A tale of two (climate) migrations

Tell the audience a little about your own background and how you got to, to doing so much work on the subject of climate migration.

Yeah.

So, um, I am actually from France.

I got to the US, uh, as a teenager, and, um, I am currently a professor at American University.

But the reason I got into climate is because I was trained as a trade economist, um, and I, um, got hired f- with the French Embassy in Washington, DC.

And at the time, the US was considering regulating, uh, greenhouse gas from power plants, but they were really concerned that if they did that, then US companies would be at a competitive disadvantage compared to companies abroad.

And so they considered putting some trade policies in place to compensate for that.

And so s-since I was trade policy attaché, they brought me in, and that was my first introduction to the economic consequences of environmental policies, and I got really interested in it, and then I did my PhD in that, and it just got me started.

I remember reading a piece by George Will in The Washington Post, and it, it sort of evokes the current debate about AI between the United States and China.

Of course, with AI, there's a lot of talk about, well, if there's a slowdown here, that opens the door for a Chinese advantage.

And decades ago, even George Will was writing about, well, if the United States seeks to regulate fossil fuels, is it giving the advantage to the rest of the world? Is there an economic cost that we can't recover from? And we're gonna get into the, sort of the, the why and the reality of that, but the big picture in reading some of your work seems to be that we really misdiagnosed some of what would happen if we actually started to regulate pretty stringently.

Yes.

There's a nuance to that, that so far we haven't regulated super stringently.

Okay [laughs].

So there is still the possibility that some of these things might happen when we actually get the price right.

But for now, we do not see, uh, evidence of companies losing competitiveness, closing factories, moving abroad.

Like, we simply do not see that in the data.

And if you're watching WXXI News on YouTube, you'll see me referring to a number of documents, including, um, 19 pages of a PowerPoint that Dr. Brunel sent.

And I, I was joking before the program, I was trying to take notes, and I finally gave up, and I said, "I'm printing the whole thing here."

[laughs]

Um, because there's too much that I want to talk about here.

But, um, in some of the slides here, uh, interesting to me, there was the United States, Japan, and Germany, and then the rest of the world.

And, uh, you know, we hear about Germany when it comes to cleaner energies, um, but to see that show up on a slide, clearly Germany is doing something that we're not really doing.

Is that, is that fair to say?

So, I mean, Germany, Japan, and the US too, right? Like, they're still doing something.

Tell the audience a little about your own background and how you got to, to doing so much work on the subject of climate migration.

Yeah.

So, um, I am actually from France.

I got to the US, uh, as a teenager, and, um, I am currently a professor at American University.

But the reason I got into climate is because I was trained as a trade economist, um, and I, um, got hired f- with the French Embassy in Washington, DC.

And at the time, the US was considering regulating, uh, greenhouse gas from power plants, but they were really concerned that if they did that, then US companies would be at a competitive disadvantage compared to companies abroad.

And so they considered putting some trade policies in place to compensate for that.

And so s-since I was trade policy attaché, they brought me in, and that was my first introduction to the economic consequences of environmental policies, and I got really interested in it, and then I did my PhD in that, and it just got me started.

I remember reading a piece by George Will in The Washington Post, and it, it sort of evokes the current debate about AI between the United States and China.

Of course, with AI, there's a lot of talk about, well, if there's a slowdown here, that opens the door for a Chinese advantage.

And decades ago, even George Will was writing about, well, if the United States seeks to regulate fossil fuels, is it giving the advantage to the rest of the world? Is there an economic cost that we can't recover from? And we're gonna get into the, sort of the, the why and the reality of that, but the big picture in reading some of your work seems to be that we really misdiagnosed some of what would happen if we actually started to regulate pretty stringently.

Yes.

There's a nuance to that, that so far we haven't regulated super stringently.

Okay [laughs].

So there is still the possibility that some of these things might happen when we actually get the price right.

But for now, we do not see, uh, evidence of companies losing competitiveness, closing factories, moving abroad.

Like, we simply do not see that in the data.

And if you're watching WXXI News on YouTube, you'll see me referring to a number of documents, including, um, 19 pages of a PowerPoint that Dr. Brunel sent.

And I, I was joking before the program, I was trying to take notes, and I finally gave up, and I said, "I'm printing the whole thing here."

[laughs]

Um, because there's too much that I want to talk about here.

But, um, in some of the slides here, uh, interesting to me, there was the United States, Japan, and Germany, and then the rest of the world.

And, uh, you know, we hear about Germany when it comes to cleaner energies, um, but to see that show up on a slide, clearly Germany is doing something that we're not really doing.

Is that, is that fair to say?

So, I mean, Germany, Japan, and the US too, right? Like, they're still doing something.