Carbon in soils and trees: What should farmers and society worry about?            Brent Sohngen, Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Ohio State University As the US re-enters the Paris Agreement and companies all over the world work to become…

By Brent Sohngen This article ran in the Columbus Dispatch on February 13, 2021: https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/02/13/re-entering-paris-agreement-likely-reduce-pollution-cost-americans-little/4282378001/ One of the first official acts of President Joe Biden was to re-enter the Paris Agreement, that 2015 pact among most of the world’s countries to…

The following appeared in the Columbus Dispatch on November 4, 2020: https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/11/04/column-markets-and-consumers-not-president-control-oils-future/6136112002/   Brent Sohngen, AED Economics, Ohio State University For practically 150 years, oil has been at the center of the American economy.  At first, it provided a source…

The U.S.-China trade war represents a natural experiment in the sense that we have not seen such wide-ranging increases in tariffs since the 1930s, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (Bown and Zhang, 2019).  Not surprisingly, applied trade economists…

Analysis of the current administration’s trade policy choices has typically interpreted them in terms of a zero-sum game, i.e., rather than generating mutual benefits in a positive-sum game, international trade is a game where economically, one country is a winner…

In light of the sectors targeted by China’s retaliatory tariffs against U.S. imports, it is not surprising that agriculture was a critical component of the Phase One Trade Agreement between the U.S. and China, that went into effect on February…