THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED. Middlebury Institute of International Studies presents a lecture by Chris Busch, Research Director at Energy Innovation, entitled Introducing the California Energy Policy Simulator: Insights into State Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Policy Opportunities, on Thurday March 12, at 6pm in Room 100 in the McGowan Building on the campus of MIIS.

California met its 2020 economy-wide target four years ahead of schedule, and is now working toward the 2030 target set in Senate Bill 32, requiring a statewide reduction in emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels (a 39 percent reduction compared to 2017 levels). The state’s existing climate strategy puts the burden on the cap-and-trade program to make up the difference between the emission reductions other policies accomplish and the target, but the economic model used by the California Air Resources Board for evaluation is ill-suited to analysis of cap-and-trade design.

The California Energy Policy Simulator (EPS), a new open source model, helps fill the resulting analytical void with unsurpassed visibility into the combined effects of carbon pricing and sector policies. California EPS results find the current strategy is likely to lead to emissions in 2030 that are roughly 10 percent above the target of 260 MMT of CO2e even under optimistic assumptions about the future effectiveness of policies. They use the model to identify six policy recommendations that hit the target while also generating an estimated $7 billion in net economic benefits plus an additional $14 billion in health and climate benefits.

Chris Busch is Energy Innovation’s Research Director. He works at the intersection of research and policy, including previous posts with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the BlueGreen Alliance, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2006, Chris persuaded four Nobel Prize winning economists to sign a public letter supporting California’s Assembly Bill 32.