Potential pension fund losses should not deter high-income countries from bold climate action

Abstract

Gregor Semieniuk (PhD, Economics, New School for Social Research) is Assistant Research Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He researches the political economy of rapid, policy-induced structural change required for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Gregor has published widely on this topic, won grants to study it, and regularly speaks to policy and academic audiences, most recently testifying on stranded fossil-fuel assets before the US Senate Committee on the Budget. Previously, Gregor was on the faculty at SOAS University of London and University of Sussex, and he is an Honorary Professor at University College London. Lucas Chancel is an Associate Professor of Economics at Sciences Po and co-director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics, as well as a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard. He is the author of dozens of research articles and book chapters on global inequality and environmental issues. He coordinates and edits the World Inequality Reports, which present the latest data on global economic and environmental inequality. His work has attracted media and policy attention worldwide and his book, “Unsustainable inequalities” (Harvard University Press, 2020), featured in the Financial Times and Nature’s best books of the year. Eulalie Saïsset is a specialist in environmental public policies and resulting inequalities. She is a graduate engineer from Mines Paris where she focused on the sociological and political dimensions of the environmental transition. She also holds a master’s degree in public policy and development economics from the Paris School of Economics, where her dissertation focused on the redistributive aspects of stranding fossil fuel assets. Eulalie previously worked at the World Bank in Washington DC as a transport consultant for the Africa region. She also carried out the analysis of European industrial decarbonization policies at the think-tank La Fabrique de l’Industrie. Philip B. Holden completed his DPhil in computational modeling of X-ray lasers in 1991, after which he held research positions in the University of York, Université Paris-Sud, and the Czech Institute of Physics. He then spent 10 years in the finance sector, designing and modeling approximately $2 billion of “big ticket” asset financings. He returned to academia via an MSc in Quaternary Science from the University of London (RHUL/UCL) and joined the Open University in 2007. Phil’s main focus now is the development of computationally efficient Earth system models, with particular focus on interdisciplinary applications and integrated assessment. Dr. Jean-Francois Mercure is Senior Climate Economist at the World Bank and Associate Professor in Climate Policy at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, UK. His research focuses on developing theory, models, and methods for public policy appraisal in climate policy, and for assessing the effectiveness and socio-economic impacts of diverse types of low-carbon, energy, and other climate policies. He also develops methods to understand and assess climate-related financial risks. He co-leads two major programs at the World Bank on analytical tool development and capacity development for finance ministries. Neil R. Edwards is Professor of Earth System Science and University Lead for Sustainability Research at The Open University, UK. After studying mathematics at Cambridge and Leeds Universities, Neil became deeply involved with the early development of comprehensive Earth system models in the 1990s, playing a key role in developing the grid-enabled integrated Earth system (GENIE) framework and related models. Through GENIE, he contributed to the multi-millennial climate projections of the fourth and fifth IPCC assessment reports and has published extensively on climate dynamics, integrated assessment and climate impact modeling, and uncertainty quantification. He has published over 100 refereed papers.