By Emily Pontecorvo
“In that broader sense, these clean hydrogen rules are a real opportunity,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “It’s important to get this right.”
Wagner, of Columbia, compared the situation to the federal renewable fuel standard, a subsidy for ethanol that Congress created ostensibly to reduce emissions from transportation. But recent analyses have found the policy has done more harm than good for the climate. Nonetheless, the EPA recently re-upped the policy for three more years. Once a policy is in place, it’s pretty hard to tighten it later, Wagner told me.
“What we are trying to do by getting the rules for clean hydrogen right from the beginning is to avoid a reckoning later.”
Quoted in: “The Green Hydrogen Debate Is Much Bigger Than Hydrogen” by Emily Pontecorvo, Heatmap (3 August 2023).