Building a Clean, Equitable Economy: Where Do We Go from Here?

Penn Climate, the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, welcome Heather Boushey, Professor of Practice at the Kleinman Center and former Chief Economist to President Biden’s Investing in America Cabinet, for a conversation during Energy Week.

One of our nation’s most pressing economic challenges is embracing decarbonization as a strategic opportunity for shared growth and security. There is a need to rapidly transition from a carbon-intensive economy, to adapt to the real-time physical damages incurred from a changing climate, to bolster American competitiveness through technological innovation, and to reverse decades of rising economic inequalities. Too often, policymakers seeking policies that deliver both economic and climate benefits find themselves constrained by frameworks that assume decarbonization is a simple tradeoff between higher costs and lower emissions.

For the United States to maintain its role as an economic powerhouse, it cannot be economically “blind” to the financial hazards of climate change and the economic upsides of decarbonization. The fundamental gaps in technical knowledge, tools, and communities of economic practice leave economic policymakers with outdated frameworks and capacities that fail to account for the requisite scale and speed of the energy transition, which, in turn, results in people and places being left behind.

In this Penn Energy Week seminar, Dr. Heather Boushey, professor of practice at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, will debunk old dogma on the economics of climate change and map out the necessary principles to deliver on our future, which sets the table for a forward-looking plan where decarbonization delivers shared growth for people and places and bolsters national security.