Do Environmental Markets Cause Environmental Injustice? Evidence from California’s Carbon Markets
Join the UCSB Library for this talk with Bren faculty Kyle Meng and Economics PhD student Danae Hernandez Cortes as part of the library's Pacific Views Speaker Series, April 20, 2021 at 4:00pm via Zoom. The Pacific Views: Library Speaker Series is an opportunity for UCSB faculty and graduate students from diverse disciplines to speak about their current research, publications, or creative work. The talks are free and open to the public.
About the Talk
There is mounting evidence that economically disadvantaged and racial minority communities bear a greater share of environmental harms. This systematic pattern can be found across the world and over time. In California, existing large disparities in pollution exposure underlie many environmental justice concerns.
At the same time, policymakers increasingly rely on market-based environmental policies - like pollution taxes and emissions trading programs - to cut pollution. But while these policies lower the economic costs of cutting pollution, the market forces unleashed by them could widen existing pollution disparities between disadvantaged and other communities.
In their Pacific View talk, Kyle Meng and Danae Hernandez-Cortes will share what they learned when they examined what happened to such inequalities following the introduction of California's greenhouse gas emissions trading program, the world's second largest carbon market. Finding that the program narrowed local air pollution disparities between disadvantaged and other communities, Meng and Hernandez-Cortes will discuss implications and limitations of these findings in other settings where environmental injustices meet environmental markets.