set of just transition policies—what I term a robust as opposed to a thin just transition program—is fully alighted with the Energy Justice and Capabilities Approach as well as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Within this framework, the paper first reviews experiences with transitional policies in Germany, the UK, the EU and, more briefly, Japan and Canada. A critical point that emerges is that these just transition policies do not provide the needed guarantees for assuring workers that they will not experience major living standard declines. The paper then describes an illustrative robust just transition program for workers that includes reemployment, income and pension guarantees, focusing on a case study for the U.S. state of West Virginia. The results show that the costs of this just transition program for West Virginia’s fossil fuel industry dependent workers will amount to an annual average of about $42,000 per worker, equal to about 0.2 percent of West Virginia’s GDP. I briefly summarize results from the seven other studies of U.S. states and for the overall U.S. economy. For the U.S. economy overall, the just transitionInternational Climate Negotiations: The Role of Finance in Securing a “Just Transition”
Abstract
This paper will focus on the public finance challenges posed by the need for rapid international decarbonization. It will be rooted in the rising profile of the “fair shares” idea, which is becoming increasingly influential in the global climate movement. The immediate context here is the negotiation of a collective finance goal, which will be one of the central wrangles at COP29, which will take place in November of 2024 in Azerbaijan. By COP29, the international movement will have settled on its core public finance demand, which will be on the order of $1 trillion a year. This figure can and will be defended by “needs assessment” processes, which take account of mitigation, adaptation, loss & damage, and the just transition needs associated with the rapid phase-out of fossil fuel production, around the world. In this context, the notion of “fair shares” will be introduced, as will the need for international emergency taxation, which of course must be progressive. In this context, the shifting nature of “realism” will be considered.The Prospects for Reducing Plastic Pollution
Abstract
Plastics are everywhere, including in our cars, phones, furniture, and toothpaste. We wrap our food in plastics; we carry our shopping in plastics, and we wear clothes made from plastic materials. Since their commercial debut in 1950, plastics use has increased from 5 million tons per year to 407 million tons in 2015. Plastics growth is expected to persist over the next several decades and will lead to an intensification of the environmental and health consequences already associated with their use. To meet sustainability goals, plastics consumption cannot remain at current levels, much less grow as is expected. This paper is a first step in assessing the extent to which plastics demand can be limited via elimination, reuse, and substitution. Specifically, I expand prevailing estimates for plastics use by estimating demand for 68 plastic applications across seven sectors. Demand for the material services that plastics provide across these applications is also estimated. Using these results, I develop a framework to assess the extent to which elimination and reuse interventions can reduce demand for the most prevalent plastic products. The results of this paper provide a more granular view of plastics use and prospects for reduction, which is thus far absent from plastics policy literature.JEL Classifications
- Q5 - Environmental Economics
- B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches