Reclaiming the atmospheric commons: a new strategy for climate policy success?

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Free and open to the public.

This talk explores a surprising new strategy for climate change policy that has emerged in the last 10 years: “reclaiming the atmospheric commons.”  The strategy combines the idea of making polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions with the additional idea of using those revenues to generate tangible, broadly distributed public benefits.  The strategy emerged in the creation of the first major U.S. climate change policy, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), in 2008 and has since expanded to other climate policy venues in the United States and abroad. The talk also considers how a focus on new egalitarian principles for any use of the “atmospheric commons” by private companies may also facilitate the implementation of future state climate change and energy policies, in particular response to U.S. EPA Clean Power Plan regulations.

Leigh Raymond is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Environment at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from U.C. Berkeley, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University. Dr. Raymond’s research focuses on influence of norms of justice and fairness on the design and implementation off market-based environmental policies, including emissions trading policies to address climate change. He has also done research on political communication, policy adoption, and implementation in a wide range of other environmental policy areas, including environmental risk management, renewable fuels, conservation tillage, and biodiversity protection on private lands. Dr. Raymond has served as PI or Co-PI on more than $1.2 million in external research grants and is the author or co-author of three books on property rights and environmental policy and more than 30 refereed articles or book chapters, including a forthcoming book on recent changes in U.S. climate change policy.  Dr. Raymond teaches courses related to public policy and the environment, and was a winner of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in the College of Liberal Arts. 

As director of the Center for the Environment, Dr. Raymond helps organize and promote cross cutting, interdisciplinary research at Purdue focused on pressing environmental challenges.  Prior to his appointment as director of the Center for the Environment, he was an associate director and founding executive committee member of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, an similar program dedicated to interdisciplinary research and teaching on climate change.  Raymond also co-organized and led a university cluster hire of seven new faculty members across seven departments at Purdue on the theme of Building Sustainable Communities, from 2013-2015.  http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/environment/

Sponsored by: The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP)

Co-Sponsors:  The University of Michigan’s Graham Sustainability Institute, Energy Institute, Program in the Environment (PitE), and Evironmental Law & Policy Program (ELPP)

For more information visit www.closup.umich.edu or call 734-647-4091.  Follow on Twitter @closup

• Global Warming
• Climate Change
• Environmental Politics