Brian Prest

The reduced royalty rates do encourage additional production, which DOGMA accounts for, but not nearly enough to overcome the substantial reduction in federal revenue. I’ll be posting additional details of this analysis on RFF’s web site later this week--stay tuned!

These values represent only the approximately 50% share of royalties retained by the federal government, so the cuts would lead to similarly large revenue losses to the states where the oil and gas is being produced.

The House Natural Resources Committee today is marking up its piece of the reconciliation bill currently making its way through Congress.

My analysis on potential impacts of expanded US LNG exports is available here zenodo.org/records/137383… @RFF's analysis of oil & gas leasing led by @bprest can be found here rff.org/publications/i… One can read these and verify the letter's statement is incorrect.

We have a paper out in @ScienceMagazine today showing how new guidelines allowing for income weighting in federal cost-benefit analysis would affect the social cost of carbon. Main takeaway, the SC-CO2 increases nearly 8x to ~$1300/ton. @rff @ERGBerkeley science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@Komanoff @TAndersen_nSCIr @JesseJenkins @HarrisonGFell @DxGordon That was a typo in the old version @JesseJenkins shared. Notice the two "of"s where a crucial modifier was dropped. The corrected one is here and reads as follows: rff.org/publications/w…

@TAndersen_nSCIr @JesseJenkins @bprest @HarrisonGFell @DxGordon The "thesis" is mis-stated, bizarrely. For oil, the paper found "a 55% leakage rate (i.e., one bbl retired is counteracted by a 0.55-bbl incrs in supply from other producers)." It should have said GHG reductions are on the order of 1/2 of the interdicted emissions. @JesseJenkins

Anyone writing/thinking/arguing about the impacts of permitting/not permitting US LNG terminals really ought to read this work by @bprest @HarrisonGFell @DxGordon & TJ Conway on how to think about the net impact of 'supply-side' interventions like this: media.rff.org/documents/WP_2…

Discounting in benefit-cost analysis using investment rates of return can yield very misleading estimates of the costs and benefits of policies with long-lived impacts, from @richardgnewell, @billypizer, and @bprest nber.org/papers/w31526

Check out this new research in #JEEM on climate royalty surcharges on fossil fuels by Brian C. Prest (@bprest) and James H. Stock (@jimstockmetrics). Increasing royalty rates on federal fossil fuel reduces global emissions. Link to paper: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@stroebel_econ @ProfJAParker @JohnHCochrane Also the time profiles of costs and benefits need to align for an investment rate to make sense. But there's a better way: the shadow price of capital, which was implicitly endorsed in the old A-4, but given much more prominence in the revision. rff.org/publications/w…

Psyched about this new @rff working paper from @bprest, Zach Whitlock, & me. It asks: in a future with more ambitious climate policies, what happens to oil and gas production in different US regions, and how does that affect local gov't revenue? 1/8 rff.org/publications/w…

@DByers21 @DanielRaimi @DxGordon But--and this is key--it is incredibly unlikely that reducing oil supply results in more emissions. That would require (1) oil demand to be ~perfectly inelastic and (2) implausible substitution patterns (e.g., Gulf of Mexico oil being partially replaced by oil sands)

@DByers21 @DanielRaimi @DxGordon In my recent paper, I do the emissions impact calculation both at the play level (e.g. Permian basin) and aggregated by region (e.g., N. America) using the OCI+ data. Roughly speaking, the emissions effects vary by field, but less than you might expect. rff.org/publications/w…

@drvolts Highly relevant: twitter.com/bprest/status/…

This probably won't get much notice, but it's a huge deal. The Trump administration used OMB's ludicrously high discount rate (7%) to stifle all sorts of regulations. Now Biden's OMB has established an across-the-board discount rate of *1.7%*. Valuing the future!

@cjwich @rff @billypizer @richardgnewell I guess they saw my tweet thread

Wonky paper alert! New @RFF working paper, "The Shadow Price of Capital", with @billypizer and @richardgnewell rff.org/publications/w…

This is super important for properly measuring the benefits of climate policy and regulations. like the @EPA's soon-to-be announced successor to the Clean Power Plan.

In the near term, the difference is small. We show this by redoing the cost-benefit analysis of the 2015 Clean Power Plan, showing that the SPC approach is similar to using 7% for near-term benefits (here, health cobenefits), but massively different for long-term climate benefits