Location: Salons de l’hôtel des Arts et Métiers, 9 bis avenue d’Iena, Paris, France
Register Here (Required) | Questions? Email Carey King
In an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape, this one-day conference in Paris convenes leading academics, policymakers and philanthropies to address a critical blind spot in global climate policy debates: the interactions between the transformation of energy systems and geopolitical shifts. The inadequacy of current climate and energy macroeconomic models to represent the effects of such an unorderly and fractured net-zero transition is a drain on the capacity of countries to assess the risks and opportunities of prospective decarbonization scenarios. While China thrives in most of the major green sectors at the risk of flooding the global markets, Europe strives to reconcile its ambitious climate commitments with the urgent need to maintain industrial strength and security, while the United States has aggressively pivoted toward a "drill baby drill" version of the Monroe Doctrine, deprioritizing decarbonization in favor of fossil fuel expansion and hemispherical dominance. Major emerging economies as well as the rest of the developing world are facing a period of geopolitical realignment, increased instabilities, frontier expansion in resource extraction and persistent transition dynamics.
Across four sessions, the conference will explore why existing economic frameworks—often built on assumptions of global cooperation, free trade, and exogenous growth unrelated to energy use—fail to account for these rising tensions and the non-linear risks associated with stranded assets and energy costs. Energy costs are usually a small share of overall spending, and thus it is commonly assumed energy is not economically-constraining such that a net-zero transition will be orderly and low cost. Yet energy constraints tend to dominate politics in a way that has delayed climate commitments (e.g., “gilets jaunes” protests of 2018, EU delay on phasing out internal combustion vehicles), and increases in energy costs in the 1970s triggered stagflation and a major economic transition that has led to higher inequality and debt burdens today. This conference highlights the need for "fit-for-purpose" macroeconomic models that integrate energy principles and sovereignty, industrial competitiveness, resilience and real-world political economy constraints. In doing so, this meeting aims to catalyze a dialogue necessary to build a more capable set of models and scenarios for a low-carbon energy transition.
- Session 1: Understanding the role of energy in economic transitions: lessons from the 1970s to today
- Session 2: The geoeconomic turn of the energy transition: energy security, energy affordability and energy imperialism.
- Session 3: The macrofinancial turn of the energy transition: stranded assets, cost of capital and balance of payment instabilities
- Session 4: Building scenarios for the mid-transition period: what can the models tell us?
Sponsors:
- Energy Institute of The University of Texas at Austin
- Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation
- Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences
Conference Organizing Team:
- Transition Macroeconomics Consortium
- Carey W. King (University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States)
email: careyking@energy.utexas.edu - Matheus Grasselli (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada)
- Jean-François Mercure (University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom)
- Carey W. King (University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States)
- French Development Agency
- Etienne Espagne (French International Development Agency)
- Emmanuel Henriet (Expertise France, a division of the French International Development Agency, Senior Research Fellow of the Energy Institute, University of Texas at Austin)
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