How Much Should we Regulate the Economy to Fix the Environment?
A discussion by Carson Reeling and Claudia Williamson
On Thursday, September 7th we hosted a discussion between Claudia Williamson and Carson Reeling titled “How much should we regulate the economy to fix the environment. Drs. Williamson and Reeling are great scholars who’ve worked on issues related to the environment and have different views.
The goal of this event was two fold: to learn about the topic and to model civil discourse to students. Their conversation was fascinating and enlightening, and Drs. Reeling and Williamson ended up disagreeing way less than I (or they) expected.
I recommend you watch their entire discussion, but two key points to highlight are:
Dr. Williamson repeatedly highlighted the importance of property rights and enforcing existing laws. A student afterward asked about companies that “greenwash” (make misleading claims about environmental quality). Dr. Williamson correctly noted that fraud is illegal so if companies are being committing fraud, then there are channels to correct that.
Dr. Williamson also highlighted the Coase Theorem
Dr. Reeling emphasized and Dr. Williamson agreed that correcting for externalities is important. A (negative) externality occurs when two people involved in a purchase of an item impact someone else not involved. A key example is pollution - others are impacted when products that pollute are bought/sold.
Dr. Reeling noted the benefits of changes to diesel engines that have significantly cut emissions.
Check out the full conversation in this video!