Ray Kopp started at Resources for the Future in 1977, holding multiple positions at the organization, including fellow, director, and vice president. He passed away in August 2024, which compels colleagues to celebrate Ray’s life from many angles.
Introduction
by Kristin Hayes
This article celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Ray Kopp, with whom I shared an office wall for much of my tenure at Resources for the Future (RFF). When I first started working for Ray in late 2010, our respective offices were on opposite sides of the building—and when we undertook a big renovation and shuffled everyone’s offices around, my primary request was “be closer to Ray.”
Ray epitomized many of the things that are great about RFF: a commitment to doing work that matters, a willingness to push intellectual boundaries, a firm belief in excellence. And Ray played as hard as he worked; he brought that same desire for excellence to his rich life outside the office, whether prepping for car races, cooking, tending to bonsai, or making toys for his grandchildren.
I encourage you to read about Ray’s accomplishments in the sections below—and through those words, I think you’ll see that many people benefited from being closer to Ray. I found him creative, inspiring, organized, diligent, and endlessly empowering. He was an introvert who nonetheless could talk your ear off about subjects of mutual interest. He was fundamentally private, but nonetheless drew people to him and inspired them in ways that always impressed me.
I miss Ray profoundly, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to introduce this article about someone who gave RFF so much.
Ray as Mentor and Leader
by Billy Pizer
Ray was exceptionally good at not being the center of attention. He loved to give credit to others, compliment the attributes of people around him, and lead from behind.
Ray leaves a legacy as a scholar, collaborator, and one of the architects of RFF being a truly enjoyable place to work. You’ll hear more about his contributions in those areas later in this article. But where I want to focus my remarks is on Ray’s impressive ability to identify and cultivate opportunities to improve policymaking by applying economic research—and, through his leadership, define a successful trajectory for RFF. I’ll give four examples that make the point.
When I arrived at RFF in 1996, I had been researching and writing about how two prominent economic ideas for regulating greenhouse gases—carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs—behaved differently. And, perhaps more importantly, how these approaches could be combined to deliver even better “economic” results. By which I mean, I had an equation that defined what was good for society, and playing with combinations of carbon taxes and emissions trading could provide better outcomes than either strategy alone. This was literally all academic, however. I had written journal articles and given talks to economics departments. But Ray and another colleague, Dick Morgenstern, saw in this research something I did not: A way to connect all this to the policy world.
In 1997, Ray, Dick, and I wrote an article we called, “Something for Everyone: A Climate Policy that Both Environmentalists and Industry Can Live With.” That blog post described how environmentalists valued certainty about the emissions reductions that could be associated with a cap on emissions. Industry and business cared about having some certainty about the cost of such a policy or regulation. We proposed mashing them together in the same way my research had suggested, but without the equations, math, and complexity of academic writing. We later called the policy a “safety valve.”
Folks may recognize some version of the safety-valve idea as a component of multiple trading programs—including California, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and the EU Emissions Trading System. But in 1997, the idea was totally new. What Ray was doing, early on, was making research accessible and relevant to policy in a way that 28-year-old me was just beginning to understand. Under Ray’s leadership, RFF’s Weathervane website did this same thing across a range of climate topics for nearly 15 years.
The second example is Ray’s co-leadership (with me) of the Climate Policy Forum, an 18-month project in 2006–2007 that brought together business leaders from 23 companies to provide detailed and thoughtful policy options for climate legislation. I was certainly older by that point and understood more about policy issues. In particular, I had a keen idea of the kinds of topics we wanted to cover. Think of me as the “back end” of the effort, managing analysis. Ray was the front end, thinking about who needed to be at the table, how the convening of business leaders needed to be executed, and how the topical analysis and writing needed to be presented.
The result was threefold. Over the course of 18 months, we provided a forum for business leaders across major sectors—electricity, fossil energy, transport, agriculture, heavy industry—to meet one another and learn about the various facets of climate policy. The Climate Policy Forum helped these leaders understand their own issues and questions, target RFF research and expertise to answer those questions, and move the business conversation forward about climate policy.
We also produced a lot of ideas, ranging from economy-wide policy options to sector-specific options. We wrote about offsets and agriculture. We wrote about domestic policies that were tied to international negotiations. And we answered basic questions about the pace, timing, and cost of emissions reductions that were necessary to hit different targets. Finally, we produced a collection of short briefs—the report itself was a collection of 15 of these briefs—that were easy to digest and a resource for stakeholders and students for more than a decade.
Another example is something I learned about only two years ago, when Ray shared a “thank-you note” from a Senate Appropriations Committee staffer. Back in 2016, Ray had written a memo for the committee staff—something RFF researchers increasingly are asked to do—on how to design a subsidy mechanism for the nuclear power industry. The question was simple: What options are available for the federal government to keep nuclear power plants financially viable, and how much would those options likely cost? In typical fashion, Ray produced a seven-page memo, outlining options that drew from available data. Moreover, the memo highlighted how an auction mechanism could minimize the necessary payment by incentivizing generators to reveal what they really needed to survive.
Nothing further happened on this in 2016. But in 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which included the Civil Nuclear Credit Program. This program allows operators of commercial US nuclear reactors to competitively bid on credits that help support their continued operations. As a Senate staffer put it in his note to Ray, “Your original analysis was used throughout the entire process for this.”
My most recent example comes from Ray’s work over the past three years with Senate staff on climate and trade issues. In a rare area of bipartisan interest, both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have been interested in how to tackle the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in traded industrial goods, even as many of our global competitors are not doing so. This is tricky stuff—both understanding how much carbon is emitted to create various products in various countries, and thinking through the design of a system that can tackle the problem. A lot of options are on the table, with a lot of consequences stemming from those options.
Ray spent the last two years of his life leading RFF’s work in this area, producing ideas and analyzing their consequences, following direct engagement with Senate staff. These efforts build on research that Ray organized on climate and trade for probably a decade or more, including collaborations with European and Japanese colleagues and numerous reports and publications. Like his work on nuclear subsidies, this work with the Senate has yielded public and private appreciation. But what was more gratifying was seeing Ray’s efforts materialize in better-informed legislative proposals and, hopefully someday, successful efforts to reduce industrial emissions dramatically.
These kinds of activities at RFF over the nearly three decades that I’ve known Ray are not just his own direct efforts. Thanks to Ray’s leadership over many years; his mentorship of young scholars (like me, 28 years ago); his steering of the organization as a vice president, program director, and staff director; and his incredible knack for seeing how to write and talk in ways that engage stakeholders and policymakers—I believe he has been one of the drivers that steered RFF into the position it is today. Ray was at the heart of doing research inspired by deep engagement with policymakers and stakeholders. And thanks to him, RFF increasingly succeeded in our unique contribution of relevant, independent, honest, and trusted research that answers the questions those policymakers and stakeholders care about.
Fun at Work
by Paul Portney
Ray created good culture at RFF by bringing good times, and he literally helped build a great RFF community through great hiring.
Billy Pizer has spoken to the seriousness with which Ray immersed himself in the process of designing public policy regarding climate change. And Kerry Smith will point out the high quality and significant impact of Ray Kopp’s economic research throughout Ray’s career at RFF, along with important participation in natural resource damage assessments.
I want to take a different tack. Ray was a terrific researcher and a model for those wishing to see their research have an impact on public policy. And during his 40+ years at RFF, he also helped create an atmosphere in which doing research on environmental and natural resource issues was not only rewarding but also—dare it be said?—fun!
He didn’t do this by being an office cutup or practical joker. In fact, Ray was reserved, remarkably disciplined, and managed his time as well as anyone I’ve ever worked with. That said, he always made sure to allow time in his schedule for fun, and he always tried to include his colleagues in the action.
This social savvy may have been something as simple as hosting a midsummer pool party at Linda’s and his home in Great Falls or encouraging us all to go out for drinks together at the end of the workweek. But the fun took more ambitious forms, as well. For instance, Ray made sure that RFF had a team in Washington’s traditional summer Softball on the Mall league, where we interacted with teams from congressional offices, government agencies, and other nonprofit organizations. (See the photo, with Ray shirtless in the top row.) Those softball games may have been his first involvement with the people involved in the public policy process!
Credit: Courtesy of John Mullahy and Paul Portney
As another example, in 1982, Ray and others at RFF hired a new research assistant, John Mullahy, who not only was very technically gifted but also shared our interest in college basketball and, particularly, the annual NCAA tournament. Ray knew the office pool was a source of great entertainment across RFF and tasked John with running it, at which John excelled. When interviewing research assistant applicants in subsequent years—only after questioning them about their undergraduate education, technical skills, and other relevant qualifications—Ray might casually ask, “By the way, do you have any experience with NCAA tournament pools?”
Permit me a final and epic example. One spring in the mid-1980s, Ray and I were talking about our love for Delaware’s Atlantic beaches. Ray said, “Why don’t we rent a big beach house there for a weekend and invite everyone we work with to come?” And that’s what we did. Members of the administrative staff, research assistants, and junior and senior researchers came for sun, swimming, beach football, and the occasional adult beverage. I would say more, but we took an unspoken vow that, like Las Vegas, what happens in Dewey Beach stays in Dewey Beach! Long before the term “team building” took hold in organizational behavior, this was a definitive example, never to be forgotten by any who attended.
Many would argue that Ray’s stellar research record and his dedicated involvement in the policy process must overshadow the contributions I’ve identified above. I’m not so sure. While sometimes exhilarating and exciting, research can be frustrating and disappointing. Papers are rejected for publication, grant applications are turned down, and other things go wrong. Similarly, even the most diligent efforts to shape public policy often go awry. Elections bring in new officials who may have no interest in the areas where their predecessors paid attention. Coalitions built over periods of years can fall apart suddenly and for what seem to be ephemeral reasons. In times like these, it’s easy to throw in the towel. Unless, of course, one is lucky enough to work in an environment with smart and supportive colleagues, excellent role models, and people who make work … fun.
Before he retired, Ray and his wife Linda bought land atop a ridge in the Shenandoah mountains and subsequently designed and built a home there. Whenever Ray and I talked, texted, or emailed, I always started out by asking him, “How are things are up there on Mount Olympus?” It dawns on me now that Ray was Olympian in his talents as a researcher, policy advocate, and colleague. Thank you, Ray, for always having made it easy—and, yes, fun—to come to work on Monday.
Ray’s Research Legacy
by V. Kerry Smith
Ray’s legacy of research involves phenomenal contributions to the field—though what people may remember the most is the great integrity he brought to his work.
Good research addresses important questions and provides clear answers. Great research meets these standards and does more: great research changes the way people think.
Ray’s research over 30 years ago changed the way that the social costs of environmental policy were defined and measured. His 1990 paper with Michael Hazilla in the Journal of Political Economy assures that, when the US Environmental Protection Agency conducts benefit-cost analyses for regulatory impact analyses, the analyses must explain why the general equilibrium effects of any proposed policy can be overlooked.
Over a decade before that 1990 paper, Ray was a leader in using programming methods to distinguish between technical efficiency and allocative efficiency for electric power plants. Technical efficiency measures whether a power plant is using the best possible practices in producing its outputs; the measurement is defined within the structure of neoclassical production models. Allocative efficiency gauges whether the incremental contributions of each pair of inputs to production matches their relative costs.
Ray’s research on this topic began in graduate school. I asked Ray to explain an abstract paper on frontier production functions (the basis for defining technical and allocative efficiency measures). His explanation was clear and became a major article in one of the most important journals in economics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, in 1981. That paper and his subsequent research on the topic led to many other contributions. Some of these novel contributions were collaborations with prominent economists who at the time were defining the theory of index numbers. Indeed, one of these coauthors told me how Ray worked out the details of their paper on the back of a coaster during a break between technical sessions at an international conference on production modeling. The resulting paper from 1982 is one of the most highly cited articles in a leading econometrics journal.
Skills in applied economic theory and measurement usually are not good predictors of comparable interdisciplinary talent. But this rule of thumb does not apply to Ray. He led every major natural resource damage assessment for three decades—while advancing major research programs at RFF. The assessments for state and federal litigation that involved Exxon Valdez, Montrose Chemical Corporation, and Deepwater Horizon required someone who could listen to and integrate the ideas of a wide array of social scientists while mediating the concerns of these scientists with the practical needs of the lawyers who managed the cases. Everyone involved—researchers and lawyers—respected Ray’s quiet, thoughtful demeanor.
Ray ensured successful outcomes and research that met the highest standards. The Internet Age sometimes causes us to forget research legacies. In Ray’s case, we should not.
Final Thought
by Kristin Hayes
I’d like to close with one more personal anecdote. On August 19, 2019, I was sitting in my RFF office when my mother called and told me that my father had passed away earlier that day. He had been sick for some time, and I knew the end was coming—but when it actually did, I found I couldn’t fathom what to do next. I sat immobilized in my office, and then finally texted Ray (in the office next door): “I need help.” Ray came over, gave me a big hug, and got me up, which was exactly what I needed in that moment.
Ray died on August 19, 2024; this time, it was Billy Pizer who came into my office to give me a hug and share in the sadness. We spend so much of our lives with our colleagues, and it’s a privilege to work with ones—both present and past—who approach their lives with as much commitment and caring as my RFF colleagues do.
More Memories of Ray: People from around the world have shared their own anecdotes about Ray Kopp, which have been posted in fond memory of our colleague.
A version of this article appeared in print in the Winter 2025 issue of Resources magazine.
