Tyler Hansen and PERI Co-Director Robert Pollin analyze fossil fuel divestment campaigns as a strategy for advancing an effective global climate stabilization project.  They examine data on global divestment patterns and evaluate econometrically the impact of divestment events on the stock market prices of fossil fuel companies.  They conclude that divestment movements have not been especially effective as a means of significantly reducing CO₂ emissions.  The paper suggests that most efforts now devoted to divestment campaigns would be better spent on more direct efforts to drive down fossil fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions.

According to PERI Co-Director Gerald Epstein, since the mid-1980s, the short answer to this question is "no." Among the reasons: U.S. workers disproportionately finance the costs of U.S. imperialism through their taxes; and cheap imports facilitated by U.S. imperialism hurt U.S. workers' wages and job prospects. U.S. workers also pay in blood, as they constitute most of the U.S. military. But Epstein argues that, from the 1950s – 70s, U.S. workers did gain from imperialism, since they had more bargaining power and they paid a lower share of total taxes.

The 2015 Paris Agreement adopted the goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperature to 1.5 – 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. In this paper forthcoming in Ecological Economics, PERI economist James Boyce argues that carbon pricing can play a key role in meeting this objective, either through a cap-and-permit system or a carbon tax indexed to a fixed emission-reduction trajectory.  But carbon pricing can have significant regressive distributional impacts, raising energy prices disproportionately on lower-income people. Boyce shows how these distributional impacts can be addressed by universal dividends funded by carbon revenues.