Environmental economics…. Is there a hotter topic these
days? With the billions allocated to one kind of green business or
another, and the real possibility of passage of the
Waxman-Markey bill, officially the American Clean Energy and Security Act,
which will establish a market for carbon trading and offsets (also known as
“cap-and-trade,”) —
well there is plenty
of fodder her
e for teachers of the dismal science to blast away with.
Over on
TheEnergyCollective, there has been a running argument among the best
minds in this relatively new field of environmental economics on what impact
the stimulus will have on green jobs (most agree, not as much as politicians
would have you believe) and of course, the eventual price of carbon under the
new legislation and what impact this will have on businesses large and
small. One of the most influential of our bloggers on the topic is Robert
Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at Harvard.
It’s perhaps a sign of some sort that someone you’d more readily
associate with the sort of journalism that usually only sees the light of day
in Foreign Affairs or at best The Harvard Business Review is a blogger.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Ivory Tower. Several months
ago the noted environmental reporter for The New Yorker, Elizabeth Colbert,
interviewed Stavins and her report, online, generated a huge amount of
comments, and some of it was “downright hostile. I was talking to Sacha
Talcott, head of communications for the Kennedy School of Government's Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs (Harvard), and told her I was
fascinated with the process, expressing frustration with being taken out of
context. She suggested I should have a blog (like Kennedy fellow Jeff Frankel,
the trade economist) which they would set up (on Wordpress).”
Originally Stavins intended to review all comments, and to
choose only those comments that he had time to respond to. But once, when
a reader posted a comment that would require too lengthy a response (Stavins
does have a “day job,” after all), the reader sent an email to Stavins asking
“why didn’t you respond?” When Stavins wrote back that it would take too long
to respond, he got a bit of sage social media advice: “Rather than delete ,
what you ought to do is to accept them all (comments), and leave it up to
others (to respond),” “After that , I stopped my practice but now
selectively respond. The only things I delete are the ones that are really rude
or flakey.”
Whom does he consider his audience? Fellow academics,
or his students, or…? “My original intention was to reach out to people who
care about the environment but are not economists… it turns out that some of
the comments are from
other economists … other ‘greens’,” but interestingly enough he does not
mention his blog in class. But his impact has been considerable,
especially among those who are charged with climate policy development and
implementation. He recently learned that a senior advisor in the White House
referred to his recent post about Waxman-Markey (“The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade”) in
a meeting. And does the controversy raging on his blog,
TheEnergyCollective and other sites bother him?
“I direct a program with 25 professors who are doing
research and teaching about environmental economics, so I don’t see
the controversy…. I don’t think of environmental economics as
controversial anymore than a good Catholic thinks there is controversy about
Catholicism.”