This week, Kristin Hayes and Joseph Aldy discuss the presidential candidates’ stances on climate change. Aldy is professor of the practice of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a university fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). Aldy worked as an RFF fellow in 2005–2008, leaving in 2009 to serve as the special assistant to the president for energy and environment, reporting through both the National Economic Council and the Office of Energy and Climate change at the White House.

Given this experience as both a researcher and a policymaker, Aldy is the perfect person to kick off the Resources Radio podcast series that accompanies RFF’s new online interactive tool, the Candidate Tracker. The Candidate Tracker has been developed to compare and contrast the positions of the 2020 presidential candidates from both major political parties on a range of climate- and energy-related topics. It’s available online at www.rff.org/candidatetracker. We hope Resources Radio can serve as a great venue for some deeper-dive analysis on several issues under discussion by the candidates; listeners will see episodes posted over the next few months in this mini-series.

This first episode in the Candidate Tracker series with Aldy is designed to offer some big-picture commentary on how the candidates are talking about energy and climate, how their plans compare, and how the conversation is evolving.

References and recommendations:

"Declining CO2 price paths" by Kent D. Daniel, Robert B. Litterman, and Gernot Wagner; https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/30/1817444116