A Climate Agenda for the Next US President

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Trending Globally's producer, Dan Richards. No matter who wins the presidency this fall, we know this much. Unprecedented wildfires, hurricanes, and floods will continue to hit the US in Twenty-Twenty-One and beyond. Human-driven climate change will continue to be one of the greatest threats we face, not just as a country, but as a planet.

Which is why Watson Professor Jeff Colgan recently formed with several other colleagues at Brown the Climate Solutions Lab, which is housed at the Watson Institute. On this episode, Sarah talked with Jeff and political science PhD candidate Fred Shaia about one of the lab's first projects, a report exploring all the ways executive action in the US could be used to fight climate change. It's called "Presidential Climate Action on Day One, A Foreign Policy Guide for The Next US President". Some are actions you're probably already familiar with. Others will probably be new to you.

FRED SHAIA: This would mark 123 special statutory powers. We've highlighted three that could help address climate change.

SARAH BALDWIN: I actually slapped my forehead. I was like, why hasn't this been done? ?

DAN RICHARDS: They also discussed the mission of the Climate Solutions Lab more broadly and how it fits into Brown's university-wide Climate Initiative. Here's Sarah.

SARAH BALDWIN: Jeff Colgan, Fred Shaia, thank you so much for coming on Trending Globally today.

JEFF COLGAN: Thanks for having us on, Sarah.

FRED SHAIA: Thanks for inviting us.

SARAH BALDWIN: So Brown recently established the Climate Solutions Initiative, and part of that initiative is the Climate Solutions Lab, which is based at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. So I wondered if you could tell me, why is it a Climate Solutions Lab? How is that different from the initiative? And what do social scientists have to contribute to climate change mitigation?

JEFF COLGAN: Well, we recognized that this is the preeminent global challenge in the 21st century. And that as an Institute for International and Public Affairs, Watson really needs to engage in that. And we need to do it with faculty like myself, with postdocs, and with students like Fred, who is a tremendous student in the political science department.

SARAH BALDWIN: And this notion of laboratory, what does that mean? What will you be doing?

JEFF COLGAN: Well, we're trying to catalyze some movement on climate change, as you said, that often faces inertia, where people feel like they can't make progress on this massive problem at the global level. And yet, when we look around, we actually see that there's lots of things that we can do. We don't have to feel helpless. It's difficult on an individual level.

But as a society, there are lots of things that we can do. And so, that's part of bringing together a lot of people who maybe don't feel like they are climate experts themselves-- bringing people who have a lot of climate adjacent knowledge, knowledge in international trade or energy or finance or gender-- bringing all of that to the table, because all of those things are related to climate change. And it's not enough to have just the climate scientists at the table when we're trying to move forward on the problem.

SARAH BALDWIN: Can we just stay with the idea of foreign policy for a second? I just would love you to articulate why foreign policy is at the heart of your report.

JEFF COLGAN: Well, one of the things we wanted to recognize is that there have been already some great thinkers who are focused on what the next president can do for climate change on a domestic level. What are the things about domestic policy that a president can work on?

But not as much has been done to bring climate change to the center of US foreign policy. So we wanted to focus on that, and of course, to look at the interconnections between foreign policy and domestic policy. Because, as we say in the report, these things have to work together hand in glove. If there's no efforts on a global level to deal with climate change, then the domestic opponents to pro-climate policy in the United States say, forget it, we're not going to do it, because China's not doing it and others aren't doing it. So that's just one of, unfortunately, five or six really solid reasons why policy aimed at climate change is very hard.

And Fred could probably also speak to the intergenerational problems and the distributional problems and all of the other issues that make this so hard.

FRED SHAIA: Yeah, just building on what Jeff said, it's an incredibly complex challenge that spans across generations. And domestically speaking, reducing emissions fundamentally reconfigures states' political, economic, and social makeup, in ways that really produce new winners and losers. So that creates really strong distributional conflicts within states. It makes it difficult to make the transition from a high carbon economy to a lower carbon and eventually a net neutral economy.

SARAH BALDWIN: Well, speaking of this domestic and foreign policy connection, it's really at the heart of this report you released yesterday on October 8. And it's titled, "Presidential Climate Action on Day One, A Foreign Policy Guide for The Next President". Who received this report yesterday?

JEFF COLGAN: So we sent out the report to congressional staffers, to groups like the American Enterprise Institute, Niskanen Center, Brookings Institute, think tanks in DC. We sent it to journalists, of course, and to fellow academics, to try to start spurring the conversation about, what can we do? Think about the solutions rather than the doom and gloom that you often hear about climate change. It is a tough problem. But again, there are things that we can do. And we thought, what makes this exciting thing is to look across the government at all of the different departments and agencies that have a way to make the climate change problem a little easier. And that's part of what our report gets at. Not just one-- we don't just look at the State Department and what it can do, we look at all across the US government, what are the options?

SARAH BALDWIN: How long did it take you to write this report?

JEFF COLGAN: So we've been thinking about it for a while, actually, probably six months or so. But it was really only in the last two months that we got going, in part because the Climate Solutions Initiative itself had to unfold, the new Climate Solutions Lab was only officially launched just two weeks ago. And so we've been in preparation for that launch, working to develop this report over the last couple of months, and trying to keep it current with what's going on in the presidential campaign, and of course, watching what the candidates are promising.

SARAH BALDWIN: And I think it's really interesting that you've targeted things that can be done through executive action. Can you talk about the genesis of that idea?

FRED SHAIA: Well, regardless of who wins the next administration, it seems at least possible that there will be or could be gridlock in the next US Congress. And executive action would be one means of enacting meaningful reform, as Jeff said, across all levels of government in a way that meets the timeline that we're under at this point.

JEFF COLGAN: If I can just pick up on Fred's point here, that if nothing else, the Trump administration has shown, for better or for worse, that the executive branch is extremely powerful. And that might be something that we want to change over time. But in the meantime, the point is that we have a climate crisis that we need to address. And our thinking was, let's not pretend that the executive branch is helpless, even if it doesn't get assistance from Congress and from the judiciary. We want that to be the case, too, and we hope that that's the case. But even on its own, there are things that the president can do, and we want the next US president to be ready on day one to do those things.

SARAH BALDWIN: Executive actions are exciting to think about, sort of deploying that ability of the executive branch to act. But they can't do everything. So what can be done by Congress? Are there recommendations for actions that aren't the president's to take?

JEFF COLGAN: So actions from Congress are something that we decided early on to make outside of the scope of the report. But you're right that there are things that would strengthen climate policy in the US if Congress would act. And one of those is to put a carbon tax, and that can only come from Congress. So specifically, taxing emissions of carbon dioxide and the other five greenhouse gases. And so, that's one thing that the president can't do. Only Congress can do that.

A green industrial policy and anything related to either, say, Joe Biden's plan or the Green New Deal, anything of that flavor would also require actions by Congress to provide the kinds of jobs that-- public sector jobs, that are really important for decarbonizing our economy. So for instance, generating jobs to increase building efficiency across the country. This could be a really important source of jobs and economic renewal in rural America and in parts of the country that are urban or subhuman that have been hard hit by the various financial crises in the last 10 years. And so, seeing that the role of the federal government and Congress specifically in acting that way would be big.

SARAH BALDWIN: So let's dive into the report. I'm going to say, my favorite recommendation is, declare a US national climate emergency. I actually slapped my forehead. I was like, why hasn't this been done? What would that enable the president to do?

FRED SHAIA: So it seems clear to many across the country, including to folks like Jeff and I, that climate change constitutes a pretty clear threat to national security, not just in the United States, but across the world. I mean, we see now the wildfires that are ravaging the American west, and hurricanes and other storms that are striking land with far more intensity than they did just a year ago. And declaring a national climate emergency essentially unlocks a wide range of special statutory powers that would otherwise be unavailable to the executive branch. But it essentially provides the president with a very wide range of powers to act in ways that address this emergency.

SARAH BALDWIN: How would he bring those powers to bear on a climate emergency?

FRED SHAIA: Invoking the National Emergencies Act would unlock 123 special statutory powers that the next president could use to protect the US economy against climate-related disruptions. And among this vast array of executive powers that would become available upon declaring an emergency, we focus on three action items.

First, the president could use special construction authorities to direct military funding toward the construction of a massive renewable energy program that would help address the national climate emergency. The president could also invoke expanded emergency powers to rapidly accelerate the production of battery storage technologies, charging stations, electric vehicles, anything that would respond to a, quote, unquote, shortfall in vital technologies or industrial resources. And lastly, a declaration would also provide the president with the authority to issue loan guarantees to clean energy developers and utility companies, which would provide incentives to upgrade outdated grids that are vulnerable to climate disruptions and cyberattacks.

JEFF COLGAN: The big thing about this signaling and this statutory power, I think, is not so much that solar and wind need a big push from the federal government-- because those, happily, are already commercially successful. What it does need to do, the federal government needs to help change the national grid, the electrical grid. Because right now, that's actually inhibiting the development of renewables, because there aren't enough connections between the different parts of the grid in the country. So that when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining in one part of the country, you can offer electricity to other parts of the country. And that's just exactly the kind of thing that we want governments to do, is to provide that type of infrastructure.

The other reason I think that a national climate emergency is an appropriate declaration is pure politics. Just the signaling. Of saying, look, this is a huge problem, and we need to focus on it. And lots of other times, the national emergency declaration that's been used by previous presidents has actually focused on emergencies that are of a lower grade than the one we're talking about here. This is a serious threat to our way of life, and we are starting to see that already, most vividly on the west coast this year, but through lots of other examples.

SARAH BALDWIN: You connected climate change and climate change mitigation and national security to the-- you even bring the Federal Reserve into it. How can you connect climate risk and our financial system?

FRED SHAIA: At a very high level, the Federal Reserve's job is to promote a stable and healthy economy. And to do so, the institution is responsible for monitoring a range of current risks and anticipate future risks. And they can do so using a range of tools, from monetary policy to overseeing the financial system and the macro economy writ large. And at a very high level, the effects of climate change threaten the US financial system in two main ways. First, the effects of climate change present physical risks to the financial system. And what I mean by that is physical consequences, like, increasing rates of flood exposure or rising sea levels threaten major markets like mortgage and insurance industries.

And the second risk is transition risks. And by that, I mean, as the US economy transitions from one that is high carbon to a lower carbon economy and eventually a net neutral, certain industries and asset values also suffer. Oil, for instance.

SARAH BALDWIN: But what can the Fed actually do?

FRED SHAIA: With those risks in mind, the nation's largest financial institutions continue to invest in the very fossil fuel industries that have created the climate crisis that we face today. What we speak to in our report is the need for the Fed to address this maligned feedback loop, in which finance for fossil fuels exacerbates climate change, and climate change in turn destabilizes the US financial system. And so, if the Fed fails to act in the near term, these climate risks could generate a financial crisis that far exceeds the severity of the Two Thousand and Eight global financial crisis or the financial crisis that we've seen most recently with COVID-19. And so it's important to keep in mind that the executive branch lacks formal power to direct the Fed to do anything. But the president's voice can go a long way in getting the Fed to take action.

Some of these recommendations are easier than others. For instance, the next president will be in a position to reappoint Fed leadership and to take a more active role in reappointing leaders that are committed to mitigating climate risks to the financial sector. And we also advocate for the Fed to use tools that are already available to the institution through the Dodd Frank Act, which is a Twenty-Ten law that essentially was designed to protect the US financial system from systemic risks of the 21st century. And we think that climate change constitutes the very type of systemic risk that legislators designed this act to address.

SARAH BALDWIN: Another suggestion, recommendation, is to create a climate club. And I wonder if you could describe what you mean by that, and why the club model is somehow going to be effective?

JEFF COLGAN: One of the things we've seen in the last 25 years is that international negotiations have really struggled to address climate change in a meaningful way, to reduce overall emissions. One of the key problems, the obstacles, to those negotiations is the problem of free riding, in that there are countries that look at the rest of the world, and say, well, if you're going to reduce your emissions, great. You take the costs of doing that. We'll sit back and avoid doing that. But of course, if every country does that, which is what's happened, then nobody actually does that the hard work of reducing their carbon emissions.

The issue is, with the Kyoto Protocol of Nineteen-Ninety-Seven and again in Twenty-Fifteen with the Paris Accord, there's no punishments for the countries that are sitting back and not really living up to their obligations. And that's where the climate club comes in. The idea is that a small number of big economies-- we're thinking about the EU, the US, and China as sort of the three major economies that would be minimally required to be in the club-- as accepting that they need to have some sort of minimum threshold of a carbon tax or some cap and trade program, some minimum price on carbon that makes it less attractive to emit.

And if those three economies do that, they form this club, they can then also put tariffs on the goods that they are importing from countries outside of the club. And the whole point of that is to encourage the countries that are outside of the club to join. So let's say Mexico is looking at this club and thinking, wow, it's going to be costly to us, to put on that carbon tax. It's going to hurt our economy a little bit. But if we don't do it, we have to pay big tariffs to export our goods into the US. And that encourages countries to join.

This is an idea that has been championed by Nobel laureate, William Nordhaus-- he's an economist-- and many others, especially political scientists, who are saying, look, we have to get past the ideal economic solution and start thinking hard about the politics of what are the incentives, how do we get countries to actually buy into this.

SARAH BALDWIN: It's such a great idea. And another one is to rejoin the World Health Organization. And so, I'm wondering, what's the connection between climate change and global health?

FRED SHAIA: In the report, Jeff and I speak to the need to bring climate change or to elevate climate change to the core mandate of the World Health Organization. And this is because the global health emergencies and pandemics of the future are going to be increasingly linked to the effects of climate change. And so, many of the member states in which WHO does its advisory and intelligence gathering already have public health systems that are fragile and are going to be even more threatened by the effects of climate change. So increasingly, focusing on climate in its advisory work is going to be helpful in that respect. And also, attending to the links between pandemics and climate change are also going to be increasingly important.

SARAH BALDWIN: And then, does that connect to climate migration and people who are going to be displaced by climate change?

FRED SHAIA: Yeah, absolutely. We also speak to the need for the next presidency to address environmental migration. And there's no easy solution here. The number of people who are projected to be displaced for environmental reasons is expected to grow exponentially. And at the moment, the legal recourse for people who are displaced for environmental reasons isn't fully worked out in the way that it has been for political refugees. And so, there's a real need to reckon with the number in the US, in particular.

JEFF COLGAN: If I can just jump in, actually. The scope of this report is really to try to go beyond what either US candidate for presidency has already committed to. So for instance, Joe Biden has already pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement and also to rejoin the World Health Organization.

The recommendations we have are in addition to that. So we say, OK, great that we're going to rejoin the World Health Organization, but we should also make sure that the World Health Organization just doesn't continue fighting yesterday's diseases. We have to start thinking about how climate change is going to affect pandemic and infectious diseases of the future. And in particular on that point, the way animals move, the way mosquitoes are and where bats are, is going to change globally because of climate change. And that matters for human health, because as we've seen, bats and mosquitoes and other animals are often the source or the transmission belt of diseases that turn into things like COVID-19.

SARAH BALDWIN: Will this report have legs if the election results do not favor Joe Biden?

JEFF COLGAN: Unfortunately, I think that this issue will not make progress-- not just this report, but a second term President Trump is unlikely to take progressive action on climate change. That's been his record to date. And I don't see it changing in the future.

FRED SHAIA: With that said, as Jeff has mentioned earlier, the report does contain recommendations that Republicans and Democrats can work on together. But essentially, the framing of this report is on the president taking decisive executive action to address this quickly.

SARAH BALDWIN: Well, I'm just so thrilled that you brought the Climate Solutions Lab to the Watson Institute. And I'm really grateful to both of you for talking about this amazing report that you've issued. And I hope it gets into the exact right hands.

JEFF COLGAN: Thanks, Sarah, for having us.

FRED SHAIA: Thanks for inviting us.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Elina Coleman. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Be sure to subscribe to Trending Globally on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you haven't yet, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show. For more information about this and other podcasts produced at Watson, go to watson.brown.edu.

Thanks for listening. And tune in next week for another episode of Trending Globally.