William Jaeger Oral History Interview, December 13, 2017

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is December 13, 2017. I’m here with Dr. William Jaeger, a professor in applied economics, at the Valley Library. Today we’re going to discuss his research and global warming. But I’d like to start out asking about your background. Where were you born?

WILLIAM JAEGER: I was born in Seattle, Washington.

ET: Is that where you grew up?

WJ: Yep. I grew up in Seattle. Went to WSU as an undergrad. I was in the Peace Corp. In West Africa. Went to graduate school at Stanford. Worked at the World Bank.

ET: Just to go back to your childhood, take a step back. What were your interests growing up?

WJ: What were my interests?—well, I did a lot of hiking, camping in the Cascade Mountains. Went fishing, bicycle, a little bit in sports but I wasn’t focused on sports that much. Playing in the backyard in the woods.

ET: Did you have any early interests in economics? Did you foresee yourself going in to that field?

WJ: No, in fact in college I first declared a major in engineering, but I had an opportunity to travel internationally and became really interested in developing countries and sort of pointed in the direction of economics as a tool for understanding why some countries are poor and others are rich.

ET: What was your school experience like growing up?

WJ: So, public school, basic public school in North Seattle. What did you mean?

ET: Did you foresee yourself attending university? Did you have people encouraging you to pursue—?

WJ: Well, none of my family had ever gone to college, but you know I was a pretty good student and so yeah that seemed to be something that my parents thought I should do if I wanted to and so I followed that path, went to college but I don’t think I really thought about graduate school until after being an undergraduate feeling like there are things I wanted to do where I needed more school, more skills, more training than what I got as an undergraduate. That’s when I started thinking about, well, at that time I’d already sort of, I’d switched from engineering to economics. I did really well in economics, but I could see to use economics in a professional way would require more than I had at that point. That’s when I started thinking about grad school and with a focus on international development actually, because I visited Africa and I was curious about poverty and food problems in Africa.

ET: Tell me more about that experience. Was that as an undergrad or after?

WJ: As an undergrad this was one of those remarkable things that happen almost by chance. I had a roommate, a dorm roommate who got a pamphlet about this program called world campus afloat. I had never traveled anywhere at that point and I got excited about the idea that a college student could travel, that could get on a boat and sail around the world while they were taking classes, so I did that. I came back and changed my major and I became sort of oriented very differently oriented after that. But visiting developing countries and especially in Africa made me think about problems of underdevelopment, of what I might be able to do in getting involved in those issues and I came to understand that economics was a tool that could be useful in understanding why there’s such differences in terms of standards of living around the world and how I might in fact be able to work on some issue and contribute to alleviating poverty or hunger, that kind of thing. That was a motivating force for me.

ET: Did you join the Peace Corps immediately after your bachelor’s, or was that later?

WJ: Yeah, so after that world campus afloat, I came back, switched majors and I had an idea of wanting to go back to Africa and West Africa where they speak French. I started taking French classes and right after college I joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Burkina Faso. Actually, what’s called Upper Volta back then, but now it’s called Burkina Faso.

ET: What kind of projects did you work on?

WJ: I worked in a village in the south part of the country which was relatively well-endowed in terms of the climate and grew fruit trees and I was assigned to manage an agricultural cooperative, mangoes and citrus fruits and I ended up doing other agricultural projects as well: bee keeping, gardening, growing potatoes to sell in the cold season to the city, that kind of thing. You know, I think I did some things that were useful but mostly it was a great eye-opening experience for a young guy to go live in an African village.

ET: Had you previously worked in an agricultural setting? Was that a familiar environment to you?

WJ: No. I just got, you know, I was interested in Africa and interested in economic development and they were agricultural economies and so trying to understand what goes on in Africa and get involved, I think Peace Corps positions at that point in time if it wasn’t related to agriculture it was probably working on digging wells or teaching English in the city, and I guess some of my economics work on economic development had involved looking at agricultural development as part of that.

ET: So, when you came back to the States did you have a plan at that point to return to school?

WJ: Yeah, even before leaving I had taken my GREs and hadn’t applied but had talked to people about where to apply. That was kind of in the plan at that point that I would come back, so I came back and worked and applied but I had to wait until the following Fall, so I built airplanes while I was waiting to go to grad school. I built 747s, actually. Not by myself—I worked at Boeing for a year.

ET: Did you know that you wanted to pursue a Ph.D. as opposed to a master’s at that time?

WJ: No, actually I was really interested in working in developing countries and working at the project level, and so initially I did apply for Ph.D. programs because that was the way to get more funding, but I had in the back of my mind that I might just stop, do a masters and then stop, that that might be enough for what I wanted to do. But as I got into grad school and took courses and learned more about research, I became more interested in the research enterprise and realized that the Ph.D. put me in a much better position to do a broader range of things.

ET: You ended up at Stanford, is that correct?

WJ: Yeah. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it was called the Food Research Institute with a focus on world food economy, agricultural development, there was demography, nutrition were parts of the program. It was tied to the economics program.

ET: What was your initial impression of the institution, especially living outside of Washington of Northern California?

WJ: The institution of Stanford?

ET: Yeah.

WJ: Oh.

ET: Stanford and just the cultural environment there.

WJ: Oh. Well, you know we were so focused. We were a group of, a cohort of 8 grad students in this program. We were scared to death we were going to fail. Stanford was a big, impressive place. It was beautiful. I mean the climate was different than what I was used to. The whole look of the university. There was so much going on there for undergrads, but we were in the small grad program and the 8 of us were focused on surviving our theory courses.

ET: Your research was on agricultural mechanization is that correct?

WJ: Yeah, that’s right. From my Peace Corps experience in West Africa, there was this puzzle. Why did farmers in that region seem to reject adoption of animal-draft power, using oxen or donkeys to pull implements to help them farm better, more efficient. It seemed like a no-brainer. The French and many other outsiders had come in and brought the tools and the animals and said here and showed them how and for decades the farmers had pretty much said thank you that’s really interesting. When the foreigners left they went back to farming by hand. I was able to collect data and do some analysis and better understand why for many of them it didn’t make sense to adopt that technology but for some it did.

ET: Were you able to return to Africa during your research?

WJ: Yeah, so I was able to very lucky to have an opportunity to join a project that was already ongoing, farming systems research project run out of Purdue University. My faculty, my program knew some of those people and explained that I was looking for a way to do some fieldwork, so I went back and spent almost two years on that project. I was able to collect data so when I came back I had the data to do my own analysis and dissertation, so it worked out well.

ET: Did you teach while you were in grad school?

WJ: I did not. I did not. I had a fellowship, so I could focus on the two years of coursework and I did not teach at that time.

ET: Then, you graduated Stanford and ended up at the World Bank, is that correct?

WJ: That’s right. So, one of my advisors was invited to work on a research project at the World Bank, so I worked on a project with him and a large team of researchers also focused on agricultural development in Africa for a couple of years and I stayed at the World Bank for a couple more years.

ET: What was your experience like working for that institution?

WJ: Boy, the World Bank, it’s a big place at that time. It’s an exciting place to work. They have lots of resources. They have really smart people, lots of economists working on projects and working around the world. You walk into an elevator at World Bank and there’s like six different languages being spoken. I was in the research arm of the World Bank. The World Bank is criticized and certainly some of that is justified in pushing loans. They’re there for a reason. They’re there to loan money with the idea that those loans will help stimulate economic growth and higher standards of living in those countries, but it’s the country itself that has to pay back the loan so there’s more risk to the country than perhaps to the young economist that thinks they know everything when they’re 27 years old. So, it was an exciting place to work, but I think I didn’t want to work there long-term. I didn’t want to stay in Washington, D.C., long term. That’s actually why I started thinking about academia as an option because I’d have a different lifestyle and more choices of where to live.

ET: Were you attracted to teaching within academia or was it more of a research draw?

WJ: You know, I didn’t really know because I hadn’t done teaching before. My first opportunity was at Williams College where I went initially for a two-year visiting appointment, but then that turned into a tenure-track position. They have high expectations for research and teaching, but especially teaching. It’s a top liberal arts college. The students are very demanding. You have small classes. You have to be really prepared to teach in that environment and they have some amazing teachers, so that was a great introduction to what it’s like to teach a college that emphasizes high quality teaching. But I continued to do some research, or actually I started to do research. I didn’t do a lot of research while I was at the World Bank. You write reports but it’s not the kind of research you get published, although I think maybe I had one or two publications.

I was also at that point still working on agricultural economics and development economics. When I went to Williams College I was asked if I would be interested in teaching environmental economics, and that’s what led me to begin a shift toward more environmental resource economics and away from focusing on African agriculture. I was also a bit burnt out on African agriculture development, because it’s kind of a discouraging topic to research. There was at that time not a lot of success stories and reasons to feel like you were moving things in a positive direction. They’re still poor.

ET: At Williams when your research started to shift directions, is that when climate change started to come into it?

WJ: It did, actually. It was interesting because the timing both for me to move to academia and have an opportunity to teach environmental resource economics, which I was asked if I would teach it. I said sure and so they signed me up to teach the course and I had never even read an environmental economics textbook. I was just keeping ahead of the students. I assigned a well-known textbook and I just made sure I stayed a chapter ahead of the class, but I went to Williams in 1989. That was the year of the Exxon Valez oil spill. That was the beginning, really, of a lot of things that have changed the field of environmental resource economics. Now we look back at the Exxon Valez as a watershed moment in the idea of non-market evaluation, that there’s an economic value or cost when damage occurs to some natural resource even if you don’t personally experience it, but you know about it. It harms you when you hear about Prince William Sound being damaged and polluted with oil. It also was a time when climate change was beginning to be talked about as an economic issue, where okay if there is global warming, there are costs, but there are costs to just trying to do something about it. Is the remedy worse than, is the cure worse than the disease? How do we or should we think about weighing costs and benefits as we ask the question should society do anything? What should we do to address climate change? It was the early ‘90s when that really began to be a question. There were a few people who were onto that topic earlier, but it sort of spread within environmental resource economics in the early ‘90s. Somewhat more generally in economics, there was an economist at Yale, William Nordaus, who was by that time he was sort of a pioneer and was well-known for his work on the topic, probably started in the 1980s. In 1992 there was a book published by an economist called The Economics of Global Warming by William Cline. I bought that book and read that book and that’s when I decided that that was a topic I wanted to be involved in because it seemed important. It seemed like something economists needed to be engaged in, because as we know now—at that time nobody, at that time people didn’t understand why economists would be involved and interested in global warming. It’s not about economics it’s about atmospheric science. And now, everyone talks about carbon tax versus cap in trade and international agreements and regulatory approaches versus market-based approaches. It’s been quite a change in terms of recognition that economics is an important part of the discussion, of the debate.

ET: In 2001, you came to Oregon State?

WJ: That’s right.

ET: Why did you decide to leave Williams and move back to the West Coast?

WJ: I never warmed up to the northeast, to the east coast. I was always from the northwest and always wanted to return and I had come back for a 2-year sabbatical and spent to years at the University of Oregon. My wife was from New York, so there was a negotiation there. But I also came back and spent a year in Seattle at the University of Washington on an earlier sabbatical. Figuring out how I could come back to the northwest and continue to do the kind of professional work I was interested in was a long-term strategic planning and this opportunity opened up in 2001 so it was great to be able to come back and be in the northwest. As an environmental resource economist, to me there is no better place in the country to do this kind of work, because you have spotted owls and salmon and old growth forests and the oceans and the fisheries. There’s so many interesting natural resource and environmental issues out here compared to some other parts of the country.

ET: What were your initial impressions of OSU and Corvallis?

WJ: Well, so I spent a couple years in Eugene and I liked Eugene. You know, I loved Seattle and wanted to get as close to Seattle as I could, but Seattle has grown so much that in fact the Seattle I remember as a young person doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gotten so big and crowded. I like the Willamette Valley. I like the access to the outdoors. That’s part of why I love the northwest so much is being able to go backpacking and go to the coast and go out for a hike and all of that. There’s all of that here. I knew Washington State quite well and all the things to do and things to see. I’ve been here quite a few years now, but there’s still parts of Oregon I haven’t seen and so there’s a wonderful natural environment and you know I actually live in Eugene and come to Corvallis two, three days a week and work at home a couple of days a week, but I really like Corvallis and I like Eugene as well. I like to get up to Portland once in a while, so it’s a nice place to live.

ET: When you first arrived you were in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department, is that right?

WJ: That’s right.

ET: What was the state of the department in those years?

WJ: Oh boy, the department has changed including changing its name. It was somewhat larger then. There was a coordinated university-wide graduate faculty program for economics that included economists in the forestry school and the College of Liberal Arts and a couple other places. But our Ag and Resource Economics department was the biggest. It had a very strong reputation going back a number of decades. It was known for high-quality research and also producing some top-quality Ph.Ds. So, being part of that department was, I was very pleased to join that department. There have been some changes since, the breakup of that unified group. We’re more on our own. Right now, there’s been some ups and downs. The program is a little smaller. I’m not one of the younger faculty. I’m one of the older faculty. That’s a change. But it’s still a very strong department and it’s a good environment for me.

ET: Did it feel different coming to a larger school, transitioning from a liberal arts school?

WJ: Yeah, there are some big differences. Some pluses and minuses. Williams College is a small, wealthy college. More than 200 years old. They’ve figured out how to do things really well with a focus on teaching. You don’t think of it as being bureaucratic. It’s small. If you need to talk to the dean of faculty, you just go talk to them. A large university is a very different environment. There’s a large bureaucratic dimension to it, a big university, that I didn’t have at a small college. Part of that is a range of researchers and faculty doing things in disciplines where I can go find someone—if I need to collaborate with someone on a particular area fairly narrowly defined specialty, I can probably find that person here. I couldn’t have found that person at Williams College. Like the Geography Department, or Geoscience Department was six people. There are those differences but I’m glad I’m here.

ET: How is your role as a teacher changed?

WJ: I don’t teach nearly as much. I don’t teach undergraduates much at all. I have a couple of graduate courses I teach. My position is actually an unusual mix in terms of research extension with a policy focus, which is really unusual. It’s sort of a new kind of position that I would do—essentially what I do is I do applied economics analysis and research with a focus on the kinds of research and analysis that will be useful at a policy level for Oregon. It can be water issues, land use issues, energy issues, public finances and taxation. I get involved in a range of issues that have some current relevance or I’m led to believe that the legislature is going to want to have some information on a particular topic in the next session that I might be asked or volunteer to do some volunteer analysis and write up a document that then will be useful to them. That is quite different. I’m still engaged with, I still engage with students but it’s typically graduate students, advising them on thesis or dissertation, teaching a couple of courses a year.

ET: Do you like that policy element to this position?

WJ: Yeah, in fact, so most applied economists think of themselves as policy economists. Going back to my interest in Africa and the Peace Corps, economics as a tool for solving problems, so you use economics to understand why a problem occurs, why we have the tragedy of the commons, why we over-pollute, over-harvest trees, why we over-pollute the atmosphere or over-fish the oceans, well, there are incentives at work and so economic models help you understand those incentives and think about how one could modify or change those incentives in a way that that would improve the efficiency of how those resources are used. I think almost every topic I’ve done work on it’s been where there was a policy relevance to the work. Yeah, I really like that. It’s sort of what motivates me in what I do in thinking this could be helpful to some policy maker if I contribute to our understanding of the cause of the problem or the way that one might solve or improve the situation.

ET: In 2007, you were a Fulbright scholar and you went to Italy.

WJ: Yeah.

ET: What was that experience like and how was it living in Italy and—?

WJ: It was great. It was partly kind of a family decision. I had a chance to go overseas and I had young children. Exposing to someplace like Italy that was part of the equation, but I also had a contact with a professor at the University of Venice who was well-known among Europeans in terms of being an economist working on climate change, so he invited me, and I applied for the Fulbright. There I think one of the reasons I was able to get a Fulbright because they’re very competitive for Italy in particular is I talked about my topic of interest and why I wanted to go to Italy and I described this visualization of Venice, which is out there in the water and with climate change and sea level rise we’re going to lose Venice. It’s kind of a dramatic example of the importance of climate change as a social issue globally. I lived in Padua, which is a short train ride from Venice and I went in and I had this office down the Canal de Cannaregio with a window I could open it up and look down on the canal and see the boats going back and forth and it was like, it was one of those situations where you feel like you got to pinch yourself to make sure it’s real. Because it was quite magical to be there.

ET: Did you teach while you were there?

WJ: I did. I taught part of the time I was there to a small graduate—they had a program where they taught courses in English. There were some Italian but also students from other nations and I taught a course on sustainability or sustainable economics or policy, I think, as I recall to a small group of graduate students there. It was a great experience.

ET: It was a good experience for your family as well?

WJ: Yeah, my kids went to an English international school, one was middle school, one was high school. They had a great experience. In fact, we’ve actually gone back two more times to Italy since then. But it was a great experience.

ET: You’re also, it looks like you’re associated with the Environmental Law Alliance worldwide?

WJ: Yeah, that’s a group. It’s based in Eugene, Oregon, which only makes sense because the guy who started it was from Eugene and his connection with the University of Oregon Law School led to it being created there. Their activities are focused around the world, providing support to legal advocacy on behalf of the environment and also sort of empowering grassroots communities who rely on environment and natural resources to protect those resources for their use. They do amazing work. I’m on the board of directors, which mostly means I sit back and watch and hear about all the great things they do around the world.

ET: How did you decide to get involved with that group?

WJ: I got involved mainly because the guy who’s the executive director, Burn Johnson, he went to Williams College, and I got connected with him through Williams at one point before I moved back to Oregon. Once I was back, I think I was just interested in their work and got to know him and got to know the organization and they asked me to be on the board.

ET: I guess moving more into questions related to your research, your book Environmental Economics for Tree Huggers and other Skeptics, do you believe that the dialogue between economists and environmentalists has improved in recent years, and if so how?

WJ: Yeah, that’s a great question. Absolutely it’s improved. It’s changed a lot. The story behind that book is that those early years at Williams College they had a center for Environmental Studies and I was involved in that program and taught courses to those undergraduate students. Williams also had one, had two small graduate programs, actually. One was called the Center for Development Economics. The economists come from developing countries for a one-year masters program and I taught in that program, taught agricultural development, or economic development. As environmental issues and sustainability became more of a catchphrase, there were some events that led someone to purpose to say we need to teach about sustainability, sustainable development and we have this Environmental Studies Center, we have this Development Economics Center, what’s the connection between the two? The connection between the two was I taught in both. I was the only connection between the two. I started teaching a course, but I think what led to the book in addition to that course was at that time it was a struggle to get environmentally minded undergrads to recognize the importance of economics. They were all for advocacy and economists were kind of the enemy. The folks coming from poor countries didn’t really understand why the environment was something they should think about, care about. As I tried to get both of them to see the other side, I began to come up with ways to make them understand and it went pretty well, and I started writing up notes for those courses and those notes became chapters in a book. That’s how that evolved.

ET: Where do you think that dialogue has pursued that—?

WJ: I think now most people get it. Most people see that economics is important for the environment, incentives. Back in those days there was a very contentious debate about whether tradeable permits should be used to control acid rain, SO2 pollution. It was a new thing in the early ‘90s. Now, tradable permits, cap in trade, even using cap shares or the same kind of concept in fisheries was viewed very skeptically and now we have these great success stories in Alaska and Australia for how a tradeable permit for the right to catch fish in the ocean can be a really important way to move toward efficient use of that resource instead of depleting it. The connection between the economy and the environment, I think it’s come really a long way. It’s quite something when I think about the skepticism back in the 1990s economists like myself faced. It’s much, much easier. There are still challenges. Multidisciplinary research has become really important. Working with folks in other disciplines in the natural sciences. There, there are still challenges. The communication between disciplines is tough and sometimes you run into some of those same obstacles of not really understanding what economists do or why it’s important and how they can work together with us.

ET: You kind of referenced this earlier, but I was wondering if you could talk about cap in trade policy and I guess contrast it with the carbon tax system.

WJ: Oh boy. So, what the big difference is the lesson economists have tried to get across going back to probably starting in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s that an incentive based approached was going to be much more efficient, much more cost effective than a regulatory approach to reduce pollution of any kind, to achieve some environmental objective. In those days, the idea of explaining that, why these decentralized, incentive-based approaches would get you the result you wanted in terms of reduced air pollution rather than regulating industries, that took a long time. That was the focus of economists for a long time. Whether it’s a pollution tax or a tradeable permit in cap in trade, that was a debate that also kind of evolved over the last 20 years on a range of topics.

There are lots of reasons why in some situations why one may have advantages over the other. They’re both incentive-based. Both of those approaches, those policy mechanisms could, if they’re designed in a parallel kind of way, could both be efficient, and both achieve the goal you want at a minimum cost. It’s interesting how the debate among economists has shifted from I think you know a decade ago more economists would say cap in trade is a better way to go. I think now most economists say carbon tax is the way to go. But the reasons for one versus the other aren’t so much in terms of the underlying basic economics about efficiency, they’re about one being more politically acceptable, where one self-adjusts to changes, say if there’s inflation or other adjustments. If there’s uncertainty, sometimes cap in trade—if you’re uncertain about what is the optimal level of pollution, you could argue that one is better and one’s better for short-term pollution, but for climate change where you have a very long-time horizon the other one might be better. There are all these kinds of detailed debates about aspects of cap in trade versus carbon tax, but it seems like we’ve won over most people in recognizing that an incentive-based approach is the way to go as opposed to a regulatory approach.

There were analyses done 20 years ago comparing a regulatory approach where you just told firms how much pollution they could emit or what the level of exhaust, or even with fuel efficiency standards and in some cases, it was shown that the cost would be ten times as much with the regulatory approach to achieve the same goal as with the market-based approach. We mostly got that across as a profession. People seem to get that now, and that’s a big step because I mean there are still things that we still do really inefficiently, biofuels. As a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or work to try to limit carbon emissions, biofuels, corn ethanols, are a really bad idea. It’s really inefficient and it will achieve almost nothing in terms of those goals. There are still inefficient policies out there, but public understanding of some of the things that nobody understood in the ‘90s, now the majority of people understand you when you talk about them and people nod and say oh I’ve heard about that, I’ve read about that.

ET: Do you feel like biofuels are inherently problematic because they’re tied to our, they’re trying to substitute our fossil fuel dependency or is it dependent on the particular biofuel?

WJ: It varies by biofuels, but there aren’t any that are really good in terms of, part of the problem is they were motivated with the idea that if we could grow our own energy, ethanol, and if that ethanol if it’s recycled carbon because when you plant a corn plant it takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When you burn the gasoline, it goes back. You could have this idea that it’s a net zero emissions. Turns out, it’s not net zero emissions by a long way because of the fertilizers you use and the diesel tractors and everything, but also because you use land for growing the crops, the corn or the soybeans, that displaces food production. That food production has to be grown somewhere else and we have over the last 10 years models that show we devote a third of our corn crop to ethanol now in this country. That has significant effects on added land being cultivated elsewhere around the world, which means clearing the land, which means disturbing the forest and the grasslands which means lots of carbon emissions indirectly. It’s called indirect land use change effects.

Some of those models suggest that that indirect effect on additional emissions because land clearing is greater than what you would be saving by using the corn ethanol even over a 30-year period. It would take you 30 years to gain back what you lost by having that land be disturbed in these other places around the world. You know, people talk about second generation biofuels. Europe’s very focused on biodiesel. But I think over the last decade or so with more research I think most people have come to realize that if we don’t gain much in terms of it actually reducing carbon emissions and the cost is many times greater than other ways of trying to reduce emissions, like raising the gas tax, that’s sort of the comparator. That’s an incentive-based approach. If you discourage the use of fossil fuels directly with a gas tax or a carbon tax, we have estimates of what that would cost, trying to achieve the same reduction in carbon emissions with some kind of biofuels, ten, twenty times as much the cost. It really doesn’t make sense, economic sense.

ET: Is a part of that, too, government subsidies of the biofuel industry, would you say that—?

WJ: Yeah let’s see. It could make sense. If it really worked really well there could be a good argument for subsidizing. There are subsidies for processing and there are some issues for the interactions between the subsidy for biofuels with the idea of promoting the use of biofuels with other trade policies and other subsidies for conventional crops, corn, cotton and there’s an interaction between those policies and it’s a complicated economic modeling exercise to try to figure out what the net effect is, but I don’t think the subsidy, you need the subsidy. Otherwise, most growers, most processers wouldn’t be processing ethanol. I think the major obstacle is this problem of it not being neutral in terms of net carbon emissions and these indirect land use change effects. If it did make sense, if biofuels did make economic sense on their own and you introduced a carbon tax, well the carbon tax would be lower. The tax on ethanol fuel would be much lower, maybe zero, than the tax on fossil fuel gasoline. That would provide the efficient differential that if biofuels were a good way to avoid carbon emissions people would voluntarily do that on their own if you had properly adjusted differential carbon tax for different kinds of fuels it would automatically be initiated, the supply and demand would organically grow up.

ET: Just to clarify, a gas tax would be a form of a carbon tax?

WJ: Right. We have gas taxes, but they’re not based on the carbon content of the gasoline. So, if we had a true carbon tax, you’d have a different level of tax on gasoline versus diesel, versus home heating oil or coal. You’d across the different fossil fuels, you’d have different level taxes and gasoline would have one level, natural gas would have a lower level, coal would have a higher one. A gas tax, just a tax on gasoline since such a large share of our carbon emissions are related to transportation. A gasoline tax of 50 cents a gallon would to some degree be a carbon tax. It would discourage the use of that particular fossil fuel energy, but you wouldn’t want to just do that if your goal was reducing carbon emissions because a lot of people would shift to diesel if you did just the gas tax. The efficient way to do it would be have different gradations of a tax on fuels in proportion to their carbon emissions per unit.

ET: It seems like there’s that balance between addressing concerns of carbon output but also having economically viable options for—?

WJ: Yeah, and that’s where the political issue is and the cost issue. That’s where the economics of weighing costs and benefits. Does a carbon tax, is it justified given that the benefits of slowing climate change are mostly aren’t going to occur for a long period of time, but the cost to households who now have to pay more, that’s a very immediate cost. How do we weigh those things? That comes back to the benefit-cost framing of the question. Is there an economic argument for introducing some policy to slow carbon emissions given that it does impose costs on the economy now?

ET: You’ve also done research on water scarcity in the Pacific Northwest. How do you think, or do you think Oregonians should change their perception of future water availability?

WJ: Oh boy, perceptions. It varies a lot across Oregon. It’s very dry in one part and very wet in another. You know, in western Oregon, in many parts of Oregon water for a long time has been thought to be it’s always there and it always comes down the river and we just use it. Actually, beginning the year I came to OSU in 2001 was the first time they shut off the water to the large reclamation project in the upper climate basin. It did not go over well. There was civil disobedience. There were threats to federal employees who shut that off and it had huge ramifications and ramifications that extended to a court case that I was involved in a few months ago, where the farmers sued the government for shutting off their water in 2001 and they’re still fighting that court case this many years later.

My most recent work on water scarcity in the Willamette Basin looked at how climate change might affect water and water scarcity with population growth and what we found was mostly good news in the sense that even though most of the snow pack in the Cascades will not be here by the end of the century, it’s still a pretty wet place. There’s still rain in the spring. For the Willamette Basin, water being available to cities and farms isn’t probably going to change that much. Water availability in the streams for fish and especially for the forests and the stress on forests and diseases and wildfires , those are probably going to increasingly be problems in western Oregon. Then of course eastern Oregon they do rely—a lot of the institutions, the cities and the farms that have built up they rely to a large extent on snow that melts in the spring and the summer for that supply of water. So, they’re going to face some pretty significant changes in decades ahead.

ET: How do you think land values will change as a result of water availability?

WJ: How will land values change? So, you know Oregon’s western water law has this priority system for water rights. You have a seniority date based on the year you started using the water. So, a more senior water right will get water after the junior water right gets shut off. If there’s not enough water for both in a stream, the more recent water right gets shut off before the water right that has a claim going back, you know, 100 years. I don’t think there’s much differentiation in many parts of Oregon right now between the value of a land with a senior versus a junior water right, certainly not in the Willamette basin. I think that’s going to change as places where water some years more irrigators are not able to irrigate after some part of the summer goes by. In July they might be shut off. We’re going to see more value placed on having the senior water right, the group that can keep irrigating when other people are being shut off. Complicating that is the fact that endangered species act biological opinions require a lot of water to be left in streams for salmon and steelhead. Those in most cases will be senior, will have a priority, over other stream uses.

Tribal water rights also will have seniority. This court case I just mentioned, the ruling that just came out a couple months ago was to deny the claims of the irrigators not so much because the endangered species act was part of the reason that they were shut off, it was the main reason they were shut off. There was also a drought. But that the tribes had a right to water being left in stream for their traditional hunting and fishing uses and that had a seniority that trumped everything else. I think some of the changes related to water have already occurred but haven’t been occurring over the last few decades. A realignment and changes in priorities with growth in population and income and the evolution of people’s thinking about protecting the environment, we’re seeing more resources dedicated to protecting habitat ecosystems, fish and that’s a significant change from a long period of time where farmers and ranchers could do a lot of things more freely than they can now.

ET: Taking a step back, given your involvement in policy how do you view Oregon’s response to climate change, say in comparison to the federal government?

WJ: It seems like the states on the west coast are engaged in trying to move towards some kind of climate change policy. There’s been active discussions in Oregon. Washington state has had some legislation, British Columbia, California. Given the Trump administration’s pulling out of the Paris Accord for a global agreement, having some states, including all the western states clearly deciding they’re going to go forward they see that in the long term we will have to deal with climate change. We will have to find ways to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions, I think that’s a very good thing. In fact, sort of separate from that there’s a court case where a group of children in Eugene have sued the government for not protecting the climate. That’s been in the news recently.

A year ago, there was a court decision in November of last year and a federal judge in Eugene made a ruling supporting the validity of the claims of these children. That case is going forward. There are hearings right now this week on an attempt to block it, but if that is unsuccessful it will go forward. And the children won in this first round the right to go to the next step in the federal courts to sue the government that the environment, the climate is part of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and claiming that it’s part of the rights of the constitution and the government’s failure to stabilize the climate is a failure to protect their interests. That’s a very interesting court case. There are a number of other legal actions in other parts of the country and in other countries, but I think this one in Oregon may actually be the first one that has gotten this far in a federal court, or a national court system. It’s very interesting.

ET: I’ll transition to my final set of questions on climate change. What were your earliest conversations on climate change like and how have they shifted over time?

WJ: Boy. That’s a great question. I’m trying to remember. It was a while ago. You know as an economist, as I approach it as an economist, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, initial discussions were about putting it in a benefit-cost framework. Early on the work being done, and William Nordhaus was not the only economist doing work that was published. I had a real problem with his analysis, as did other people. I felt, and others felt, that he was quick to ignore so many other things that he couldn’t quantify. He said, okay I’m going to—nobody had even approached this issue—I’m going to try to evaluate what would be the cost to the U.S. economy of climate change and he had some very crude kind of how it would affect agriculture negatively, ski resorts, this kind of thing. Then to slow climate change if we introduce some kind of carbon tax, what would the cost of that be? Just focused on the U.S. economy and just focused on those parts of the economy that he could measure. It was so limited. It ignored the rest of the world. It ignored poor countries.

Of course, I early on, climate change the vulnerable people are the people I lived with in west Africa, they will die. You can’t compare that to a 25-cent increase in the price of gasoline when you’re evaluating tradeoff. I felt that the early economic analyses that were done, Nordhaus and maybe one or two others, were too willing to take this very crude analysis and claim that they conclude that we should not do anything about climate change. The cost would be too high. I felt strongly that they left out most of the question and answer and I still feel that that was true and that he should have been and even later on William Cline, I mentioned, wrote this book, Economics of Global Warming, and he made stronger efforts to try to include more things and came to a more cautious conclusion: well, maybe we should be doing something more aggressively to address climate change. Through the ‘90s things shifted, and even now Bill Norhaus is still a leading economist on this topic, but he has much more sophisticated models.

He’s tried to include, he’s listened I think to other people, other economists, so he’s not so quick to say we shouldn’t be doing much. Now there are many other economists. I guess I’m getting ahead of your question. But it was a new topic. These were very crude, simplistic models. But you needed to start somewhere. I think it would have been better if we started with these crude models and then concluded, okay these are really crude models, so we can’t make any recommendations or declare. There was one point at which Nordhaus said, my analysis suggests that $5 a ton is too high price to pay on carbon, the price on carbon. I just thought there was no adequate basis for him to make such a strong statement at that time. We’ve come a long way and many more economists through the ‘90s environmental resource economists really swarmed toward the climate change topic and then there was this other work on carbon, on taxation and the use of the revenues from taxation and called it green taxation of a double dividend. Climate change and green taxation came together, and it was a lot of work and so there’s now quite a proliferation. Any conference of environmental and resource economists some significant portion of the topics, of the papers being presented, are connected to climate change. Because it’s the biggest issue, environmental issue, that we face as a planet, it makes sense.

ET: You touched on the multidisciplinary environment at OSU—can you speak about the community of climate change researchers here and how the institution facilitates that?

WJ: Well, on climate change—I think that having the Climate Center that Phil Mote heads up is a good thing for Oregon State. I think he seems to be a really good director and he tries to promote research and information dissemination on the topic because so much, you know, among developed economies the United States is the only country in the world that is opposed to doing something aggressively on climate change. Europe has been waiting for many years for us to get our act together and join the rest of the high-income economies. It does seem to be a significant part of it is Americans have been exposed to a very different set of facts and some misinformation, but there’s a lot of still hesitancy to believe climate change is really occurring, that it’s caused by humans, and that it’s going to be a big deal, that it’s going to be costly. Doing more to get that information out there and to get the science understood by the general public I think that’s really important and I know the Climate Center here at OSU is involved in trying to do that. They are occasionally on the radio talking about the latest aspect of climate change policy. They seem to be well-connected with the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. I worked with them on this Willamette Water Project and I’ve gone to present that work at there’s a Northwest Climate Conference that many people from OSU are involved in and it was in Tacoma a couple months ago. It’s an annual conference and Phil Mote used to be at the University of Washington and much of the climate research is at University of Washington and here at OSU. I think you have a good critical mass in the region and there are researchers in Idaho as well who from what I can tell, I’m not a climate scientist, but they do some of the best work. Even nationally I think they’re well-recognized for their climate research.

ET: Are you concerned about funding cuts to climate change research, and if so how do you anticipate coping, I guess, for the next four years?

WJ: Yeah, I am concerned. I think it seems like it’s going to be a problem. I know some people are strategizing by taking the words climate change out of their grant proposals and using temperature variability or some other term. My own research the next couple of years is going to be focused more on water irritation and a couple of other projects, but certainly I would expect if I were to want to get involved in another project that required grant funds, yeah that’s probably—from what we know about this administration’s plan. But it’s also true for EPA for interior department funding research, even, I think the National Academy of Sciences is probably going to be affected. So, when we’re in an environment which, you know this kind of thing has happened at some level this kind of thing comes and goes but I’ve never seen a situation where there’s such an all-out assault on knowledge. Facts are the enemy if they lead to a conclusion that is opposed to your agenda, then facts are the enemy. By blurring the distinction between the media and fake news, between science and some kind of pseudo-science or non-science it really is a threat to everything we do. All of us here at the university who teach and do research we’re in the knowledge business. So, this is a threat to knowledge, not just about climate change but at every level it’s a threat.

ET: What kind of policy changes would you like to see happen in the U.S. with respect to climate change?

WJ: With respect to climate change? Well, I think even if we had a different administration, even if we had a democratic president, I think getting aggressive carbon tax legislation and aggressively promote the Paris Climate Treaty I think it still, because of the dimensions of the climate change problem, because it’s global, it’s so long-term, the costs to reduce carbon emissions to stabilize the climate the costs are now and the benefits are far in the future, most of them, I think it’s even going to be a challenge if we had a different administration in this country and to some extent that’s true of many countries around the world. One piece of my current research is working on a paper on climate change policy. That analysis, which I’ve been working on for a couple of years now and I’m trying to get it down leads to a pretty pessimistic conclusion about that policy process through the kind of thing that started with the Kyoto Agreement and is now sort of the Paris Accord. There’s theoretical research, there’s empirical research. There are a lot of ways that you can look at this as an example of a kind of problem and ask have we ever solved a problem like this before? Well, we’ve never had a problem quite like this before, but we’ve never solved one that came anywhere close given that to stabilize the climate is different than say reducing air pollution in a city. If you don’t reduce air pollution in the city this year you can try next year. You can delay. Delays don’t necessarily make the problem go away. If your solution is delayed, you can still solve it. You just solve it at a later time. With climate change, if we don’t get our act together in the next couple of decades, stabilizing the climate relatively close to where the climate is now that goal, there’s a window of opportunity for that goal and if we end up doing too little too late then that objective can’t be achieved. It’s gone.

That is pretty pessimistic, but I think that’s a pretty clear-eyed look at the evidence from the literature that I’m familiar with on international environmental treaties, on some of the work by Elinor Ostrom on common pool resource management. The legal litigation approach that I mentioned with this case in Eugene and there are some in other countries in Europe and elsewhere I think something’s going to have to happen there in terms of—and it can be kind of a domino, if one or more countries makes a ruling that says yes the government has an obligation to stabilize the climate or work towards stabilizing the climate, that can have a spillover effect in other countries and I think that’s actually the way that—that combined with some kind of international treaty like whatever happens after Paris, I think that’s the way we might be able to stabilize the climate, introduce aggressive policies over the next 2, 3 decades to do that, but I really think that that—essentially changing the property rights, having our legal system say yes you do not have—one group of individuals does not have a right to change the climate and enforcing that is the duty of government and government has not upheld their responsibilities. A judge can make a ruling that can lead to some pretty dramatic and aggressive changes that would reduce carbon emissions and we really need to go to zero carbon emissions pretty quick. The scenarios that show the trajectories, if we’re going to stay within the two- or three-degree centigrade rise, we don’t have much time. Given that if you look—the first attempt at a climate agreement, Rio and then Kyoto and then Copenhagen and then Paris, that’s been 25 years and we have nothing that’s binding. There’s nothing been achieved except promises. We don’t have another 25 years.

ET: What changes to public education could help Americans better understand climate change or change their behavior?

WJ: That’s not my field, education, but it’s very clear that people believe very different things and I have seen enormous changes in people’s understand of the importance of the environment, wetlands. In my youth, wetlands were something you filled in because all they did was create mosquitoes and I think the general public understands how important wetlands are and so how we change people’s understanding, it might have been in elementary science classes’ fieldtrips. I think those kinds of things are incredibly influential. I was involved many years ago I was asked to come out to Oregon and come to Tillamook with a group that promoted improving pedagogical tools related, in this case it was related to environment and it was a 2-day workshop and I was asked to go along and talk about economics but we got on this bus and went out to a stream where we walked and we saw a place with these steelhead or salmon were spawning. We could see them. We could see them arranging the gravel. They were endangered species. Those species were on the endangered species list. I thought wow what an amazing thing if you could teach that kind of stuff and bring kids out to see something like that, I think that can have a lifetime effect on kids recognizing and learning about and being interested in the natural world around them. I think it has to be done, not just in elementary school but entire grades and somehow the general public, the adult population. I’m not sure what the way to do it is but efforts to get the general public to understand science better and to appreciate the role of the natural environment and protecting the system we depend on is pretty important.

ET: Are you hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change?

WJ: Am I hopeful? I’m not hopeful for this international process through Paris, the Paris Agreement. I would like to think that if it’s laid out in that sort of legal context that I described there are enough judges out there who will see themselves as being in a position to save the planet and they will make the right decision. I mean, I don’t know how to judge the probability, but if I was going to count on something happening that’s going to change the trajectory we’re on, it would be those court cases. You know, we will do something. We will slow carbon emissions, I just think we’re going to be doing it way too—if you look at the Ebola outbreak in Africa. We finally got our act together to send people over there when it was already diminishing. The height of the epidemic was over. As a society we’re good at too little too late, and in the case of climate change that means we’re not going to stabilize the climate. We’re going to just slow its gradual increase in temperature unless either this sort of litigation approach can be successful and then be leveraged to a global agreement or there’s some kind of breakthrough in technology for a non-fossil fuel energy source. Solar and wind are becoming much cheaper and more widely used. But we kind of need a breakthrough in the next 10 years if we’re going to see—if we got a breakthrough, everyone would stop using fossil fuels if something else was cheaper. We’ve seen dramatic shifts in the use of technology in the past. But there’s no way to know how likely that is.

ET: Well, we’ve reached the conclusion of the interview. Thank you for your participation. I appreciate your time.

WJ: You’re welcome. Absolutely.