Edward A. Parson, Research
Current Research Projects
The Long Haul: Managing the Energy Transition to Limit Climate Change
sponsored by the University of Victoria and its Centre for Global Studies, the US National Science Foundation, the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, and the Climate Decision-Making Center of Carnegie-Mellon University.
Climate change has seen a huge rise in attention and concern in the past few years, as debate in many countries has shifted from whether the issue is serious enough to warrant a response, to what that response should be. Most debate, however, has concerned the two endpoints of a response: first steps, and long-term climate-stabilization targets. This project focuses on the less examined space between these questions: how to move from feasible near-term actions toward reasonably prudent long-term targets.
The project was launched with a workshop, held from August 11-13 2008, at Dunsmuir Lodge, Victoria BC. The workshop convened roughly 30 experts from diverse disciplines, to examine how to achieve the huge, multi-decade transformation of world energy systems that will be needed to limit risks of climate change. As the first step in a program of subsequent collaborative research and analysis, the workshop had three objectives:
- Identify and integrate current knowledge relevant to this problem from diverse fields.
- Identify insights current knowledge offers for near-term public and private decisions.
- Sharpen questions for research and analysis, to improve guidance for future decisions.
Workshop materials and presentations
Workshop Synthesis Report, December 23, 2008:
Feasible Improvements: Technological Uncertainty and Strategic Behavior in Environmental Regulation
(book in preparation with Jennie C. Stephens, Clark University)
This book examines the role of technological uncertainty – i.e., uncertainty about what technological options are available to reduce a particular environmental burden, how well they work, what they cost, and what other environmental, health, or safety problems they might carry – in making environmental regulation, and in resultant environmental performance. The core of the book consists of six coordinated case studies of the historical development of technological knowledge and argument and policy debate for environmental issues in which technological progress was the principal means of improving environmental performance, and in which questions of the magnitude of feasible improvements were prominent and contested. The cases include air pollution from automobiles, ozone-depleting chemicals, the agricultural pesticide methyl bromide, chlorine effluent from pulp mills, emissions of high-intensity greenhouse gases from the aluminum industry, and industrial exposures to vinyl chloride.
The central conceptual focus of the book is asymmetric information – firms usually know more than regulators about technological capabilities – and the strategies that firms and regulators employ to deal with this asymmetry and pursue their disparate objectives for environmental policy. Opening and closing chapters provide a theoretical context for the cases, and develop a set of general theoretical propositions regarding firms and regulators’ strategies and the results of their interactions for environmental performance. These provide new insights into several questions of importance to both scholarly understanding and professional practice, including:
- How arguments over technical feasibility are provisionally resolved in particular regulatory decisions, and how they adjust over time
- What means regulators use to try to erode firms’ information advantage and how firms try to maintain their advantage;
- The conditions associated with the pursuit, and success, of technology-forcing regulation.
Market Creation as a Policy Tool for Transformational Change
with Robert Lempert and Steven Popper (RAND), Barry W. Ickes (Penn State)
funded by US National Science Foundation, program on Human and Social Dynamics, 2007-2010.
Economics provides an excellent understanding of the efficiency-enhancing potential of markets, but the introduction of markets often also leads to significant changes in society’s values, technology, and institutions. Such market-induced transformations are less well understood. This project aims to improve understanding of such market-induced transformations and develop policy-analytic tools that include their potential effects. Specifically, this project seeks to:
- Integrate and advance the understanding of market-induced transformations. We will examine how the potential for such transformations can lead to different outcomes (some beneficial some perhaps less so) than might be expected when considering only the most narrowly defined efficiency-enhancing potential of markets.
- Exploit this understanding by developing a set of policy analytic tools to compare and assess the effects of alternative policies that seek to achieve their goals by fostering market-induced transformations. In particular, we will examine how consideration of market-induced transformation might affect the appropriate design of policies to reduce emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.
Our work is currently proceeding along two lines of inquiry:
- developing case studies and reviewing relevant literature and
- developing simulation models that illuminate some key issues raised by the case studies.
Leadership and Leakage: Constraints and opportunities for leading greenhouse-gas mitigation actions by small groups of major economies
A New Look at Non-Point Sources of Environmental Burden: the Problem of the Dustbuster
Greenhouse-Gas Mitigation and International Trade Law – Legality and Leakage
When Truth is Power: the Influence of Scientific Knowledge and Assessments on International Policy
Technology-Forcing Regulation in US Law for Environment, Health, and Safety
Research Affiliations
Senior Research Associate, Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada)
Steering Committee, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy
Faculty Fellow, Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute.
Faculty Affiliate, Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
