Dallas Burtraw has his research base at Resources for the Future, an independent research institute located in Washington DC. He is regarded as one of the foremost experts in the area of financial policy instruments and drivers in environmental regulation.Burtraw has had an interest in the environment since his student years in California in the 1970s. Becoming an economist was connected with his wish to find out how the changes advocated by the environmental movement could be implemented.
‘Although I was politically active, that interest alone wasn’t enough for me. I was interested in the actual practicalities. I wasn’t sure that the measures we argued for in the 1970s were the right solutions, and I often ended up in discussions with economists, which led me into both economics and research,’ he says.
Influential researcher
Early on, as a researcher and economist, he took an interest in trading of emissions permits as a way of reducing the quantities of different greenhouse gases emitted. He has helped to devise several different proposals for trading systems of this kind. He acts as an advisor to a range of public agencies and bodies at both state and federal level, electricity companies, environmental organisations and international lending and economic assistance institutions.
He has assisted in drawing up a national action plan for the USA to reduce acidification (the U.S. Acid Rain Program) and has witnessed to Congress on the accumulated experience from various systems of tradable emission permits. But how much he genuinely influences different decision-makers is, he thinks, difficult to answer.
‘The less combative you are, the more they listen,’ he explains. ‘My credibility is based on the quality of the research I carry out. I may be asked for advice and about my opinion on a particular issue, but as a scientist you have to be careful. For me to be credible, the opinion I put forward or the advice I give has to be based on my scientific work.’
Effective climate policy
Dallas Burtraw has been associated with the Mistra-funded Climate Policy Research Programme (Clipore) since it started in 2004. The main function of Clipore is to conduct research on, and support the development of, an internationally viable and effective climate policy. Economic drivers and policy instruments have a key role in the creation and introduction of climate policies.
His role in Clipore means that he visits Stockholm and the Swedish researchers in the programme a couple of times a year. On the last occasion, in October 2008, he attended a seminar that discussed, for example, how international climate talks will affect the election for America’s next President.
‘There is a need to bring about better transatlantic cooperation than we have seen after the USA withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol talks. And here researchers, in Clipore and elsewhere, have a role to play in bridging the gap between the US and the EU,’ Burtraw argues.
Social movement
As he sees it the climate issue is, in a way, still in its infancy.
‘You can see the climate issue as a social one just as the race issue in the US, for example, used to be,’ Burtraw points out. Eventually the civil rights movement resulted in social reforms and legislation. But the climate issue is relatively young and to some extent immature, at least in the US, in his view. It is risky to presenting trading of emissions permits, at this stage, as the solution to the entire problem, since other conceivable solutions may then be missed, according to Burtraw. At the same time, he still advocates tradable emissions permits.
‘We need to harmonise our decisions at regional, national and international level. But we need now to think about which way we should go, and which measures are most effective.’
Greenhouse gases
In the USA, a range of different steps have been taken in several states and at regional level. For example, ten states in the north-east are currently introducing a programme for tradable emissions permits for the electricity sector, and California has adopted a climate law that sets targets for greenhouse-gas emission reductions throughout the state.
‘These different measures will have a crucial impact on the nature of federal climate policy in the US. I think that climate policy from now on will consist of a mixture of legislation and financial policy instruments, such as emissions trading,’ says Dallas Burtraw.
