LEGS

I attended a meeting of the LEGS Platform who are funding my visit to Lund. LEGS stands for Long-term Energy Growth and Sustainability. As the website says: "It a new platform for inter-faculty and interdisciplinary knowledge creation and exchange at LUSEM (Lund University School of Economics and Management). It was founded March 2009 on the basis of a strategic decision by the vice chancellor of

Generosity

Peter Martin reports on a generosity index. It combines data on charitable giving (which is highest in the US) with volunteering of time, and willingness to help strangers. In combination, Australia comes out top. It's worth also checking out some of the countries that come in with very low scores. One of these is China. We often here about a lack of trust in China and these numbers bear that out.

Another Push Towards a Directly Elected Executive President?

Back in June when Rudd was ousted I suggested that in the long-term that move could help push Australia towards adopting an executive presidency once the Republic was back on the agenda. Yesterday's emergence of a Gillard-Labor government with a one seat majority backed by the two relatively conservative independent MPs is another nudge in that direction I think. People commenting in the media

Endogenous Price of Lighting Services

Another potential issue with the Tsao and Waide and Tsao et al. work on demand for lighting is that the price of lighting services is to some degree endogenous. If this is the case then estimates of a model of the sort suggested in my previous post will be subject to simultaneity bias. So why might the price be endogenous?First, there are the usual reasons that we are not separating the effects

Tsao & Waide: "The World’s Appetite for Light"

Following up yesterday's post I looked at the study that provided the background for the paper studied there:Jeffrey Y. Tsao and Paul Waide:"The World’s Appetite for Light: Empirical Data and Trends Spanning Three Centuries and Six Continents"LEUKOS VOL 6 NO 4 APRIL 2010 PAGES 259 – 281This paper gives a figure of per capita light consumption and GDP/cost of light:I drew the thick black line on

Will the Adoption of Solid State Lighting Lead to an Increase in Energy Use?

The Economist discusses an article in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics by Tsao et al. on the effects on energy use of the adoption of solid state (i.e. LED) lighting (SSL) on global energy use. The Economist argues that it would be better to keep incandescent bulbs as a result. This seems a bit crazy. The literature on the rebound effect suggests that for energy saving innovations for

EERH Research Reports: August 2010

Peter Wood's paper on game theory and climate change continues to be popular this month. Follow this link for all the other stats.

Powerpoint Slide for Crawford School Research Retreat

Role of Fuel Economy Standards in Effecting Technological Change

I was fascinated to learn yesterday that Mercedes has paid the US government $300 million in fines due to violating the CAFE standards. As fuel economy standards continue to rise manufacturers will need to find innovative ways to reduce the fuel consumption of their luxury and sports models in order to end up with acceptable cross-fleet mean fuel consumption figures. The interesting thing is that