Earth Track Document

Harvard Management Company (HMC), which manages Harvard University’s nearly $42 billion endowment, released its first Climate Report in February 2021.  As the largest university endowment in the world, decisions Harvard makes to tangibly and materially reduce the climate impact of its investments will garner significant attention around the world and provide space for many other institutions to make similar moves.  Further, the school has the scale and the stature to coordinate with other institutional investors and accelerate the pace of financial innovation across asset

When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, ending $400 billion of annual subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry worldwide seems like a no-brainer. For the past decade, world leaders have been resolving and reaffirming the need to phase them out.

In an effort to response to the widespread health and economic issues associated with the coronavirus pandemic, Congress has been working on legislative responses.  This is the second major stimulus bill, an initiative led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.  The bill provides roughly $1 trillion in economic stimulus; more once tax impacts are included.

The attached document contains comments on particular provisions, as input to the process of improving the targeting and efficiency of the bill.

This article in Nature explains how subsidies affect fossil fuel investment and why they deserve greater attention in global modelling analyses.

It responds to a 2018 study in Nature that used the results of integrated assessment models to infer that eliminating subsidies would yield “limited emission reductions…except in energy-exporting regions”, and described the emission reduction benefits as “small”.

This working paper identifies some of the major gaps in Harvard’s existing reporting on the climate impacts of its endowment; potential leverage points to address these gaps; and some next steps to develop solutions that protect investment flexibility for Harvard Management Company while greatly and rapidly improving transparency.  These improvements a

These are the supporting slides to a presentation given in May 2019 in the Synapse Energy Economics webinar series.  The presentation provides an overview of the scope and magnitude of energy subsidies around the world, and discusses common issues that arise with regards to measurement and value differences across sources. 

For many years, policy discussions have focused on strategies to bring down greenhouse gas emissions using taxes, permits and other regulatory or statutory limits.  Yet fossil fuel markets across the world remain littered with government programs subsidizing these emissions.  The subsidies are large and act as a negative tax on carbon, slowing the transition to cleaner fuels, weakening the impact of carbon constraints and absorbing a significant portion of government revenues in many countries. 

In its proposed tariffs to remove potential distortions caused by subsidies in capacity markets, PJM includes a number of limitations and exclusions that appear to result in unequal evaluation of subsidies across different fuel cycles. This will likely impede PJM’s core objective of ensuring competitive, nondiscriminatory auctions in the wholesale capacity market.

This review assesses the House and Senate tax reform proposals as they relate to the energy sector. Three main areas are examined: cross-cutting changes to tax rates or baselines and whether some of them will have disproportionate or distortionary impacts on particular fuels; specific energy tax expenditures that are modified or repealed in the proposals; and baseline subsidies that remain untouched.