Professor Warwick J. McKibbin - A Climate Strategy Beyond 2012: what have we learnt from monetary policy?

Grantham Research Institute seminar

Speaker: Professor Warwick J. McKibbin, Professor and Director of the ANU Research School of Economics and Professor in the ANU College of Business and Economics and Adjunct Professor in the Australian Centre for Economic Research in Health at the Australian National University

Attendance: The seminar is open to all and registration is not needed

Further details about seminar

The Kyoto Protocol was the outcome of many years of multilateral negotiation and political compromise with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of dangerous climate change. The Kyoto Protocol was built around binding national targets and timetables. Most analysts would agree that the extent of emissions reduction in Kyoto countries has been disappointing to date. Partly this lack of substantial action was precisely because of the focus on targets and timetables rather than the comparable cost of policy actions across countries.

The Copenhagen Accord is a fundamental shift away from the binding national emission targets towards a system of national policy actions. Given this shift towards national actions, it is worth asking what type of national policy framework could be developed that reduces emissions at lowest cost, and how could this be coordinated across countries to create a globally efficient system.

Drawing on the way modern central banks implement monetary policy, this lecture outlined an approach based on a common global carbon price or “carbon price equivalence” of policies that is implemented in each country, and then coordinated over time to reduce global emissions at lowest cost.

Biography of Warwick J. McKibbin

Warwick McKibbin is Professor and Director of the ANU Research School of Economics and Professor in the ANU College of Business and Economics and Adjunct Professor in the Australian Centre for Economic Research in Health at the Australian National University. He is also Professorial Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney; a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C, where he is co-Director of the Climate and Energy Economics Project, and President of McKibbin Software Group. He is a member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia (the Australian equivalent of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve).

Warwick was previously foundation Director of the ANU Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis. He recently served as a member of the Australian Prime Ministers Science, Engineering and innovation Council and on the Australian Prime Minister’s Taskforce on Uranium Mining Processing and Nuclear Energy in Australia.

Warwick received his B.Com (Honours 1) and University Medal from University of NSW (1980) and his AM (1984) and a PhD (1986) from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and was awarded the Centenary medal in 2003 “For Service to Australian Society through Economic Policy and Tertiary Education”.

Warwick is internationally renowned for his contributions to global economic modelling. He has published more that 200 academic papers, as well as being a regular commentator in the popular press. He has authored/edited four books, including the book ‘Global Linkages: Macroeconomic interdependence and cooperation in the world economy’, written with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, and ‘Climate Change Policy after Kyoto: A blueprint for a realistic approach’ with Professor Peter Wilcoxen of Syracuse University.

Warwick has been a consultant for many international agencies and a range of governments on issues of macroeconomic policy, international trade and finance, greenhouse policy issues, global demographic change and the economic cost of pandemics.