Climate Economics with Arvid Viaene
Climate Economics with Arvid Viaene
Podcast Description
This podcast aims to raise the level of conversation around climate change by bringing data and economics to the forefront. As an economist, I focus on quantifying everything — from emissions and their impacts to the costs and trade-offs of climate policies. Episodes will be either expert interviews or solo explorations of key issues.Hosted by Dr. Arvid Viaene, a climate economist with a PhD from the University of Chicago. His research on climate-related mortality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and he has advised the European Commission on the impacts of climate policy on firm competitiveness.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The show focuses on critical themes in climate change, particularly the economic implications of policies and adaptations. Example episodes include discussions on the impacts of agricultural emissions on climate policies and barriers to adaptation in the Global South, emphasizing topics like trade, adaptation strategies, and innovations in emissions measurement.
A research-focused podcast on the economics of climate change and air pollution. Episodes are released every two weeks on Tuesday at 6 am CET. Episodes will be either expert interviews or solo explorations of key issues. Hosted by Dr. Arvid Viaene, a climate economist with a PhD from the University of Chicago. He has done research on the impacts of climate change on agriculture and mortality. His research on climate-related mortality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and he has advised the European Commission on the impacts of climate policy on firm competitiveness.
Sometimes you hear: “we should stop subsidizing dirty industries.” But are we actually doing that—and how big is it?
In this episode, I’m joined (again) by Professor Joe Shapiro (UC Berkeley) to discuss his paper “The Environmental Bias of Trade Policy” (QJE, 2021). Joe’s core finding is striking: dirty industries tend to face lower trade protection, while cleaner industries face higher trade protection—a pattern that appears across countries, years, and even non-tariff barriers.
Joe then translates that pattern into an intuitive metric: if you interpret existing trade policy as a carbon tariff, it looks like an implicit carbon subsidy of around -$100 per ton of CO₂ (roughly -$85 to -$120/tCO₂) or $550 to $800 billion dollars per year. In other words, goods with higher embedded emissions often face less trade protection—trade policy gets the magnitude “about right,” but the sign wrong.
We unpack what drives this: tariff escalation linked to “upstreamness” (upstream, commodity-like inputs tend to be dirtier and receive lower protection; downstream consumer goods are cleaner and receive higher protection).
Finally, Joe walks through his model-based simulations showing that harmonizing protection between clean and dirty goods could modestly raise GDP while meaningfully reducing global emissions.
In this episode
- The key empirical fact: dirty industries have low tariffs; clean industries have high tariffs
- The implied magnitude: ~-$100/tCO₂ “implicit carbon tax” embedded in trade policy
- The mechanism: upstreamness → tariff escalation → environmental bias
- What the simulations show when you “flatten” the bias across sectors
- A surprising map result: countries with strong climate reputations can still have trade policy that tilts toward dirtier goods
If you care about CBAM, industrial policy, or the political economy of decarbonization, this episode is a powerful reminder: trade policy can be climate policy—even when nobody intended it.
For questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact me at [email protected]
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