Beyond Paris: Building a Practical Climate Coalition

In this episode, we speak to three scholars in the cluster to learn about their progress at COP30—the thirtieth UN Climate Change Conference held last fall in Brazil—and also about the state of renewable energy technology in the US.

Catherine Wolfram recounts the launch of the Declaration on the Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets (the Open Coalition), a pact with middle- and lower-income countries to collaborate on carbon pricing. Launched at COP30 last fall, the coalition currently has eighteen member countries signed on.

Arathi Rao explains the challenges and opportunities of bringing together countries with different capacities and industrial policies to the table. She describes the willingness of middle-income and low-income countries to become larger players in what she hopes to be a growing coalition.

Reflecting on the process of bringing theory into practice, Dustin Tingley notes the kinds of expertise and strategy needed to approach world leaders in person and truly understand their needs. He notes that offering help elicits more collaboration than imposing a predetermined formula.

The scholars also recognize China’s leadership in renewable energy and point out the technologies that could move the US more prominently into the renewable energy technology market. 

Guests

Arathi Rao, Director, Global Climate Policy Project, The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, Harvard University. 

Dustin Tingley, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Climate Policy. Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy, Department of Government, Harvard University and Harvard Kennedy School; Deputy Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, Harvard University.

Catherine Wolfram, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Climate Policy. William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy; Professor of Applied Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management.

Host

Jessica Barnard, Administrator, Weatherhead Research Clusters on Global History and on Global Climate Policy. 

Producer/Director

Michelle Nicholasen, Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Related Links

• “America’s Surprising Energy Advantage: How to Beat China on Clean Power,” by Joseph E. Aldy, Motoy Kuno-Lewis, and Dustin Tingley (Foreign Affairs, July 29, 2026)
• “How Will Energy Demand Develop in the Developing World?” by Catherine Wolfram, Orie Shelef, and Paul Gertler (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2012)
• “Building a Climate Coalition: Aligning Carbon Pricing, Trade, and Development,” a Global Climate Policy Project flagship report

Music 

“Soft Calm Background Music” by Inplusmusic. Source: Pixabay (Content License Summary) 

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the Epicenter Podcast from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your host, Jessica Barnard.

The United States may have withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement a decade ago, but that hasn't stopped cutting edge research on decarbonization. At the Weatherhead Center, the social scientists in the global climate policy cluster have made strides in putting together an international coalition to collaborate on carbon pricing. They also have their finger on the avenues that hold the most promise for the US to become more dominant in the global market for renewable energy technology.

Today we're talking to members of the global climate policy cluster. Arathi Rao is Director of the Global Climate Policy Project at the Salata Institute at Harvard, a joint initiative between Harvard and MIT. Dustin Tingley is Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Government at Harvard University and Harvard Kennedy School. Catherine Wolfram is William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

First, let's talk about your big achievement at the 30th Annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30 in Brazil last fall. You created a coalition for international cooperation on carbon pricing. Can you tell us what that means? Catherine?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM Sure. So last year at COP30, 18 countries endorsed what's called a declaration. It was kind of a 400-word statement on what countries envisioned, which is a group of countries, not every country in the world, but a group of countries. These 18 countries agreed to coordinate on pricing carbon emissions, which is a really good way of trying to reduce carbon emissions.

So I think it was notable for a couple of reasons. One, because it was 18 countries. Usually the COPs are about 190-plus countries, reaching some kind of unanimous consent. And at least my impression is that can lead to kind of a least common denominator. If you're trying to get 190 countries to agree to something, it's not going to be as robust as if you get 18 countries to agree to something. So that was notable.

And I think the second thing is that it really centered carbon pricing. So this is a technique that's been around for ages to help abate carbon. We can talk about what it does, but it was really something that this declaration highlighted.

I should also say that we played an important role in its creation, but the Brazilians-- we worked closely with the Brazilian Ministry of Finance, and they did the hard diplomatic work and wrote the declaration and got the 18 countries to agree to it. So I do not want to in any way take credit away from their efforts there.

JESSICA BARNARD: Arathi?

ARATHI RAO: I was just going to compliment what Catherine said and just say that the fact that Brazil led this initiative was really notable, to see an emerging market kind of ascend to more of a leadership role on the global stage. And the fact that they were able to get China and the European Union to sign on very early helped us set the stage for a broader coalition of 20 countries to join. So, really, this new model of having more partnership between advanced economies and emerging markets was another really distinctive feature of this new coalition.

JESSICA BARNARD: Now, Catherine, can you give us a thumbnail explanation of carbon pricing, just a little bird's eye view of this very complex topic?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Sure. So right now we have too much carbon going into the atmosphere. CO2 is the main greenhouse gas and the main contributor to climate change. And right now in most of the world, you can use carbon in a production process. You can consume goods like steel or aluminum that require a lot of carbon to produce for free.

But the idea behind carbon pricing is, let's make that expensive or a little bit more expensive, so that producers find ways to make things that don't require as much carbon, and so that producers can't do that, consumers turn away from the goods that remain really carbon-intensive.

So it's what's called a market-based regulatory approach. It's kind of using the market signals through this price to encourage consumers to find different products and producers to find different ways of making products. It's not the government saying, like, every firm should do this and should install carbon capture and sequestration or whatever it is, but saying, we're going to put a price on it and it's up to the market to figure out what the best way is to-- in some cases we'll continue using carbon because it's valuable and we can't find good alternatives to it.

JESSICA BARNARD: So many developed countries already have different carbon taxing regimes for their big polluting industries like steel, aluminum, and concrete. And some even have border taxes for leveling the carbon tax field. In the US we have neither, which is kind of shocking. How significant is this omission in the global context?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Yeah. So I think one of the things we documented in our report was just how pervasive carbon pricing has become in those heavy industries like steel and aluminum. I think a lot of people that you talk to in the US, they think, oh, carbon pricing is something that the Europeans have tried, but it's not that extensive elsewhere. And we showed that over 80% of the carbon emissions in these heavy industries actually do have prices globally. So I think more pervasive than people thought.

But the fact that the US doesn't is notable. I think the US is a big country, the second biggest emitter in the world. It's also historically, when you look to lots of geopolitical issues, the US has been a leader. So the US helped get the UN off the ground and helped get the IMF and World Bank founded. If you go back in history, the US has historically played this real leadership role. So I think the fact that the US is, especially in these industries, an outlier and not having a carbon price, yeah, it makes it harder to find global cooperation on this topic.

JESSICA BARNARD: Sure. Dustin, do you have anything to add? Yeah

DUSTIN TINGLEY: One, interesting thing to add about the US not having carbon pricing, one is just a background political reality, which is that there have been efforts, bipartisan to adopt carbon pricing in the US has passed. So I think there's a feeling of, like, this could never happen. But historically we have had bipartisan efforts that recognize this and saw this as a great market-based solution. So Republicans who had thought that we should have a market-based rather than a straight regulatory-based approach to this, this is very much in that wheelhouse.

The second observation I would make, and this is something that Catherine and Arathi and others, I think helped to surface amongst others, is that there are a number of US industries that relatively are pretty clean. Right. So from an international competition angle, it's not like carbon pricing would then make the US decidedly disadvantaged versus other countries who also have a carbon pricing.

We have, in this country, made amazing innovations to our industrial processes. And so we actually, in some sense, you could talk about the US having a competitive advantage if we were to be in a scheme of having carbon pricing alongside other countries also having carbon pricing. So I think that's just something to always think about as we think about the more political side of this is that there could be an advantage to this.

JESSICA BARNARD: Now building a climate coalition like the Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets means finding common ground between countries with very different needs. Arathi, can you tell us about how you find a structure that works for developed and less developed countries?

ARATHI RAO: Sure. I mean, I think a starting point is just recognizing that fairness doesn't require every country to have exactly the same policy. So countries are at different levels of development. They have different energy systems. Indonesia is very reliant on coal. Brazil has access to a lot of hydropower. They have different industrial structures and different capacities to actually decarbonize.

So if international cooperation requires that every single country adopt the same policies on the same timeline, it's just not practical. And so we looked at ways to combine climate ambition with flexibility. And so our research kind of examines, both having a common carbon price or the same carbon price across a coalition, or a more graduated approach, under which lower income countries would actually adopt a lower carbon price.

And we also looked at, in our report, including positive incentives to get low and middle income countries to join. So things like climate finance, cooperation around technology or capacity development. And that would make it easier for developing countries to join a coalition to meet the commitments and to raise their ambition over time.

I think importantly, in our technical work, what we are able to show is that kind of including some of these features, for example, a graduated approach would actually-- you could do that and still minimize the risk that production shifts from high income countries to lower income countries, which was some of the concerns that we had been hearing for the European Union. And then we also tried in our work to spotlight those aspects of climate finance, technology cooperation that were pragmatic.

DUSTIN TINGLEY: You know, I think this is a really important point. Because if you listen to some of the developing countries talk about their experience to date, there is a little bit of a feeling that this is being yet again foisted upon them. And it minimizes their interest in participating in a coalition to feel like they're being sort of left out, and that their interests aren't being included.

And the reality is, is that their interests could be included in a way that is compatible with what other countries like the European Union want. The point about having a graduated pricing scheme and not creating the incentive for domestic manufacturing in Europe to all of a sudden flee and go to a lower price regime, you don't see that dynamic as strongly as what I think some were imagining.

Or let's think about the role of technology partnerships, where European and Western companies who have really interesting decarbonization technologies can actually join with countries and governments in the Global South to implement those things. That's incentive compatible on both sides. Those companies want new markets and companies in the developing country context want these new technologies. Let's come up with incentive compatible ways for those to come together.

And that's something just on the political side of this that we've understood from the politics of foreign aid. This isn't foreign aid in the traditional development health, food related context, but there has to be an incentive on the donor side. Why are they doing this beyond simple altruism? And that helps to kind of square that circle.

So I think it's very exciting. And the result of this coalition that Catherine and Arathi and others helped to foment here that spanned developed and developing economies, that message I think is getting through that there are ways where this is good for both sides, rather than just being kind of like a zero sum game that's being foisted upon developing countries by the developed world.

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: And I would just make a quick point. I mean, Arathi and Dustin have covered the substance really well. But to get back to Arathi's point, I think the fact that this was led by Brazil signaled that these issues would be taken seriously, that a middle income country would make sure that the issues that are important to low and middle income countries will be surfaced.

And so I think in a strange way, the fact that the US was not showing leadership here and Brazil was able to step up to the plate was really important and gives this some good runway.

ARATHI RAO: Yeah, and just building on that point, I think what we're seeing on the international stage is these low and middle income countries transitioning from rule-takers to rule-makers. And so Catherine alluded to how the declaration for the open coalition was quite high level. And so what that allows is for the breadth of countries that have endorsed to really build this coalition together, and to get in the details together in a more inclusive process than perhaps we've seen in the past.

JESSICA BARNARD: So did the US not have any representation at COP30 or any kind of formal government presence? Because I'm curious how that relates to the idea if any of the current administration has any interest or expression of interest in their coalition and getting on board with carbon pricing.

ARATHI RAO: Yeah, no. The US has formally withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, did not have any formal representation at COP30, has literally walked away from the table. That said, there were some US Democratic senators that came down for COP30.

But in general this hasn't been on front page news and isn't something that the current administration is paying attention to. I think were they to-- Dustin's point is really important, that US companies, even if the US is not part of the coalition, US companies stand to benefit from something like the coalition.

JESSICA BARNARD: Dustin, do you have anything you want to add to that?

DUSTIN TINGLEY: Yeah, I think it's interesting that in addition to senators, you had some governors go. And one point is that there is not federal level carbon pricing in the US, but there are subnational efforts-- a variety of different forms. We're not going to go into that here. --in different ways to put, kind of like a price on carbon.

And so there are major manufacturing hubs, California being a big one, where some of these constraints are binding. So you do have subnational interest. But, again, at the federal level, there wasn't representation due to the withdrawal.

JESSICA BARNARD: The US wants to achieve energy dominance, but we are way behind China, for example. How far ahead are they?

DUSTIN TINGLEY: So I think the way to think about this is that China has done an incredible job at scaling up the production of a core set of technologies for things like renewable energy and storage.

So sometimes people ask me, like, what's been the most amazing thing for the environment that has happened in the last 30 years? And it's been the ability of the Chinese, granted, taking technology that was innovated in Europe, in the US, in New Zealand around solar panels and just driving the cost of production down. And that has led to the blooming of solar energy across the globe. And in transformative ways, where in Pakistan this last year, you've just seen explosive growth, Nigeria, so on and so forth.

So China has been able to expand its capacity and leadership in areas like that, in areas of battery technology, then on your more consumer product side things, et cetera. At the same time, it still is burning a lot of coal. It's a big economy. But on the ability to scale up production through the use of industrial policy, so the government stepping in and helping its producers achieve these scale economies, it's been able to make tremendous strides.

JESSICA BARNARD: And you and colleagues have written about the US's potential competitive advantage in both nuclear and geothermal energy. You call this firm energy, meaning it's constant, not intermittent like solar or wind. Why does the US have an advantage here?

DUSTIN TINGLEY: The US has some really interesting opportunities here. I've recently, as part of the Global Climate Policy Project, written with Joe Aldy and others on the amazing progress that we've made in geothermal power. And what's fascinating about geothermal power-- so that's the idea that you drill deep down to harness the heat that's contained underneath the ground. A lot of that technology innovation came from people who were working in oil and gas and doing drilling.

And so here we just have a great story of the US, which has clearly an advantage in things like natural gas, through advanced drilling technologies, some of that being carried over into renewable energy. And I think there's a really exciting story of American leadership to be told. And I think there's a hope that we can see that leadership, not just present in what we're doing domestically, but also how our geothermal expertise could be a major source of export opportunities of technology and of know-how of US companies being able to go out across the world and work in that area.

So I put China clearly as playing a major role of playing a lead in energy. I would say Russia has been hamstrung in a variety of ways. And the US having important pockets like geothermal, like advanced nuclear, that could really help it leapfrog it on the international scene.

JESSICA BARNARD: Catherine, did you want to add anything?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Yeah, I guess I would separate global energy markets into two buckets, one being the clean energy, things like solar panels that Dustin referenced, electric vehicles, and then the other bucket being dirty or fossil fuel energy. And the US is clearly the leader in fossil fuels. We're the biggest oil producer in the world, the biggest natural gas producer in the world.

And as Dustin said, China is pretty clearly the leader in clean right now. It, in addition to huge strides in production of solar panels has made huge, huge strides in the production of electric vehicles. So I think the latest data I've seen is 2/3 of the passenger vehicles sold in China were electric vehicles. And you read about a real vehicle that's less than $10,000 that you can get in China, or a pretty fancy vehicle that's got 1,000 kilometers range, about 600 miles range that's like less than $20,000.

So if you think that clean is where the world is going, China has certainly been dominant. But it's going to take some time to get to that clean, whole world being clean. And in the meantime, the US is pumping out a lot of oil and a lot of natural gas to supply the world's energy needs.

JESSICA BARNARD: Are there any more promising directions for the US and renewables? What about the ability to store renewable energy?

DUSTIN TINGLEY: There are a couple of things that are changing. First of all, one thing that's changing is that the ability to store energy, which I see as the next frontier. Just like solar cost plummeted, once you get the cost of storage plummeting, that creates an interactive effect where you're able to store energy that is renewable when you don't need it, and then discharge it and let people use it when you don't.

And so there are tremendous strides in large scale storage technologies, including ones being made by US companies, I should be clear, to enable firm kind of base load power coming from renewable sources. But, you know, maybe you don't put all your eggs in a storage basket and you want to have technologies that allow for firm base load energy production that are clean, like geothermal power, which I described before. Well, the heat underneath the Earth, that's not oscillating by the time of day. So you get that kind of ability to have a baseload.

Now another area is nuclear energy. And I wouldn't put that in the camp of necessarily clean or dirty. You do generate nuclear waste, but you do not generate emissions that are leading to global warming from nuclear energy. And there have been a lot of really interesting technological investments that have been happening, and in the US, where the US is starting to look like a leader in areas like small modular reactors. You might have heard of SMRs. And this is just an idea that rather than having nuclear power plants that are gigantic and have huge reactors, that we can make them more modular, make them more self-contained. And that this is leading to a lot of interest in the nuclear power sector.

Especially as you start to think about, how do we power these gigantic data centers? Well, you've got companies that are literally building natural gas power plants to power a data center. Nuclear energy provides an alternative to that. And the US is making a lot of strides there.

I'd also say that the Trump administration has increasingly been supportive of nuclear energy. And if you look at the kind of broader political landscape, the gaps between the political parties in the US on nuclear energy are starting to recede. And there's been more and more of an openness to nuclear energy, at least across different political circles.

So those are just areas of having firm baseload power, renewables plus batteries, geothermal energy, and nuclear that the US is well poised to pursue. And then you map that on to the great work that the coalition was looking at, which is, like, how do we decarbonize industrial processes? You got to run a steel plant 24-7, right. There are all these industrial processes that really require that kind of baseload power. And these are things that are great opportunities to do that with.

JESSICA BARNARD: Dustin, you brought up data centers, which is a really big part of this new demand for global energy. So what is happening with data centers? And what risk does this pose to the global efforts to scale back carbon emissions?

Catherine, can you comment on that?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Sure. I think the key word there is that they're new. They're growing tremendously. I mean, in the US we have seen flat electricity demand growth or maybe like 1% a year demand growth for the last 50 years. And now, thanks to data centers, we're seeing 6% or 7% a year growth in the demand for electricity. And so this is just like unheard of and is really transforming the way we think about meeting electricity demand.

That said, they're growing-- like, think, two years ago we were just starting to hear about ChatGPT, and three years ago no one was talking about it, or maybe a couple of people in Silicon Valley were. But they've grown from essentially zero. And so, from a low base, even rapid growth doesn't necessarily amount to that much energy.

So I've done some calculations. When you talk about global energy demand and global carbon emissions, steel in 2030 is going to be 10 times as important as AI. Even though AI is growing a lot, steel is just really, really energy intensive and made right now with very dirty energy. Whereas AI is using electricity in a lot of places that that electricity is pretty clean.

So, yeah, AI is like this new kind of new kid on the block. Everyone's talking about it and it's growing very, very rapidly. But there are a lot of things in this world that use a lot of energy. And I think that's kind of the point, getting back to the discussion about the coalition is, let's go after some of these big, heavy industries that are very, very carbon intensive, like aluminum, like steel, and find a way to get some global cooperation around decarbonization.

Because, I mean, we're building lots of data centers and that takes steel, right? So we are going to continue to need steel. And steel is super important from the global CO2 perspective.

JESSICA BARNARD: Why was this a ripe time to start a global coalition? And is yours the first one of its kind involving carbon pricing? Arathi?

ARATHI RAO: This idea of having a climate club or cooperation around carbon pricing is not that new. I think what was changing was the policy landscape. Notably the European Union was going to put in place a carbon border adjustment mechanism, which was going to become operational in January, 2026.

And so many countries, potentially in response to the CBAM, had made progress on carbon pricing.

JESSICA BARNARD: Arathi, I'm just going to interrupt you for one second. Could you tell us what CBAM is?

ARATHI RAO: Catherine, you want to take that?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Sure. I think CBAM, like it's got this funky Batman sounding name. I think we're going to look back in 10, 15 years and see it as the most transformative climate policy out there. So the basic idea-- we talked about carbon pricing. The EU has had a carbon price for a long, long time, but they have gotten more and more worried that they're pricing their companies and that forces production in these heavy industries, in particular to move to other countries where they're not pricing carbon.

And so what the EU did was say, even if you're not pricing carbon, when you export to the EU, your exports have to pay a price, basically, at the border as though they were in the EU. So they have to still pay this carbon price for any shipments they're sending to the EU. But-- and this is a really crucial but-- if you have a carbon price on domestically, like if you start pricing carbon then you don't have to pay the carbon price to the EU.

And so we have some research showing that that led to just a huge surge in interest in pricing carbon for the industries that the EU was starting with, which are the industries that we've been talking about, the steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers.

JESSICA BARNARD: And CBAM, just to clarify, stands for Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Is that right?

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Yes, exactly. Yes.

JESSICA BARNARD: The Global Climate Policy Group is a rarity among academic groups. You've successfully gone from research to policy. How can you replicate this and what can other research groups learn from your example?

ARATHI RAO: So I think the biggest lesson is that research can have impact when it's designed to actually be used. And so we thought very carefully at the outset of our work about the opportunities for policy impact. And we saw that in response to the European Union Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism going into effect in January 2026, that there is a lot more interest in carbon pricing. And also, many countries were looking for an alternative framework, one that could be potentially more inclusive.

And so we were thinking, what is a technical work that would be needed to spur a group of countries by COP30, which would be November 2025, to begin a more serious conversation about cooperation on carbon pricing? And I think once you have that clarity about the direction and the opportunities on the policy landscape, then you can work backwards.

Like, who has the actual authority to act on your policy proposal? Is it finance ministries? It ministries of environment, in which key countries? And then what are the technical questions and information they may need to inform their position? And when would they need to know that all by? And so I think that really informed how we did the research and policy analysis.

So we convened a global working group. It was balanced and so that we can get a diversity of inputs and perspectives. Many people in our working group had actually been involved in designing the carbon pricing systems in their respective countries. And so they kind of had a good sense of how this could all work together.

And then I think another lesson is that the strategy really matters as much as the analysis. And so policy has this rhythm, these action-forcing events, be it the COP, the IMF, World Bank annual meetings, climate weeks, where you actually see all the stakeholders come together and decisions getting made. And so deliberately sequencing the research, the convening, the outreach around these key moments helped improve the take up of the research.

And then the last is just that trust and relationships really matter. So investing time in building those relationships, as you're doing the research really I think pays off in the ultimate take up of the proposals.

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Yeah. I would just build on that in a couple ways. I think at a high level, academics are rewarded for thinking blue sky novel ideas. Like, imagine a world that looked like this and policymakers are not rewarded for going from A to Z in a million very rapidly. Policymakers want to go from A to B, like, understand how to get from A to Z, even if they share that vision of the ideal world that academics have sketched out.

So I think what we did that was pretty unique is think, here's the world now. What is the appropriate or a practical next step that could be taken to get us further down the carbon pricing road? So this idea of a coalition is not unique. Academics have been talking about carbon pricing. Academic economists or economists in general have been talking about carbon pricing for decades, if not centuries. The idea of a club or a group of countries pricing carbon was something that was formalized about 10 years ago by a guy who won the Nobel Prize.

I think that that small tweak or innovation that we had was to say, let's do this just for these heavy industries. Like, let's start small, manageable, and on the industries where, as Arathi explained, the CBAM was already leading to lots of interest in carbon pricing. And so I think the fact that policymakers could see that this was a manageable next step that they could take was really important.

And I think, unfortunately, it's not something that's necessarily rewarded in academia to go from A to B, instead of articulating the dream world of Z.

DUSTIN TINGLEY: I'd add a couple more, building on these great thoughts. I think another thing that I observed through this process was leading with asking the question, how can we help? Rather than being, like, oh, here's the answer. Right. And that just sets a different tone, right.

Policymakers don't want pointy-headed nerds like me to just waltz into the room and tell them what to do, like here's the answer. But a different strategy is to say, like, hey, here are these broad policy changes that are happening. Here are some ideas about how we might move forward incrementally, but in important ways. But, like, what would you need in order to help you be a part of this process?

And sometimes that's analytical analysis. You get the smart economists like Catherine making calculations. Sometimes it's even simpler things like Arathi and others help lead an effort to develop simple informational dashboards about the impact of some of these policies on a country's economy.

We did some work specking that out for Indonesia. And I happened to be in Indonesia, and I'm talking to government officials and they're like, yeah, there's this great dashboard from Harvard and MIT. And I'm cracking up because previously I was a little bit skeptical. I'm like, ah, are they going to use it? And then no. They asked and they're like, yeah, this would be useful for us. And then Arathi and others helped to build them. So I think just leading with this orientation of how we can be helpful.

And the final thing I would add is just as a person that's been a part of this process, but the energy and the commitment that have come from people like Catherine and Arathi, it's a lot of sweat to do this type of work. Like, this is not, you sit back and you write an article and maybe some people read it. It's getting on Zoom calls. It's traveling to different parts of the world so you can have that in-person component. There's a lot of sweat that goes into this work. And I've certainly been appreciative of seeing Catherine and Arathi, as well as others, contribute in that dimension. But I just don't want that to be left out.

CATHERINE WOLFRAM: Yeah. So as we've been talking about, this coalition is often running. It May of 2026 it was formally launched with Brazil as the lead and the EU and China as co-leads. And so I really want to see this coalition flourish. I'd love to see some additional countries join, maybe Indonesia, Turkey, India, all super important middle income countries. It would be great to see them get involved.

I think there's some low income countries that might be interested. I've been working with the government of Mozambique. Mozambique's a big aluminum exporter, so potentially they could join. Yeah. I would love to see the open coalition grow and thrive and eventually encourage the US to do the right thing and put a price on our carbon emissions.

DUSTIN TINGLEY: Yeah. I think some other things that we are working on. We've started to do some work around how industrial policy across different countries can be better coordinated. So Catherine's kind of referring to one mechanism of, like, let's coordinate on prices and that will induce innovation.

Another theory of change that's out there is, like, no, let's actually have governments put their thumb on the scale a little bit. But if you have different governments putting different thumbs on the scale and it's not coordinated, it can lead to some bad outcomes. And so that's an area of work.

As part of the larger faculty group in the Global Climate Policy Project, we're learning and investigating more about the status of different international trade rules as it comes to some of these things, the sharing of intellectual property. So we talked earlier about technology transfers. How can we do that in responsible ways? So we have some people working on that.

And then there's other things, like, there are technologies that are being developed that would enable the reflection of sunlight in order to slowly cool the planet a little bit if none of these mitigation efforts are as effective as we need them to be, known as geoengineering. Well, how do we put governance and international cooperation frameworks around things like that? And so we're exploring some work in that space as well.

All of this we're super thankful to the Salata Institute at Harvard, to a range of support from MIT, but also the cluster that we have with the Weatherhead Center that's enabling this fascinating combination of academic insight and policy impact.

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JESSICA BARNARD: Thank you, Dustin, Catherine, and Arathi for describing the Global Climate Policy cluster's rigorous behind the scenes work on global carbon pricing and your reflections on that blue sky scenario we are all hoping for.

For now, I'm Jessica Barnard, signing off from the Weatherhead Center at Harvard University. Please subscribe to the Epicenter Podcast to enjoy more of these in-depth conversations with scholars at the intersection of research and policy.

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