Fanny Henriet, 38 years old, is one of the three nominated, apart from the winner Alexandra Roulet, for the Best Young Economist Prize 2024. Bringing together representatives from the Cercle des Economistes and Le Monde, the jury highlights the work of researchers within the applied economics and promoting public debate.
Why did you turn to economics?
My father was an economics professor, so the discipline was familiar to me. As a child and teenager, I heard about two things: the hole in the ozone layer and climate change. We found a solution to the first problem, but the second seemed inexorable.
At Polytechnique, it was environmental economics that motivated me. The science of climate change was already well known, as were the technical solutions to deal with warming. It seemed to me that what was missing was knowledge of collective modes of action and public policies to act. And as the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from the combustion of fossil fuels, I have focused my work on the energy transition.
What are the main axes of your research?
The first concerns fossil fuels, and what the transition entails for these energies. And in particular: what fossil resources must remain underground? If we burn all the oil we have, we will exceed the carbon budget that would allow us to respect the Paris climate agreement. We should, for example, no longer extract oil in Canada, where it is very expensive and very polluting, while we could continue to extract a little in Kuwait, where it is less polluting and less expensive. But refusing to exploit resources would have significant repercussions for countries, particularly economic ones. States can claim compensation for this.
This is a major subject in the context of climate negotiations. The question of who should pay for the fight against global warming is the main obstacle to the transition.
Which makes the link with your second line of research…
I am also interested in what optimal taxation could be at the scale of a country. We have clearly seen that the distributive impact of environmental regulations, which create winners and losers, is a determinant of anger against these climate policies. The “yellow vests” are a good example. I am therefore studying how we could implement a carbon tax but with redistribution measures, by evaluating how to compensate the lowest households in terms of income, how to take into account the differences in standard of living linked to where where we live… Looking at these distributive effects is crucial both at the national and international level.
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