Friday, November 7th, 2025 | 10:30 – 11:50am | Location: 1605 Tilia St., Davis CA
Paige Weber, Assistant Professor, Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley
Join via Zoom (passcode: ucdenergy)
Join us for the UC Davis Energy & Efficiency Institute’s Fall 2025 Energy Seminar Series. These weekly Friday morning seminars feature leaders in energy and climate research, providing insights for students, professionals, and the public.
Tradeoffs in health, labor, and equity in decarbonizing California’s oil and refining sectors
Transportation is the largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting sector in many advanced economies including the United States. Among U.S. states, California is the second-largest consumer of refined petroleum products, 85% of which were consumed in the transportation sector. This presentation discusses two related papers that study the health, labor, and equity impacts of alternative decarbonization approaches for California’s transportation fossil-fuel sector.
This first paper studies the oil extraction, sector, combining an empirical field-level oil-production model, an air pollution model, and an employment model to characterize spatially explicit 2020–2045 decarbonization scenarios from various policies applied to California. We find setbacks generate the largest avoided mortality benefits from reduced air pollution and the largest lost worker compensation, followed by excise and carbon taxes, though setbacks fail to meet the state’s ambitious GHG emissions reduction targets.
The second paper studies California’s refineries. Petroleum refineries are one of the largest stationary sources of air pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions but also generate substantial economic benefits through employment. Relative to historic California refining production levels, reducing production from lower fuel demand and exports reduces premature mortality by 16–40% translating to a net present value of health benefits of $9–21 billion. However, we estimate that direct, indirect, and induced employment losses result in cumulative wage compensation declines of 0.7–2.4% ($0.8-2.6 billion).
Paige Weber is an Assistant Professor in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020-2023) and a postdoctoral scholar in the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) at the UC Santa Barbara (2019-2020). Weber is also research affiliate at emLab and a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network.
Weber uses methods in environmental economics, industrial organization, and urban economics to answer research questions in energy and the environment. A primary goal of her research is to understand the determinants and solutions to environmental inequality. Her research studies energy and electricity markets, climate change policy, local air quality, renewable energy, and transportation demand and urban form.
Weber received her Ph.D. in Environmental Economics from Yale University in 2019. She also earned a M.ESc. and a M.Phil. in Environmental Economics from Yale, and a B.A. in Political Economy of Industrialized Societies and Music from the UC Berkeley. She has professional experiences in the electricity industry, federal government, and non-governmental research organizations, all of which inform and motivate her research agenda.
