Erickson wrote a 2018 paper arguing for limiting fossil fuel production as climate policy. This summer he rebuilt the economic model behind an early rebuttal and found it held up: keeping oil in the ground raises prices and enriches every other producer, which undercuts the idea that supply limits weaken the industry.
…oil drilling. And the argument that was persuasive with John Holdren, as I understand it there in the White House at the time, was how can we expect the rest of the world to be getting off oil in the ways that we, the U.S., want them to do if we're then providing them even more oil in the process?
…infrastructure. Part of the case that's made for limiting fossil fuel production is also that it addresses, especially at the time, especially in the late teens, is also that it addresses the power of the fossil fuel industry and weakens it as a political power and political entity going forward.
…scratch this economic model. I got it to verify the calcs that Severin put forward in 2018. And I looked at, okay, say we leave that barrel of oil in the ground and prices increase just the way we think, and it helps reduce emissions. The whole storyline that you and I have been talking about, what else happens? And it turned out, and this was what I was kind of afraid to look at in 2018, right? It turned out that the overall transfer of money from the world's consumers to the world's incumbent fossil fuel producers was greater than the amount of money that was denied that company that you no longer let develop their assets, right? That and that finding is inseparable from the climate benefits that limiting supply would bring, right? And so to me, that really complicated this idea that limiting supply is a stick in the eye to the fossil fuel industry, right? Like they are actually on net, winning out when you limit supply in many cases. And of course, they know this, right? That's why they have OPEC and OPEC Plus…
So before we get to this paper you wrote this summer, in 2021, you wrote a paper that looks at U.S. fossil fuel subsidies. And it draws a very interesting conclusion. The paper looks at what you describe as 16. The U.S. has 16 different policies that could be construed as fossil fuel subsidies. You…
We find something surprising. And of course, this is all dependent on the price of oil and gas and economics and stuff, but that is what we looked at. So I think you should pay attention to what I say here. What we looked at is we gathered data on tens of thousands of oil and gas fields in the…
Why is that?