With the end of the year approaching, it is time to take stock and reflect on the past 14 episodes. I present lessons and takeaways from each and discuss some upcoming episodes. For questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact me at arvid.viaene.ce@gmail.com

We talk a lot about the “right” climate policies—carbon pricing, clean investment, regulation. But there’s a step before all of that: politics. Who wins elections. What voters actually do—not just what they say in surveys. And how politicians reposition when the climate gets hotter and the economy starts to transition. Today’s episode asks three concrete questions: When a place experiences unusually extreme heat, does it measurably shift votes?Do local green and brown jobs shape climate...

In this episode, Berkeley professor Reed Walker discusses his American Economic Review paper with Joe Shapiro on the costs and benefits of U.S. air-pollution regulation—using Clean Air Act offset markets to infer marginal abatement costs—and why the results suggest regulation is often too lenient on the margin. We also touch on his Journal of Political Economy paper on the long-run consequences of cleaner air for children’s adult earnings. For questions, comments or suggestions, you can...

Is U.S. air pollution policy still too lenient – even after decades of regulation? In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Joseph Shapiro (UC Berkeley, NBER, Energy Institute at Haas) to discuss his recent research using 40 pollution offset markets under the U.S. Clean Air Act. By looking at how much firms actually pay for emission reductions, Joe and his co-authors back out marginal abatement cost curves and compare them to the health and welfare benefits of cleaner air. We talk about: How pollut...

On paper, climate policy sounds simple: you put a price on carbon. Either you tax it, or you cap it and let firms trade. In practice, doing that for one of the world’s biggest economies — as the first mover — is anything but simple. This episode looks at 20 years of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS): how it started, the challenges, the lessons, and where it’s going next. The ETS is the world’s first major carbon market, and it has helped drive CO₂ emissions in covered sectors down by m...

Send us a text Air pollution isn’t just a climate co-benefit—it’s the number one threat to human health. In this best-of compilation, we revisit three standout conversations to trace the arc from global impacts to two of the world’s most important case studies: China and India. Both tackled air pollution, but one In this episode: The global picture (Dr. Christa Hasenkopf, EPIC – UChicago): Why fine particulate matter (PM2.5) quietly shaves ~2 years off global life expectancy—and how mic...

Send us a text Marion Kruger, co-founder of Remove, explains how carbon removal technologies are essential for achieving net zero targets by compensating for emissions that are impossible or extremely expensive to eliminate. Carbon removal is what puts the "net" in net zero, and by 2050, we'll need to remove 5-10 gigatons of CO2 annually—creating an industry comparable in size to today's oil and gas sector. • Three main types of carbon removal technologies: nature-based, hybrid, and engineer...

Send us a text Did the 2018 US–China trade war make China’s air dirtier and increase its CO2 emissions? This question is not easy ex-ante. On the one hand you have a decrease in production which decreases emissions and pollution. On the other hand, there is more pressure on politicians to relax environmental standards. Notice any similarities with recent events? In my latest episode, I therefore sit down with Prof. Lorenzo Trimarchi to unpack these forces in his new JDE paper, “Th...

Send us a text Find the clean transcripts on my Substack: https://substack.com/@climateeconomicswitharvid Could market forces be the key to solving one of the world's most pressing public health crises? The evidence from India's groundbreaking air pollution markets suggests a resounding yes. Air pollution in India has reached catastrophic levels. With 74 of the world's 100 most polluted cities located there, the average Indian loses 3.5 years of life expectancy to dirty air. In Delhi, that n...

Pricing carbon is the backbone of climate cost-benefit analysis in the U.S. If the price is high, stronger environmental rules pay for themselves; if it’s low, they don’t. In this episode, I trace how the social cost of carbon entered federal policy and why the number has shifted between administrations. What we cover From Reagan-era cost-benefit rules to a 2007 court case that rejected “carbon = $0”The Obama team’s Interagency Working Group and a unified SCC built from leading IAMsTrump’s sh...

A plain-English tour of how economists put a price on climate harm—the Social Cost of Carbon—and a quick way to estimate damages with just a few numbers. We start from 2023 anchors (≈4.7 tCO₂ per person; ≈38 GtCO₂ worldwide), explain SCC and how U.S. administrations have used very different values, and compare with recent EU carbon-permit prices. Using a €100/ton example, we translate emissions into ~€500 per person per year and ~3.8% of global GDP, then show how the result scales...

Carbon credit offsets sound great in theory. But how well do they actually work in practice? In this new episode of my podcast, I talk with Dr. Benedict Probst about one of the largest reviews ever done on the effectiveness of carbon credit offsets, which covers over 1 billion credits across dozens of studies. We discuss what his research says, why less than 16% of credits were found to be effective, and what this means for future climate policy, especially as the EU considers offsets in its ...

Air pollution is responsible for shortening global life expectancy by more than two years—making it the world’s leading threat to human health, ahead of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and even smoking. Yet it receives only a fraction of the funding and policy attention. In this episode, Dr. Christa Hasenkopf breaks down why air pollution is such a silent but devastating force—especially in the Global South—and what can be done to fight it. From real-time data sharing in Mongolia to clean air markets in I...

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Ishan Nath, assistant professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, about his research on climate change, agriculture, and trade. His forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy explores how warming could actually increase the share of workers in agriculture in many low-income countries, especially those with limited access to trade. We discuss why trade barriers matter for climate adaptation, what makes agricultural labor patterns persistent, and how ec...

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Koen Deconinck, economist and policy analyst at the OECD, to explore a deeply technical but increasingly important piece of the climate puzzle: how we measure greenhouse gas emissions in the agricultural sector. Direct and indirect emissions in Agriculture are responsible for up to 30% of global man-made emissions, yet it's often left out of the climate conversation. Why? Because measuring these emissions accurately is really hard. Dr. Deconinck walks us t...