Jeffrey Ball is a lecturer at Stanford Law School; the scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance; a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; an affiliated instructor in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources; and an associated scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Ball created and heads the Stanford Climate of Infrastructure Project, a research effort that tracks and analyzes the environmental implications of investment in infrastructure in emerging economies and, using that information and analysis, seeks to improve the environmental efficacy such investment. Stanford graduate students from around the university participate in the research through Stanford Law School reserach seminars, known as “policy labs,” that Ball teaches.

The premise of the project is that the carbon intensity of the infrastructure being financed and built in emerging economies will, more than any other set of investment and policy decisions, shape the trajectory of climate change. Infrastructure such as power plants, electricity-transmission lines, and roads have decades-long emissions tails. Increasingly, the world’s biggest financing institutions and governments are identifying decarbonizing their investments in such infrastructure as a top priority. But holding those players to their decarbonization promises, and helping them achieve them, will require better information and analysis than is now available: about which players are funding what infrastructure where, about why they’re making those investment decisions, and about how, by shifting to financing lower-carbon infrastructure, they could create infrastructure-project deals that would increase rather than reduce their profits.

The Stanford Climate of Infrastructure Project, housed at Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, aims to fill this gap. By analyzing new data sources, it is tracking and mapping global infrastructure investment across several key emerging economies. Ball teaches a Stanford graduate research seminar in which students take part in the research.

In 2021, the project produced a peer-reviewed research article in iScience analyzing the carbon intensity of finance bankrolling power plants in emerging and developing economies — infrastructure that will lock in global carbon-emission trajectories for decades to come. Ball also published a New York Times guest essay and a Brookings Institution essay about the research. The analysis yielded three overarching conclusions: that investment in energy infrastructure being built in the countries that will most determine the climate future are too carbon-intensive to align with global climate goals; that a major reason for that misalignment is the extent of construction in these countries of natural-gas-fired power plants, which will lock in too-high carbon emissions even if coal-fired power generation continues to wane; and that much of the money financing this too-carbon-intensive energy infrastructure comes from institutions within a a given emerging market or developing economy, a fact that underscores the imperative to help discern and develop ways to recalibrate incentives in such countries toward lower-carbon infrastructure — realistic in terms of the country’s fossil-fuel-based political economy.

In 2022, Stanford students working on the project produced preliminary analyses of the climate-relevant political economies of Indonesia and Vietnam, mapping each country’s climate-relevant political economy to identify key players, structural impediments to material decarbonization, and politically and economically realistic ways around those impediments.

In 2023, Stanford students working on the project through additional policy labs leveraged these preliminary political-economy analyses and worked with key government and business players in Indonesia and in relevant global institutions an attempt to help those officials improve the efficacy of international and domestic low-carbon finance that is focused on the country, the world’s fourth-most-populous nation and its top coal exporter.