China Can't Win

People like this see China's announced carbon intensity target as "unambitious" because the business as usual scenarios from the IEA and US EIA already incorporate all of China's ambitious energy intensity and renewable energy goals. I wouldn't call those scenarios "BAU". Yes, China's carbon intensity target is probably mostly confirming their existing greenhouse policy. But why should China have

Great Climate Data Resources Page

In response to the "Climategate" events the RealClimate blog has put together a great resource page with links to various climate data and modelling results.

Artificial Meat

I'm very skeptical that this would be an economic proposition any time soon. You'd think it would be a lot easier to produce artificial milk - engineer some micro-organisms to secrete cow milk. Instead we still go to the trouble of raising cows, milking them, and transporting the perishable product to market. I'd like this to be true - it has big environmental and possibly ethical advantages.

China's Intensity Target is at Least as Stringent as the US Intensity Target

I'm puzzled by people saying that the Chinese intensity target is just business as usual. Of course, Roger Pielke is skeptical like me that the IEA projection is anything like realistic BAU. Some simple math reveals that the Chinese target is likely a greater intensity cut than that proposed by the US. The US proposes to cut emissions by 17%. In other words emissions will be 83% of the 2005 level

China Announces Carbon Intensity Target

China proposes to reduce carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 relative to 2005 which was a year with a relatively high carbon intensity.President Hu Jintao announced at the UN Meeting in New York that China would adopt a carbon intensity target. Now we know what it is. This looks like a quite ambitious target. Frank Jotzo and I are supposed to talk about this at the AARES meeting in February. Now

ANU Economics Showcase Slides

I'm presenting on Thursday in the ANU Economics Showcase. I'll be speaking in the 1:30-3:00pm slot. You can find a draft of my slides here and my abstract over there.

And then a Reject...

Right after getting a revise and resubmit I get a "reject" for my paper "Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve". Understandably, referees and editors are unwilling to publish more papers on the EKC and this paper apparently confused people as to whether it was a comment on Vollebergh et al. or a new econometric method for estimating EKCs (it's both) and if it was the latter I

Revise and Resubmit...

I got another revise and resubmit today. This time for my paper on interfuel elasticities of substitution. The most important point the referees want me to address is the weights I use in the meta-regression. I use the square root of sample size. They would like me to use the standard errors of the parameters from the original studies. However, one referee admits that when the statistics that are

Does the Natural Resource Curse not Apply in Democracies?

One of my colleagues, Sambit Bhattacharya, has an article out on natural resources and corruption. Their conclusion is:"Resource-rich countries are often cursed by corruption and governance problems. This column shows that the natural resource curse burdens non-democracies, but countries with better democratic institutions are not corrupted by such endowments. For governments accountable to their

Fenner Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Fenner School today. Because of the way I set things up to allow me to have an "animation" in a pdf file there aren't actually as many slides as there are pages in this document. But I didn't delete the extra pages because this is my emergency copy if my flash drive fails!

Nigel Jollands

Nigel Jollands, the head of the energy efficiency unit at the International Energy Agency gave a presentation today at the Crawford School. He talked about three main ideas the first of which was the relationship between changes in energy use, changes in well-being, changes in energy efficiency. This diagram is a revised version of his:The y-axis is the percentage change in well-being, the x-axis

My Fenner School Seminar: Thursday 12th November

As I mentioned a couple of months ago I'm giving a seminar at the Fenner School of the Environment and Society at ANU tomorrow, Thursday, at 1:00pm in the Forestry Lecture Theatre. As usual the slides will go up on the web as soon as I've completed them... I'm still working on model runs to put in the presentation as I wasn't pleased with the results I presented in Darwin. I'll show those results

Review of Prosperity without Growth

Here is a draft of my review to be published in Ecological Economics of Prosperity without Growth:Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite PlanetBy Tim Jackson, Earthscan, London, 2009.Reviewed by David I. SternUsually, I find myself disagreeing with advocates of zero economic growth (defined as non-increasing GDP). First, a large part of the world’s population remains poor by any

EERH Working Paper Statistics for October 2009

We saw an increase in both abstract views and downloads this month over last month. This is the first full month of participation in RePEc - data started being collected midway through September. Only a few papers were included in NEP reports this month (which tends to increase downloads). So these numbers might be representative of the expected performance of the series. We ranked 276th out of

Rudd's Speech to the Lowy Institute

In his speech to the Lowy Institute on Friday the Prime Minister lashed out at climate change skeptics but lumped them together with those who agree on the natural science but disagree on the policy response to climate change:"The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.· First, the climate science deniers.· Second, those that pay lip service to the

Still More on Spash Case

This from the ABC includes more quotes from Clive.

The Australian Weighs in on the Spash Scandal with an Editorial

Here it is.

AARES 2010 Abstract

I just submitted an abstract for the AARES 2010 meeting in Adelaide. You have till Friday to submit... I also expect to be presenting at the Environmental Economics Research Hub Workshop that precedes it. Here is the abstract:How Feasible are Developing Country Energy and Carbon Intensity Targets? An Econometric AnalysisFrank Jotzo, Resource Management in the Asia Pacific, Crawford School of

CSIRO Doesn't Seem to Understand What Social Science is All About

ABC reporting on the Spash controversy. If the comments here accurately represent CSIRO's position then they don't have much of a grasp about what applied social science and certainly economics is all about. Some more information from Clive was also published in the Australian.

CSIRO Tries to Ban Paper Critical of Emissions Trading

Just got back last night from the ANZSEE conference in Darwin (yeah we went to Kakadu too) where I saw Clive Spash present the paper in question that CSIRO have tried to ban from publication. From the presentation the paper is just a long list of different criticisms of emission trading schemes, none of which were new to me and not all of which I really agreed with. Most cogent is the issue of