Informing Effective Public Policy for a Rapid and Equitable Electric Vehicle Transition

Ari Raphael Ball-Burack

Road transport electrification is a vital step toward decarbonization. However, it remains unclear how and which public policy interventions can sufficiently propel the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) in the US. Because the EV transition is closely tied to individual decision-making and experience (in contrast with more centralized sectors such as power generation and industry), inclusivity and equity in the EV transition are not only a moral imperative but also necessary to ensure widespread decarbonization. In the coming year, I plan to explore the current state of equity in access to public EV charging infrastructure, and to determine how public policy can accelerate and make more equitable the EV transition. Our work will first leverage geospatial analysis to identify equity gaps in California’s EV charging infrastructure. I then hope to compare the equity impacts of different methods for siting EV charging infrastructure (e.g., random placement, machine learning, and/or human use of data-driven decision support tools). The work might culminate in a modification of FTT:Transport, a technological change model, to demonstrate charging access constraints on the EV transition.

Quantifying the effect of renewable plant outages on grid carbon intensity and electricity prices

Ruth Kravis

Renewable power plants in operation today will form the backbone of our decarbonized energy system moving forward. These power plants have high upfront costs but are cheap to operate, making it valuable to extend their lifetime through intelligent maintenance strategies and management of downtime. Currently, most reported outages of these resources occur at short notice, directly affecting the dispatch of supply in the wholesale energy market. This project seeks to quantify the effect of renewable plant outages on the carbon intensity and price of electricity in CAISO, by building econometric models that leverage historical data. This project will enable a better understanding of the system-wide impacts of outage management strategies.

Incomplete Environmental Regulation and Inter-sectoral Leakage: Evidence from the Petrochemicals Industry

Kendra Marcoux

Current U.S. climate policy focuses on incentivizing renewable energy to decrease domestic reliance on fossil fuels. This approach leaves a second industry that also uses fossil fuels as the main input largely unregulated: petrochemicals. This project will construct a structural model of the fuel and petrochemicals industries to estimate supply, demand, and cross-price elasticities for energy and petrochemicals, both of which are derived from oil and gas. This project will then use the parameters estimated in my model to run counterfactual simulations of how petrochemical production, primarily focusing on plastics and ammonia, will react to changes in the demand for fossil fuel-based energy, and how total emissions will change in this scenario. The results of this project will shed light on how future policy can more fully regulate the entire oil and gas sectors.

Green Subsidies and road taxes: unintended effects on accidents, injuries and welfare

Paula Meloni

Green subsidies and fuel taxes have the potential to affect accident outcomes through their effects on fleet composition due to the manner in which they influence vehicle choice. Over the last ten years, global demand for SUVs and off-road vehicles has seen a sharp increase vis-a-vis smaller compact cars. Simultaneously, several governments have put policies in place aimed at bolstering demand for EVs and hybrids in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local pollutants. Although these policies are of utmost importance in achieving emissions reductions, jointly with the rise in the popularity of SUVs, this means the vehicle fleet is becoming increasingly heavy and the variance in vehicle weights is rising as well. Both larger mean weights as well as larger variances in weight are associated with higher mortality rates in the context of an accident.

This project seeks to understand the impact of road taxes and subsidies on vehicle choice and the associated welfare impact due to their effect on mortality and injuries in Sweden in order to understand how that shapes optimal policy design in different settings.

Studying the Role of Farm-to-School Programs on the Spread of Climate-Smart Practices among Historically Disadvantaged Farmers in California

Sayantan Mitra

The project studies how farm-to-school programs in California play a role in the diffusion of climate-smart practices among historically disadvantaged farmers. A California farmer faces several barriers to adoption of climate-smart practices faces including high initial setup costs, changes in accounting practices and lack of information about implementation, and these barriers are further attenuated for farmers from historically disadvantaged groups due to systemic and market-level issues of access. School kitchens are uniquely placed to address some of these constraints through farm-to-school programs as they provide a large local market for farmers’ produce and are therefore in a position to aid historically disadvantaged farmers overcome these barriers and push local farmers to adopt climate-smart practices. Recently, the California Department of Food & Agriculture has been pushing for adoption of climate-smart practices and for inclusion of historically-disadvantaged groups through a variety of grants for farm-to-school programming focused on these objectives. This project aims to study the role of social networks in the fulfilment of these objectives and identify the roadblocks to large-scale adoption of climate-smart practices among historically-disadvantaged farmers.

Measuring high-resolution neighborhood spillovers from Federal property buyout programs using econometrics and machine learning

Hikari Murayama

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) property acquisition programs fund states and local governments to purchase flood-prone properties. Although there has been recent work to understand the spillover impacts of related programs, we aim to advance the current literature by increasing the spatial granularity and the temporal length of the analysis, as well as examining differences across all jurisdictions that have implemented the program since 1990. A more comprehensive view of property acquisitions provides more insight into racial inequity, climate abandonment, and managed retreats.

When the Credit Dries Up: Examining the Effect of Water Utility Surcharges on Consumer Credit

Steve Ramos

This project explores an understudied but increasingly important aspect of public infrastructure, water utilities, and how households react to the financial burden associated with water utility surcharges. It further gains us insight into the role climate change plays in increasing water utility bills through increased, longer lasting periods of droughts and the resulting volatility in water availability. To study this relationship, we leverage a difference-in-differences research design and a unique merger between two administrative datasets.

Flood Risk Disclosure and Renter Adaptation

Alice Schmitz

While there is a breadth of work examining how providing information on natural disaster risk affects the adaptation choices of homeowners, there is little evidence on how renters respond to natural disaster risk. My project seeks to examine how information on flood risk shapes tenant location choices and to estimate the costs of misclassifying flood risk. In particular, I will study the effect of informing tenants of a property’s location in a FEMA-designated floodplain, using the passage of state laws which require landlords to disclose flood risk in leases.

Paying Smallholder Farmers to Increase Carbon Sequestration by Changing Agricultural Practices: Evidence from Odisha

Shuo Yu

This project incentivizes smallholder farmers in rural India to adopt agricultural practices that improve soil carbon sequestration. We plan to conduct an RCT with 3000 smallholder farmers in rural Odisha, testing the impact of the regenerative practice – rotavator usage – the mechanized incorporation of harvest residues into the soil over three growing seasons. This practice, recommended by local agronomists for its potential to enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) and Nitrogen (N), will be financially incentivized, aligning with carbon credit standards like Verra's. Initial pilot results indicate promising SOC increases without yield loss. The RCT will lay the groundwork for developing a larger-scale program that links small farmers to commercial firms providing carbon credits. The project will also explore the potential of satellite data to validate the adoption and impact of regenerative agricultural practices on SOC and yields, which will be essential for any scale-up.