Getting to sustainable energy systems while considering trade-offs, environmental justice, and distributional effects - Livestream

I will cover several recent papers: In Tschofen et al. (2019) we compute economy-wide gross external damages (GED) due to premature mortality from air pollution. We find that: GED has decreased over time; damages from farms are now larger than those from utilities; 4 sectors, comprising less than 20% of the national GDP, are responsible for ∼75% of GED. In Thind et al. (2019) we estimate health impacts associated with PM pollution from electricity generation by race, income, and geography. We find that exposures are higher for lower-income than for higher-income, but disparities are larger by race than by income. In Sergi et al. (2020a), we estimate inter-county impacts of PM from all sources and find that 26% of U.S. counties experience worsening health damages over time. Furthermore, 30% of all U.S. counties receive 90% of their health damages from emissions in other counties, and these damage-importing counties also tend to have lower median incomes. Finally, we compare the best technology options for the transportation sector (Tong and Azevedo, 2020) and the power sector (in Sergi et al., 2020b) when climate and air pollution consequences are tackled in isolation versus considering both aspects jointly.

Speaker: Ines Azevedo, Stanford Univ.

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