'The Blair black hole in global climate policy: international trade of zero-carbon goods' with Prof Ross Garnaut

Past Event

Date
 16 June 2025, 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Location
 Oxford Martin School & Online
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

Event Recording:

The Tony Blair Institute of Global Change recently published an article asserting that reducing emissions was difficult and would fail unless we expanded use of technologies that are expensive and a challenge to living standards. This is reminiscent of nineteenth century economist William Stanley Jevons’ in “The Coal Question”, warning of the limits that finite coal resources placed on British prosperity. The hole in both visions is the absence of international trade.

Specialisation in line with comparative advantage removed the limitations on countries without the natural resources of coal, oil, or gas becoming great centres of industrial activity. International specialisation and trade along the supply chain of zero-carbon goods production can render the limited renewable energy resource endowments of Europe and Northeast Asia compatible with prosperity through early movement to zero net carbon emissions.

Success will require open minds and open economies—just as sustained prosperity of regions without rich fossil carbon resources required open minds and open economies. 
Open economies are threatened by US retreat from international exchange, though this is a setback but not in itself a fatal blow either to the global mitigation effort or to prosperity in the rest of the world. The challenge is for other countries to remain open to each other, while we await the return of America, or confirmation of its departure. 

In this lecture, Prof Ross Garnaut will discuss how international trade in zero-carbon goods amongst the rest of the world can deliver continued prosperity through transition to zero net emissions. He will be joined in conversation with Prof Ian Goldin.

Ross Melb Uni colour

Prof Ross Garnaut
Emeritus Professor of Economics at The University of Melbourne

Ross Garnaut is Emeritus Professor of Economics at The University of Melbourne and The Australian National University. He is a founder and Director of The Superpower Institute, a philanthropically funded and independent  think tank focussed on the contribution to zero global net emissions that can be made by exports of zero-carbon goods from Australia, with comparative advantage in energy-intensive goods in the zero-carbon as well as the fossil carbon world economies.

Ross is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, an Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Economics Society and an Honorary Life Member of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Association. He prepared the “Garnaut Climate Change Review” for the Australian Prime Minister and State Premiers (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and “Australia and the Global Response to Climate Change” for the Australian Prime Minister and Multi-Party Parliamentary Committee on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2011), His recent collection of essays “Lets Tax Carbon and Other Ideas for a Better Australia” concludes a quintet on challenges facing the Australian economy over the past decade. 

He has been a senior official in the Papua New Guinea Department of Finance in the years straddling Independence in 1975; the principal economic adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke; and Australian Ambassador to China.