PESD Director Frank Wolak will be among a number of speakers participating at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research's Policy Forum - "Using Economics to Confront Climate Change."

Frank will be moderating a discussion of difficult challenges posed by the rapidly rising use of coal in India and China, and challenges to trade policy as studied by PESD researchers Richard Morse, Mark Thurber, and Jeremy Carl.

PESD research associate Richard K. Morse will be presenting "The Real Drivers of CCS in China and Implications for Climate Policy" at the Coal Utilization Research Council's Fall 2009 General Membership Meeting.  Richard's presentation will reflect the research and publication of PESD's Working Paper #88.

Richard's CCS technology collaborative briefing is from 2:15PM to 2:30PM at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel

Coal is both the world's fastest growing fossil fuel and a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. While in the West coal use is under pressure, much of the developing world is predicating economic growth on cheap, reliable electricity from coal. As a result, the next few decades are likely to witness a massive build out of coal capacity.

Morse will explore where coal markets are growing, examine what economic and political variables have the greatest impact on coal use and the global coal trade, and discuss possible leverage points for CO2 mitigation. One mitigation option is a technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Should we place big bets on this expensive and largely unproven option? Morse will discuss whether the current state of CCS deployment for coal-fired power falls short of mitigation levels required by many widely publicized targets and proceed to analyze the potential for commercial deployment of CCS technology at scale.

The "Carbon Markets: Developing Countries & the Next Clean Development Mechanism" panel will be held from 3:25PM to 4:45PM

PESD researcher Richard K. Morse to speak at the 2010 MIIS International Trade and Investment Conference: Opportunities and Strategies in Emerging Economies on the "Carbon Markets: Developing Countries & the Next Clean Development Mechanism" panel.

The Monterey Institute of International Studies (an affiliate of Middlebury College) will be hosting this all day conference.  This event is being held with the purpose of bringing together stakeholders in the fields of trade policy, business, and human development to enhance knowledge of and create constructive dialogue around the global trends shaping international trade policy, business innovation, and social ventures in emerging economies.

This event received over 300 participants, including experts from over 20 countries and presentations from two dozen internationally renowned experts.

The III Lisbon Conference emerged as a platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences on the various aspects of the defence and promotion of competition, contributing to the dissemination of a competition culture.

Associate Director Mark Thurber discussed two related threads of PESD research on "State Choices in Hydrocarbon Administration."  The first part of the talk, based on a paper which Mark co-authored with PESD affiliated researchers David Hults and Patrick Heller, focused on how countries design institutions for administering their oil sectors.  It suggested that countries with certain institutional deficits may be better off not separating commercial functions from policy and regulatory ones in oil, even though the separation of functions approach (as pioneered by Norway) is generally considered "best practice" in oil sector administration. 

The second part of Mark's talk described statistical analysis he is performing to quantitatively test the hypothesis advanced by PESD consulting professor Pete Nolan that private oil companies will preferentially operate at "frontiers," for which state-controlled oil companies cannot adequately manage risks for their host governments.  Patterns of company operatorship of exploration wells in the 1970s and 1980s, derived from data from oil and gas research and consultancy company Wood Mackenzie, suggest that this hypothesis indeed was statistically supported for frontier exploration in deep water.