Joseph S. Shapiro

A new study by associate agricultural and resource economics professor Joseph Shapiro finds that tariffs and other global trade barriers are lower for carbon-intensive products than greener ones, and that creates an "implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions" that amounts to $550 billion to $800 billion a year. This makes it harder to fight climate change, Professor Shapiro says. "The resulting change in global CO2 emissions has similar magnitude to the estimated effects of some of the world's largest actual or proposed climate change policies," he writes in the report. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Tariffs and other features of the global trade system are interfering with climate goals and indirectly subsidizing fossil fuels, according to a new study by associate agricultural and resource economics professor Joseph Shapiro. He calls the interference an "environmental bias." He says it hasn't been measured in the trade system previously, but it's worth between $550 billion and $800 billion a year, amounting to more than direct subsidies that governments paid in the form of tax incentives to big greenhouse gas emitters in 2007. "This research is pointing out that different sets of policies that seem completely separate -- trade policy and climate change -- are connected quite closely in ways people might not have noticed," he says. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.