BY WILLIAM HILL & JEFF D. COLGAN
William Louis Hill is a MAIA student from New York, USA. He is in his second year at SAIS Europe in Bologna, Italy, where he focuses on sustainability, international law, and trade. He also studies constitutional law in Central Asia as a research assistant at the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development.
Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. His research focuses on international order, especially in relation to energy and the environment. His recent publications include “Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order” and “Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War.”
The Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University has a mission to create, learn and distribute solution-oriented climate knowledge both at Brown and across the world. Recently, Professor Jeff D. Colgan visited the SAIS Bologna Campus to speak about whether the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement influenced corporate behavior while also addressing some of the challenges and obstacles climate progress might face in the coming years.
Given that Professor Jeff D. Colgan’s research and his work at The Climate Solutions Lab aligns with SAIS Perspectives’ 2024/2025 theme of ‘Escalating Consequences’, second year MAIA student William Louis Hill was able to sit down and interview Professor Colgan on his thoughts for what lies ahead. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Hill: So, the theme of this year’s Annual Issue is ‘Escalating Consequences’, so naturally the questions I wanted to ask are oriented around that idea.
The first consequence I want to discuss is that of the election of Donald Trump and his incoming administration. Specifically, since you work on a solutions-oriented climate lab, what role do you think climate researchers, policy experts, and others will have in the Trump administration? Can their roles be refocused on private sector, state or local-level actors?
Colgan: Yes, I do think so. Number one, Trump's victory is negative for the climate, relative to the counterfactual, right? This is something that is awkward for anybody who's working in a university that is committed to being non-partisan. My job is not to talk about partisan politics, but from a policy perspective, Trump has made it very clear that climate is not only a non-priority, but in fact might be a priority in the other direction, having called it a hoax, et cetera. But having said all that, what is interesting, looking at the election results, climate outperformed the Democrats in many areas. Not only for individual candidates, but also, in particular, some really surprising state-level ballot initiatives, state-level Supreme Court elections, et cetera.
Climate politics can be a winner in the United States, which is something that you don't often hear, and maybe you don't even often think, but it actually bears out when you look at the data from what happened in the election.
For instance, one example that's really striking and one that I'm following very closely is Washington State, which has a carbon tax, called a carbon cap but it functions like a tax. It was rejected twice in the past when it was proposed by a ballot initiative, but the governor and the legislature said, well, we're going to do it anyway, even though the voters have rejected it.
They put one in place, but then in this election there was a ballot initiative to repeal what the legislature had done. Now, you might think, having said no to this twice, that voters might be interested in saying no to it a third time. And, in fact, it failed by a margin of 62 percent and that's in a blue state. Last I looked, Kamala Harris had 58 percent of the Washington vote. So, the climate was actually running ahead of Kamala, which is a recurring pattern where we see climate politics performing marginally better than you might expect.
I think that context is really important for understanding what might happen in the next four years.
Hill: So, there's still political energy in favor of climate, in your opinion?
Colgan: I think it's going to be a process in the next month, or however long. Everybody who cares about climate policies is dusting themselves off, getting themselves back on their feet and starting to think about what's possible in the next four years.
Hill: Can you speak to what you expect you or your colleagues in the solutions lab will be focused on?
Colgan: What we're most interested in, from a social science perspective, are the conditions that allow policies to happen without getting into the specifics of what the actual policies are. So, understanding, for instance, what makes voters who voted for Trump also vote to keep a carbon tax? That's a really interesting question for us.
Hill: The incoming administration has made tariffs one of its signature policy promises. How do you see trade policy interacting with climate change in the coming years? What does the impending protectionist era, whether in the United States or even globally, it seems, hold for climate action?
Conventional thinking says that tariffs are likely to slow the transition because they make it more expensive to import things like solar panels or electric cars from countries that have an advantage in that sector. But is there an upside to building a domestic economy in these things that could redound to the country in the future?
Colgan: Yes. I actually wrote a Foreign Affairs piece about the potential benefits of rivalry between the United States and China in particular, although you could extend that to Europe in various ways. Obviously, there are a lot of negatives, and I want to be clear that I am not saying that the U.S. and China having a serious rivalry is net positive for the world. In fact, it could lead to wars that we would really not like to see. But there are some silver linings.
What we can think about is whether competition is good for climate, in particular climate technologies, where countries and other players are racing towards dominance in various green tech sectors. China has what might end up being an insurmountable lead, in solar and wind manufacturing. But there are lots of other technologies in play, like battery technologies and a million other things that are still very much all to play for. One could imagine a more protectionist era leading to that kind of outcome.
I want to be clear that that is a silver lining. With future trade protectionism, all the economists say that this is net negative for the global economy, particularly if we get a replay of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act from the 1930s that led to poor outcomes economically or politically. I am not in favor of going down that path. But there may be some silver linings from a supply chain perspective.
Hill: Thank you. How will a future global economy founded on renewable energy compare to our contemporary, now transitioning, oil-dominated global economy? Do you anticipate this new economy to lead to new partial hegemonies to emerge? Do you have any places or countries in mind?
Colgan: The transition that you're hypothesizing for the future is likely going to be a decades-long process. It is not going to be done quickly in the next few years.
Particularly on energy, I have an ontological bet, if you will, that oil and gas are here probably for the end of your lifetime, let alone mine. This is going to be a slow transition.
What we are trying to do collectively as a species is to have an energy transition that is unprecedented in human history. So, typically, what happens with an energy transition is that a new one comes along, it gains a lot of market share, but that doesn't shut down the previous fuel source. In fact, if anything, that previous fuel source tends to continue.
That's what happened when coal replaced wood in biomass. That's what happened when oil replaced coal. We're still consuming far more coal than we were in the 1800s. So, it just doesn't go away. What we're trying to do now is to not only switch to renewables and not low-carbon energy, but also shut down fossil fuels. Well, we've never done that before. So, on some level, from a social science perspective, I'm very uncomfortable making that kind of prediction. We just don’t know.
That being said, I think we can say some very limited things around which countries are likely to suffer the most from this transition, which are the high-cost oil producers like Venezuela and my own country Canada, that are producing this at really high costs and therefore are most likely to get squeezed out if there is contraction in oil demand.
Hill: So, one final question. Any reflections on the theme of ‘Escalating Consequences’?
Jeff D. Colgan: Putting aside the U.S. election, this decade is the crucial decade for climate change, and I think that we should take that seriously.
The escalating consequences of failing to deliver, which is what we are on track to do, get worse. The consequences of each tenth of a degree Celsius of increasing warmth—it's not linear, it’s exponential. Whether we get to 2.6 or 2.9 degrees Celsius, it sounds so marginal to the average person. First of all, what does that even mean? Second of all, three tenths of a degree, that doesn't sound like a big deal when you think about your own living room, right? But that's really a sign of a fever for the planet. When your body temperature rises a few degrees, it can be very serious, it can be deadly.
To my mind, other than nuclear war, there really isn’t a more serious escalating consequence than global climate change.
Photo Credit: Jack Kennedy, 2023 Photo Contest