Progress Amid the Pandemic: Carbon Markets in 2020, with William Acworth

Notable Quotes

• How COVID-19 has impacted emissions trading: “Carbon markets have definitely been affected. COVID-19 led to the lockdowns, and then we saw steep declines in economic activities as jurisdictions implemented their various efforts to try to contain the pandemic. This resulted in declining emissions and then a decline in the demand for [emissions] allowances, and allowance prices fell accordingly. This is what you’d expect from a market-based instrument like this, but it did also raise some concerns as to how far prices would fall and for how long that they would slump … But, following the initial fall in prices, the vast majority of markets actually stabilized and recovered. Many of the prices in the [emissions trading] systems around the world actually ended the year either at or above pre-pandemic levels.” (5:45)
• China’s new emissions trading system could be transformative: “China undoubtedly takes the spotlight this year with the launch of its national emissions trading system. The system is large—there’s no other way to put it. It covers 40 percent of China’s emissions, but this is already four billion tons of CO₂. That’s about the same amount as all the other programs combined … But we also need to temper our expectations. Like most emission trading systems, the national system in China will have a soft start.” (11:33)
• Progress in regional carbon markets: “As for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), this was a year when Virginia joined the market, and there are other states that have also signaled their interest … Pennsylvania is looking to potentially join RGGI, and if they were to do that, it would be really significant, because they would increase the size of the market by almost 75 percent. This would really increase the reach of RGGI on that northeastern seaboard. That’s something to watch over the coming years.” (23:17)

Top of the Stack

• "Emissions Trading Worldwide: Status Report 2021" from the International Carbon Action Partnership
• “Prices in the world’s biggest carbon market are soaring” from the Economist magazine
• "2020 China Carbon Pricing Survey" from China Carbon Forum
• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
• Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. This week, we talk with William Acworth, Head of Secretariat at the International Carbon Action Partnership, or ICAP, which recently released its 2021 status report on emissions trading worldwide. For the second year in a row, we're highlighting this report, and we'll talk to William about a wide range of issues. He'll get us up to speed on the recently launched nationwide trading system in China, along with programs from elsewhere in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. We'll talk about how markets have responded to the pandemic, where prices might be headed, and how markets are expanding to cover new sectors like buildings and transportation. Stay with us.

Okay. William Acworth, joining us from the International Carbon Action Partnership, thank you so much for coming on today to Resources Radio.

William Acworth: This is an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Daniel Raimi: So William, we're going to talk today about your organization's annual status report on emissions trading around the world. Before we do that, we always like to ask our guests how they got interested in working on environmental issues in the first place. So, what's your story?

William Acworth: For me, it goes back to the choice I made after high school in terms of what university degree to pursue, and I was looking for something that combined both my interest in economics and also environmental science, and the University of Sydney had just started a program called Resource Economics. Through this program, I became fascinated by what economics can actually teach us about how to solve public policy challenges. I had the opportunity also to intern as part of the program to work with the economics unit at the World Wildlife Fund, and here we were looking into what you could learn from the Montreal protocol—the global agreement on ozone-depleting substances—to inform the climate change policy space. I found this to be a really fascinating and challenging question and never really looked back.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. So many of us at RFF can identify with that line of reasoning; you're definitely in good company here. As I mentioned during the introduction, last year around this time we spoke with your colleague, Stephanie La Hoz Theuer, when you released ICAP’s 2020 status report on global emissions trading. When we had that conversation, I think we were just starting to enter our first lockdowns. Everything was in flux. It's really been quite a year since then. We were just talking before recording about how you've got three kids at home today because of a lockdown in Germany, but we're not going to dwell on those things, and instead it's probably best if you could just give us a quick reminder of what this annual publication is all about.

William Acworth: Perfect. In doing so, I'm going to get a couple of the acronyms out of the way. The International Carbon Action Partnership, or ICAP, is an intergovernmental partnership for jurisdictions that have implemented or are pursuing mandatory cap-and-trade programs. These are also referred to as emissions trading systems, or ETS. The status report is ICAP’s flagship publication that we put out once a year, and it really tries to provide a snapshot of ETS development over the course of that year.

It's structured in three parts. The first section is contributions from our members that are, I guess, the policymakers that are in charge of designing, implementing, and administering the systems in their jurisdiction. They contribute with their signed articles on what's the latest development in those systems as well as the upcoming topics. This year, we're very lucky to have contributions from China as well as from the UK. So those are two new systems, as well as contributions from the European Commission and from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, just to name a few.

The middle section of the report is what we call our infographics, and this is where the team here really puts a lot of effort in trying to understand what the key themes of the year have been, and also what the emerging trends are. We try to create graphics that then can be used by others in their communications around emissions trading. You can actually go and download the infographics separately from our website, and I welcome really anybody to do that, that finds these interesting and useful for their own work.

Then, lastly, the bulk of the report is over 40 detailed fact sheets on all the systems that are either implemented under development or under consideration. We tried to bring a structure to the fact sheets and really go into the details as to what the design elements of the emissions trading systems are. That's really for people that want to get into the nitty gritty and really understand these systems; the fact sheets are for you.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. I want to second the recommendation that those who are interested in this topic at a variety of levels, will find really useful resources in this report, which is why we're covering it for the second year in a row is because it's such a valuable resource. I actually use it in my teaching, and I use it in my research all the time. We're going to talk about some region-specific trends over the next few minutes, but before we do that, I think it would be really useful for you to just give us some high level thoughts about how carbon markets have responded broadly across the world to the enormous and unexpected changes in economic activity and energy use that we've seen this year as a result of COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns.

William Acworth: Thanks, it's certainly been a wild year. Carbon markets have definitely also been affected. COVID-19 led to the lockdowns, and then we saw steep declines in economic activities as jurisdictions implemented their various efforts to try to contain the pandemic. This resulted in declining emissions, and then a decline in the demand for allowances, and allowance prices fell accordingly. This is what you'd expect from a market-based instrument like this, but it did also raise some concerns as to how far prices would fall and for how long they would slump. I think that's due to the scale of the pandemic that we were witnessing and the likely impact in terms of the reduced economic activity.

It's also based on the memories of the global financial crisis from 2007 and 2008. So this led to a long period of sort of low prices, particularly in the European Union. We were fresh out of a period of consolidation across carbon markets that had seen a number of reform options put in place, and therefore resulted in more stable, more predictable, and increasing prices. There was a moment of concern where we said, “how badly are the markets going to be affected by the pandemic?”

Following the initial fall in prices, the vast majority of markets actually stabilized and recovered. Many of the prices in the ETS systems around the world actually ended the year either at or above pre-pandemic levels. This begs the question of “what's different this time around?” I believe two factors have really contributed. First, there was a period of reforming consolidation in some of the more established systems, and we saw policymakers introduce internal adjustment mechanisms that allow those systems to respond to exogenous shocks in a way that's predictable for the market.

California and Quebec demonstrate this really nicely. That's the linked markets under the Western Climate Initiative, and they operate with a reserve price at auction. This means that bids at the auction will not be accepted under a fixed amount, which is communicated to the market. When the emissions fell and demand fell, we did actually see quite a dramatic fall in the price in the secondary market. However, when the auction came around, allowances were withheld from the auction, they cleared at the reserve price; this also meant that the secondary market price almost recovered immediately to the reserve price.

There was some commentary around this to say, “okay, the market's failing, the auctions aren't selling out,” but I think this is a complete misconception. Actually, they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, by withholding some allowances from the market given the decrease in demand that we'd seen around the emission reductions associated with the pandemic. So this is an important lesson which made the systems that had reserved prices at auction more resilient.

A similar but different story is true for the EU Emissions Trading System. In 2019, the EU introduced what's called the market stability reserve, and this mechanism actually adjusts auction volumes based on a measure of allowance surplus. Basically if the allowance surplus is higher than a set threshold, then the auction volumes are reduced. This is a less direct way of targeting the market, but what it really communicates is that yes, there may be a surplus of allowances now, or we may have reduced demand for allowances now, but this will not accumulate over the longer term because we have a built-in system that will basically ensure future scarcity, and this allows people to make expectations in a slightly more predictable way, and provides a bit more confidence in the market.

Lastly, what's also different this time around is that the emissions trading systems are actually far more embedded in the longer-term, net-zero and 2030 targets. So almost all emissions trading systems actually sit within jurisdictions that either have net-zero targets in law, proposed legislation, or in policy documentation. And embedding the ETS within this credible long-term framework provides a much more clear picture that higher-emitting assets, higher-emitting production processes are not going to be part of the longer-term economy, and that allows people to form expectations around what they think the scarcity of allowances will be going forward. This is supported by prices through the pandemic.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's interesting, and it’s really cool to see the learning that has taken place over the last 11, 12 years as we've learned from the Great Recession, and now entering into this new downturn, that in some cases where the decline in energy demand was far steeper than what we saw in 2008, 2009.

William Acworth: Absolutely.

Daniel Raimi: Let's zoom in a little bit now to some specific parts of the world that have emissions trading systems and get an update on what's been happening this year. You've mentioned a couple of developments around the world already, but let's get a little deeper. It makes sense to start in Asia, largely because the world's largest emissions trading program was launched this year in China. There have been a series of pilot programs over the last several years, and now the nationwide program is launched. Can you give us an overview of that nationwide program, and—I don't know if we have enough information to answer this next part of the question, but if we do—it would be great to help us understand how it's functioning so far.

William Acworth: Definitely. China undoubtedly takes the spotlight this year with the launch of its national ETS. The system is large—there's no other way to put it. It covers 40 percent of China's emissions, but this is already four billion tons of CO₂. Just to get a sense, that's about the same amount as all the other programs combined. It's effectively doubled the number of emissions that are covered by emissions trading systems with the launch of this market.

We also need to temper our expectations. Like most emissions trading systems, the China national system will have a soft start. The system will focus initially on the power sector and it also awards allowances freely based on benchmarks. The cap is intensity-based. So rather than having an absolute target, it actually has an intensity-based target where allowances are given out based on these benchmarks and activity or emission levels.

Because of these characteristics, the system has been described by some of your colleagues at RFF as a tradable performance standard rather than your classic cap and trade program. That's accurate, but still the launch marks a really significant milestone in Chinese climate policy, as it sets a framework where the emissions trading system can grow in its role over time. We already know that plan adjustments include expansion of the ETS to also cover the industrial sectors, and we expect that the system will also transition away from an intensity-based cap towards an absolute-based cap once greenhouse gas emissions peak in China later this decade.

Lastly, it's really important to keep in mind that the Chinese ETS is operating alongside a much larger reform of the electricity market in China. Therefore, it will need to adapt and change in its design to fit into the evolving regulatory setting. In terms of how it's functioning today, I do think it's too early to say. Two really important things still need to happen. First, allowances have not yet been allocated to the firms participating in the scheme, and there's no registry yet to actually track transactions of allowances, but we expect these two things to be in place by June, and later this year, we will also need covered entities—the firms participating in the scheme—to actually comply with the first compliance period or surrender allowances for their emissions in the first compliance period, which includes the emissions of 2019 and 2020 as well.

So, we will be looking towards the end of the year to see the first allowance trades, and what everybody will be looking out for is where the price settles. I think looking at the experience of other systems when they start with these higher shares of free allocation, and also restricting the market to just the firms that have compliance obligations rather than let's say financial intermediaries and other players, price discovery can be a little bit slow, but nonetheless, we have a best guess provided by the China Carbon Forum. This is an organization from Beijing that surveys Chinese stakeholders every year on their expectations around the Chinese carbon market. From the survey that was released in February of this year, stakeholder expectations are around the seven USD per ton for allowances in the initial stages, and most people expect this to double or so towards 2030, but personally I'm happy to wait and see.

Daniel Raimi: Interesting. So relatively low price expectations, but certainly above zero, which matters. As you noted, China probably takes the spotlight this year, but there's a lot of other ETS news from around the world to catch up on. Can you help us understand any other significant developments in trading programs that have happened elsewhere in Asia this year?

William Acworth: Absolutely. Asia is seeing a lot of capacity building and policy development in a number of different countries, and we really expect a number of new systems to come from the region in the coming years. At the front of the pack, there would be Indonesia and Vietnam. They're actually taking the legal and regulatory steps at the moment to put a system in place and we expect to see the launch of their systems in the years to come.

The Philippines also has a task force within the parliament that has been asked to come up with legislation for an ETS in that region. We're also seeing renewed interest in carbon pricing from Japan. Japan's jurisdiction has been flooded with carbon pricing on and off over the years, but now as we saw last year, they've also committed to a net-zero target, and they will be seriously considering what role a carbon price and potentially an emissions trading system plays in that transition.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. For those of you who want a visual whirlwind tour of what's happening around the world, I think it's page 30 of the report. There's this really great infographic map that shows all of the countries that have ETS programs in place under development or under consideration. There's lots of richness there for those of you who just want to get a quick visual overview of where these activities are happening.

William Acworth: Thanks. To just jump back in there, when you look at the developments taking place in Asia at the moment, it's a really interesting question as to what extent these systems are being built in a way that would make them compatible for cooperation in a regional market at some future point in time.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah.

William Acworth: Clearly the focus at the moment is on market readiness and policy readiness, but we are seeing renewed interest in carbon clubs and regional cooperation. I kept up with other initiatives to facilitate exchange among policymakers in the region to help recognize design compatibility issues and opportunities, even at an early stage. So this is something for the medium term that we're also interested in.

Daniel Raimi: That's so interesting and will be fascinating to watch over the years. Let's move from Asia now to Europe where, as you noted, there has been significant developments in the European market and significant reforms over the last several years that have resulted in prices in the market reaching up above 40 euros per ton as of a couple of weeks ago. Can you help us understand some of the big drivers of those price increases over the last several years and also maybe give us an update on the status of the UK now that Brexit has gone forward?

William Acworth: I think I can help to understand, but I'm not really in the game of forecasting the allowance prices. Nobody would have expected the prices to reach the levels that they have this time last year, particularly in the face of the pandemic. When you look at it, I think you can see both a combination of supply and demand side dynamics that are playing out to result in these price increases.

On the supply side, the EU leaders have increased the bloc's target to at least 55 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2030. So that's up from the previous target of 40 percent. And I say at least 55 percent, I think this is likely where it will settle, but there are still groups within the European Parliament they're actually pushing for stronger than this.

Daniel Raimi: Sorry William, just one quick clarification. 55 percent below 1990 levels. Is that correct?

William Acworth: Yes.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Thank you.

William Acworth: Very simply, this translates to less future supply and higher prices. On the demand side, we're seeing declining shares of free allocation for European industry, and this is coupled with increased future price expectations, which I think has probably led to increased hedging from the industrial entities. By hedging, I mean that the participants may not be just purchasing allowances for today's compliance, but they may also be purchasing allowances for future years’ compliance to sort of lock in some of their exposure to the allowance price risk if they see this as potentially increasing. Again, this contributes more demand at a time where we're also seeing a sort of contracted supply with the increased ambition of the target.

In addition, the bullish sentiment on future prices combined with changes in the way in which allowances are actually regulated in the EU has actually seen more interest from investment funds as they look to also bring allowances into some of their investment portfolios. This has added a new source of demand into the market as well. For a detailed picture on the price developments, I really recommend an article that was run in The Economist in February, which really looked at what's happening in the European market and what's driving the prices, and it has some very interesting comments from market participants and others that are watching the price developments far class than I am.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. How about the UK? What's the status of that there now?

William Acworth: The UK, consistent with Brexit, has left the EU ETS, and they have also established their own system, which is now called the UK ETS. So the UK ETS strongly resembles the EU ETS to begin with, which makes sense. It's important to ensure some continuity for the firms that are obliged to participate in the scheme.

Daniel Raimi: Right.

William Acworth: But the policymakers in the UK have announced that in their future carbon pricing consultation, they are looking seriously at changes to the market over the medium term. They're going through a process now to understand what changes might be appropriate to make the UK ETS most fit for the UK economy and the targets they have in place, and also the broader policies that exists in their policy mix.

So we know that they are considering sectoral expansion to the transport and building sectors. They're looking for evidence as to whether they should adjust the way which allowances are rewarded freely to industries that are trading commodities that are emission-intensive and trade exposed and therefore at risk of emissions leakage, and also how to incentivize greenhouse gas removal units. Also, whether the ETS is the appropriate way to do this and if so, how?

Daniel Raimi: That's all really interesting. We're going to come back to that question of sectoral coverage in just a couple minutes, but before we do that, let's round out our global tour of ETS programs and get an update from you on what's been happening in North America, including trading programs at the subnational level in the US and Canada, as well as Mexico.

William Acworth: It's a pretty active region as well, and so we have 11 systems that are at various stages of development in North America. I think that this year when you look at the established markets of California, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is a system that focuses on the power sector of 11 states in the northeast United States. I guess this goes back to our initial conversation that these systems have more or less passed the COVID test, and they've been pretty focused on COVID and what that means for the markets and comfortable with the way in which the markets have responded.

But there's also a lot of policy development underway. As for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, this was a year where Virginia joined the market, and there are other states that have also signaled their interest. Most important is Pennsylvania, because Pennsylvania is looking to potentially join RGGI, and if they were to do that, it would be really significant because they would increase the size of the market by almost 75 percent. So this would really increase the reach of RGGI on that northeastern seaboard. That's something to watch over the coming years.

Daniel Raimi: That is really interesting. The only thing I would argue with you about is that North Carolina is apparently considering this too, and I'm from North Carolina, which means of course it's the most important state to potentially be joining RGGI.

William Acworth: There's a lot of interest actually from sites around there, and I think this is also why some of these conversations are also tied to the Transportation Climate Initiative. Renewed interest in general in emissions trading systems from some states. The Transportation Climate Initiative, or TCI, would establish an emissions trading system for transportation fuels, and there's been discussions on the TCI for a number of years, and we've seen in March this year basically the launch of the draft model rule.

William Acworth: Four states—Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island—have signed on, but there's been many, many more states that have been very actively contributing to the discussions and the design of that system, and it's set to launch in 2023. My personal expectation is that we'll have a number of more states actually participating in the market by then. Lastly, moving south, I think Mexico is also a really interesting system this year. It's difficult to do policy in any context in the challenges that the pandemic has thrown up, but Mexico actually launched their pilot system this year. That was fantastic to see and I think that they've gained some really great experience and increased data through that process. They're now looking at what steps need to be taken as they move towards the start of the mandatory phase that will take place in a couple of years.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. I know this is such a hard job to walk us through all of these different programs in such a short period of time, but it's just been really informative. Thank you for that, William. Let me ask you now one final question before we go to our Top of the Stack segment, which is about sectoral coverage around the world. There's this really nice infographic on page 29, right next to the map that I referenced that lays out the different economic sectors that are covered by programs around the world. We can see that electricity and industrial sectors are the most commonly covered, but can you give us a sense of how programs around the world are starting to address other sectors like transportation and buildings. You've touched on this already, but can you just give us some more color on that issue?

William Acworth: This is a really hot debate at the moment in Europe and also in North America. It's maybe something that we would need a separate conversation to unpack properly, but as you noted and as you can see in the status report, there are systems such as California, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Zealand that have taken a broad approach to system coverage right from the start, and they do cover transportation and heating.

There's benefits of doing this to have a broader, more liquid market and you have a greater proportion of your emissions from the jurisdiction kept by the emissions trading system. But policymakers from these jurisdictions are also quick to recognize that a carbon price is unlikely to drive the transformation of these sectors given the high abatement costs and other market barriers. So they also applied other sector-specific policies, such as fuel standards and ultimately banning certain types of vehicles.

Now in Europe, the EU ETS started with just the power sector and the industrial sector and then added inter-European aviation. The question now is what to do with transport and heating and whether this should be also included in the emissions trading system. Central to that debate is whether carbon pricing can actually reach levels where it will be effective in inducing real change while maintaining its social acceptance.

The conventional wisdom from the academic space is that a single economy-wide carbon price is the most efficient approach to reducing emissions, and over the longer term, that's not disputed. But in the short term, this wisdom has been challenged by some academics recently, including Joseph Stiglitz and also by some policymakers that recognize that there's barriers in certain sectors that make them more or less ready for carbon pricing than others. The one side of the debate in Europe at the moment is that sectoral expansion at this point in time would shift the burden of mitigation to the power and industrial sectors while not reaching prices that would actually induce the change required in the building and transport sectors.

So this is where we're at. There are camps on either side that are debating this at the moment. As well as sectoral expansion of the EU ETS, there's also been proposals put forward for the creation of a parallel system for the heating and transportation sectors. Then you would have two different systems operating with different caps, different prices in the interim, and this might actually allow some time to invest in those deployment challenges that make carbon pricing challenging in the transport sector at the moment, such as Evie charging stations and low-carbon public transit systems, which I guess means that then makes these systems potentially more ready for a broad-based carbon price in the future.

This is the approach that we're seeing in Germany, which just launched a national ETS for the transport and building sector this year. It also mirrors the approach taken in the northeast United States where we have RGGI for the power sector, and a separate system of TCI, so the Transportation Climate Initiative, for the transportation sector. The interesting question is then, “if you go down this path, at what point would you like to potentially connect the two systems?” And if you do design them in a way with this in mind, I think it could be relatively easy to implement a one-way link or indirect link of allowances between the two systems and then slowly open up trade between covered entities or participants of both systems and ultimately reach a single broad-based price at some point in the future.

I would like to point out that no matter which approaches are taken, it's clear that a package of policies is necessary to move at the speed that's required to align all sectors with the price agreement. The European Commission will make a proposal for what happens in Europe later this year. All eyes will be on that in the first instance to see how this might play out in Europe.

Daniel Raimi: Absolutely. That's going to be so interesting to watch, and I really hear you on that debate over prices versus standards. I mean, I think we're having that in the United States right now over a variety of sectors, not just in transport and in buildings, but even in the power sector too. That's probably something we should do a podcast episode on in the next couple of weeks. But let's close it out there, William. Thank you so much for all that great information.

Let's move now to our Top of the Stack segment, where we ask you what you've read or watched or heard recently that you'd recommend to our listeners, and I'll start with a very short repeat of a recommendation, which is Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky. It's a new book about how humans are dealing with problems that humans have created when it comes to the environment. And we were actually able to get her on the show. So we're going to have Elizabeth Kolbert on the show in the next couple of weeks. So check out her book, Under a White Sky, so you can get a primer before that conversation. But how about you, William? What's on the top of your literal or metaphorical reading stack?

William Acworth: Well, that sounds like a great book. It might've shifted up to the top as well, but I look forward to the podcast. Yeah, it's been a difficult year to find time to sort of read, I must say, but I'm looking forward to reading Bill Gates' new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, mostly because I like the idea of focusing on solutions and to see where we need to go in this space. But what's actually on the top of my stack at the moment, which I've started and he's a great book is Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

Daniel Raimi: Oh yes. I love that book.

William Acworth: Yeah. It's a really great account of William Finnegan, a surfer who basically travels the world in search of waves and yeah, it's the perfect escapism for myself as a surfer from Australia that's stuck in Berlin at the moment without the opportunity to chase waves. So this is what I've been reading.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. I've never stood up on a surf board successfully, but that book just made me love surfing. It made me want to be a surfer and do some of the things that he does in that book.

William Acworth: Well, it's never too late.

Daniel Raimi: So William Acworth from the International Carbon Action Partnership, thank you so much for joining us today on Resources Radio.

William Acworth: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Daniel Raimi: You've been listening to Resources Radio. Learn how to support Resources for the Future at rff.org/support. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes. Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the Future. RFF is an independent nonprofit research institution in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to improve environmental, energy and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals. Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason, with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.