Add Papers to Your academia.edu Profile

Academia.edu is still I think a somewhat experimental social media website. It hasn't got a lot of momentum with faculty members yet - most of the participants are grad students. This is true at Crawford School too. 27 Crawford people are on academia.edu but there are only four faculty members and two post-docs among them. This is because I think the website is most useful for people who don't

ISEE 2012 Call for Papers

Abstracts are due by 15th November. At this point, I'm not planning on attending. The last ISEE meeting I went to was in Montreal in 2004. But that was far to travel. I have enough international travel to do anyway and it is during time when I'll possibly be needing to be teaching. But if you haven't been to one, it could be worth it. The first one I went to was Stockholm in 1992, the second

Shadow Reserve Bank Board

CAMA is running a pilot project where a panel of Australian economists pick the Reserve Bank interest rate that they think is appropriate a few days before each RBA interest rate setting board meeting. It's not meant to be a prediction of what the RBA will do, but an indication of what they should do. Each economist can give a range of interest rates with different probabilities. August's chart

Ecological Economics Chapter

I've put up a complete draft of my article on ecological economics for the Encyclopedia of Environmetrics. Previously, I posted three sections of the article as blogposts. It's hard to cover everything relevant in the small number of words allocated. I've focused on controversy regarding what ecological economics is (transdisciplinary field, economics paradigm etc.) and on agreement on core

Energy Economics Course

My proposal for a course titled "Energy Economics" was approved by the College of Asia and the Pacific education committee. The course will have the number CRWF8017 and we plan to offer it for the first time in the second semester of 2012. CRWF courses are graduate courses offered by the Crawford School that have no additional prerequisites beyond those required for admission to study in one of

Why is Australia Trying to Control Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

There is a lot of misinformation floating around the blogosphere on the intentions behind Australia's recently announced climate change policy. A week ago, Stephen King listed a bunch of reasons for the policy, which does not include the true reason. And today there is a similar article on the Conversation from Paul Frijters. The real reason the government is acting is that following the

Elasticities of Substitution and Complementarity

Finally, my article in the Journal of Productivity Analysis has received page numbers. The full citation is:Stern D. I. (2011) Elasticities of substitution and complementarity, Journal of Productivity Analysis 36(1): 79-89.The article is mainly a review/survey article that organizes the literature on elasticities of substitution. It also proposes a couple of innovations along the way and gives

Google Scholar Citations

Google is launching a new service: Google Scholar Citations. Like Google+ the service is only available to a select invited few at the moment. It will allow users to update and correct their profiles much like the Author Search service in Scopus but it seems in a more user-friendly fashion. This will include merging multiple entries into a single article, a function provided by Publish or Perish.

This is Where I've Been Recently

I can't tell you anything about the IPCC meeting in Changwon City and so thought I'd post this instead. I did a day long tour from Seoul to various places near and in the DMZ including the above. I also gave a presentation at Korea Energy Economics Institute where my former student Sung Kim works since March. I talked about our study of energy and long-run growth in Sweden.

Institutions and History of Ecological Economics

Though modern ecological economics dates to the late 1980s, as a school of thought ecological economics has deep roots in thinkers who developed various forms of “biophysical economics”: Daly, Odum, Georgescu-Roegen etc. The book “Ecological Economics” by Juan Martinez-Alier documents this history [also Røpke, 1994]. The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was founded in 1988

New Income Tax Rates

The tax free threshold is going up and so are 15 and 30% tax rates:I can see why the higher marginal rates aren't being emphasized anywhere... The Henry Review argued for a $25,000 tax free threshold and two tax brackets - 35% and 45% with the top rate coming in at $180,000 per year income. So this goes quite a long way there. The low income tax offset will be reduced. Why didn't they just get

First Thoughts on the Australian Government's Climate Package

For those of you outside Australia, the federal government is announcing its planned climate change package today. They have the numbers in parliament to pass the legislation so we can expect this to actually happen this time. One surprise is the increase in the 2050 emissions reduction target from 60% to 80%. The carbon price will initially be $23 before a switch to carbon trading in 2015. After

Musings on Ecological vs. Environmental Economics

One way of distinguishing between environmental and ecological economics is that environmental economics has a focus on price while ecological economics has a focus on quantity. Environmental economics focuses on market failures as the main determinant of environmental problems. Seen in terms of externalities, the problem is incorrect prices and the solution is implementing the right prices. In

Postdoctoral Position with the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) network

The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Network, located at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment, seeks a postdoctoral fellow for a one-year appointment beginning Fall 2011. The Postdoctoral Fellow will work under the direct supervision of Professor Arun Agrawal who coordinates the IFRI network.The Fellow will conduct and support research

EPA Modifies the US Sulfur Trading Program

From Richard Woodward posting on ResEcon:"Some of you may have noticed in the news today mention of new regulations by the USEPA on SO2 and NOx emissions. The title of the articles could have been, "The SO2 trading program is dead. Long live the SO2 trading programs!"Since many of us use the SO2 program as the epitome of what a trading program should look like and teach about it in our classes,

Membership of the International Society for Ecological Economics

Doing some more work on my article on ecological economics. I was actually surprised to find that ISEE membership is at the strongest point I've seen it with 3049 members worldwide. There have been booms and busts in membership over time with particularly successful international conferences raising membership for a while and lots of changes of membership structure and location of the society

Portland State University Report Reveals Uncertain Costs, Risks of Mekong River dams

(Portland, Ore.) July 7, 2011 – The ultimate price tag of building 11 hydropower dams on the lower Mekong River potentially far exceeds the benefits to the region, according to a report released today from Portland State University and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).View the full report and video presentation The study accounts for gains through power generation,

Two Post-Doc Positions Available to Work with Simon Hay/MAP at Oxford

My coauthor Simon Hay is looking to hire two post-docs to join their team at Oxford for up to four years. One post-doc will work on "Defining the population at risk and burden of disease of Plasmodium vivax malaria" and the other on "Global dengue occurrence – present and future". The positions are funded by the Wellcome Trust.

CCEP Paper Published in PNAS

Just a few days ago I was talking about Robert Kaufmann's paper in PNAS and now we have a paper there is another paper in the journal deserving of a mention on this blog. Alessandro Tavoni, Astrid Dannenberg, Giorgos Kallis, and CCEP research associate Andreas Löschel have http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/27/1102493108.abstract?sid=783a6741-6285-4957-81a6-0542053f29a7">a paper on

SD Card Speeds Up with More Data on it?

I recently bought an SD card to use to move data between my computers at home and on campus. I was a bit dissapointed at the speed of reading and writing to the memory. It took hours to upload all my data onto the card the first time around. But now I noticed that files seem to copy MUCH faster. I put this down to the data on the card now being organized and, therefore may be more of the faster "

h(5,2) - the Best Citation Metric for Economics?

Glenn Ellison has written a paper titled: "http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3188.html">How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics" on the use of Hirsch type citation metrics in economics. An author's Hirsch index is equal to h if they have published at least h papers cited at least h times. Ellison argues that generally economists write fewer papers than natural

CCEP Working Papers in June 2011

We continue to get a decent rate of hits this month. Frank Jotzo and Steve Hatfield-Dodd's paper "Price Floors in Emissions Trading to Reduce Policy Related Investment Risks: an Australian View" was added right at the start of the month and proved the most popular for the month.

Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008

My colleague Robert Kaufmann (one of my PhD advisors and coauthor on several papers) has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the slowdown in global temperature increase between 1998 and 2008. The Guardian has pretty balanced coverage but all the bloggers I read seemed to be upset about it both people who support mainstream science and the climate change

2012 International Association for Energy Economics Conference in Perth

The 2012 conference of the International Association for Energy Economics (publisher of the Energy Journal) will be in Perth from June 24th-27th. The http://www.iaee.org/documents/2012/PerthCFP.pdf">deadline for paper submissions is 13 January 2012. There will be two types of paper sessions - 15 minute presentations (including questions) and 30 minute presentations with formal discussants. In

What is Ecological Economics?

So, time for another "serialization" in the spirit of John Quiggin's Zombie Economics and my earlier serialization of my Ecological Economics Reviews article. This time I have to write an encyclopedia article on "ecological economics". I only get 2000 words. This first very rough draft of the first section is titled "What is Ecological Economics?". Please contribute your insights and criticisms

S.A.P.I.E.N.S.

Another new journal, though actually it has been published since 2008: S.A.P.I.E.N.S. - Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society. This is an open-access journal, which is also free for authors to publish in. It is funded by French MNC Veolia Environnement through their non-profit research foundation. The inaugural issue featured articles by Esther Duflo and Bob Costanza.

Reviews in Ecological Economics

After two years of publishing Ecological Economics Reviews (EER) as a special issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Bob Costanza, Karin Limburg, and Ida Kubiszewski are announcing a move - to Springer - and a slightly different name: Reviews in Ecological Economics (REE). They are confident that this move will strengthen the new REE and increase its exposure and

Nature Publishing Group Goes Head to Head with PLoS ONE

Nature Publishing Group is launching yet another journal: Scientific Reports. It is an open access journal with the same $US1,350 publication fee as PLoS ONE. Nature recently launched another journal: Nature Communications that charges a $US5,000 open access fee, which is higher than any of the PLoS journals and the highest publication fee that I've seen. It's not a pure open access journal

Special Issue of Energy Economics

The latest issue of Energy Economics is a special issue on the economics of technologies to combat global warming. I haven't read the papers in detail yet, but there look to be several good overviews of the current state of play on the key issues in this area. Given the slowness with which countries are moving to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, technology policies might end up being more

Episode 3

Evolutionary biology, HIV, and the Central African World War... This one is even more out there... There is more about the series on Wikipedia.

Episode 2: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

This episode should be of interest to ecological economists:It starts off with a discussion of the history of ecology including the Odum brothers as well as Jay Forrester and cybernetics. It goes on to the Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth and then to more recent developments in ecology. One of the themes is the rise in people's understanding of the world as an interconnected system. Today,

Review of the Publish or Perish Bibliometrics Software

Publish or Perish (PoP) is a freeware interface for deriving citation metrics from Google Scholar (GS). I downloaded it, wrapped it up as a Mac application using Wineskin and ran it. The three most useful features of the software are:1. It automatically computes a bunch of statistics such as the h-index from the GS results.2. It allows you to merge together the multiple entries for a single paper

Crawford School Working Papers on SSRN

I still don't quite get how SSRN works despite having my own page on there. All Crawford School papers that are on SSRN are now included in the Australian National University Crawford School of Economics & Government Research Paper Series. But the Crawford School has also launched a new working paper series on SSRN titled Crawford School Research Papers. We have a bunch more paper series too as

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences

A new journal for a new academic society: Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences. I've long thought it strange that there has been no professional society for environmental studies. Well, apart from the International Society for Ecological Economics of course :) This makes academic job searches in environmental studies a bit more challenging than in other fields, for example. Unlike

Advice on Getting Published

Via Marginal Revolution a newsletter with a bunch of advice about getting published. Seems to make sense to me given my experience in publishing and being a referee for more than 50 journals and associate editor for Ecological Economics.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

An interesting take on the history of America in the last couple of decades. At least that's what I think it's about:

Follow Up on SD Cards

After my flash drive died I finally followed up on my idea of using an SD Card instead. The drive died after being knocked one too many times while plugged into my laptop.I bought a Dick Smith brand card as I wanted to get one right away after the flash drive died. It claims to be a Class 4 card but so far it seems to be extremely slow when writing data from my computer onto the card. This is

The "Google Way" to Visualize Research

Yesterday, I showed one potential way of visualizing my research areas. Another way is using the web to tell us just like Google does. In fact, I did a Google Scholar search on myself and then put the results (with some cleaning up) into Wordl:I could have also cleaned out my name from the data first (using the replace function in Word) but decided against that. Some of the topics from

Visualizing Research Areas and Links

I've been trying to give an overview of my research for a presentation and came up with this:I've tried to fit various of the topics I've worked on in the last decade within three disciplinary fields and the overlaps between them. In the middle I put "Meta" to represent my interest in meta-analysis and bibliometric analysis. This doesn't cover everything. My recent energy efficiency stuff is

New Private College of the Humanities in the UK

An interesting development in the face of the tremendous rise in tuition fees at public universities in the UK: "The New College of the Humanities. This will be a private college that is part of the University of London. It will grant London degrees and use their library facilities etc. There is star founding faculty of fourteen professors including well-known names like Richard Dawkins, Partha

CCEP Working Papers in May 2011

As the summer vacation gets going in the northern hemisphere, downloads and abstracts views on RePEc usually decline. So as expected there was some decline in the number of downloads that we received. We now have 14 CCEP working papers. The most popular paper this month was Frank Jotzo's paper Carbon Pricing that Builds Consensus and Reduces Australia's Emissions: Managing Uncertainties Using a

Price Floors in Emissions Trading to Reduce Policy Related Investment Risks: an Australian View

Frank Jotzo and Steve Hatfield-Dodds have a new CCEP working paper tiled: Price Floors in Emissions Trading to Reduce Policy Related Investment Risks: an Australian View, which is about the role of a price floor in a carbon emissions trading scheme in increasing the certainty of the investment environment. One of the downsides to emissions permit trading is that permit prices can be very volatile

IPCC Literature Deadlines

The following are the deadlines for papers that can be cited in the 5th IPCC Assessment Report. At least for Working Group III's contributions:Literature cutoff I: cited papers must be submitted to a journal (11 March 2013)Literature cutoff II: cited papers must be accepted by a journal (28 October 2013)So, if you want your work to have a chance to be cited in the Report, it needs to meet these

Countdown to Korea

I've booked my trip to Korea for the IPCC Working Group III 5th Assessment Report meeting in Changwon City. I'll also be giving a presentation on 18th July at the Korea Energy Economics Institute. My former student Sung-Kyun Kim started working there earlier this year after getting his PhD from RPI in economics. Work is starting up on the first draft of our chapter, known as the "Zero Order Draft

ARC to Abolish Existing Journal Ranking System

The Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr put out apress release today describing changes to be made in the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise compared to the 2010 ERA. One of the changes is: "The refinement of the journal quality indicator to remove the prescriptive A*, A, B and C ranks". This follows consultation on changes to the ranking scheme. "The

SNIP and SJR: Two New Journal Ranking Indicators from Elsevier

SNIP - Source Normalized Impact per Paper and SJR - are two new indicators provided by Elsevier based on the Scopus citation database. The indicators are available from the Journal Metrics website.SNIP takes into account citation practices in the field of interest. A journal's field is the journals citing that journal and the average length of reference lists in papers in that field are taken

Enhancements to Scopus

Elsevier have introduced some enhancements to Scopus, their citation index. I'll discuss a couple of these in future posts when I've learnt more about them. Actually, these might be not new at all, but I only just noticed them. One is the ability to make RSS feeds from Scopus searches and also to embed them on webpages. I've embedded a search for the most recent papers citing my work on my

Castro e Silva and Teixeira

An interesting paper by Castro e Silva and Teixeira reviews the evolution of themes and types of papers in Ecological Economics over the first 20 years of its existence. The paper joins other bibliometric analyses of the journal including Luzadis et al. (2010), Costanza et al. (2004), and Ma and Stern (2006). Two of their main findings are that:There has been an increase in the number of

Invited to Publish a Chapter in an In-Tech Book

Open Access chapters in books with pay to publish fees seems to be a new trend. I got an invite to contribute a chapter to a book published by In-Tech. The publication fee is Euro 590. The book is available for free online but a hardcopy is mailed to each author. What I found to be even weirder is this statement:"To preserve the integrity of the review process the identity of the editor will be

Links to Working Paper Versions

I've added links to working paper versions of my publications where those exist to me to publications pages. For the most recent publications that aren't yet in RePEc the main link is to the working paper. My older publications, of course, don't have online working paper versions and neither do most of my natural science publications.

ORCID

There is a global system for unique identification of electronic publications: DOI. But so far there is no unique system to identify researchers. Thompson/ISI has http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2011/02/researcher-id-to-be-more-integrated.html">Researcher ID but it is dependent on authors registering themselves and is still of limited utility. Databases such as RePEc or SSRN use their own

The ANU Energy Change Institute Launches Website

The Energy Change Institute at the ANU is launching its website. As you can see from the website, the Institute brings together researchers from many different areas across the ANU from artificial photosynthesis to energy economics and policy and from enhanced oil and gas extraction to solar photovoltaics. Several of my colleagues in the Crawford School and Research School of Economics are

Landmark Papers Boost Citations of Authors' Existing Papers

In an article titled "How Citation Boosts Promote Scientific Paradigm Shifts and Nobel Prizes", Amin Mazloumian et al. analyse the citation records of 124 Nobel Prize winners of the last two decades. They find that following the publication of a landmark highly cited paper, the existing papers of these authors receive increased citations. This effect was stronger for the Nobelists than for a

CCEP Working Papers in April 2011

In April we again got a decent number of downloads following adding RePEc links into our working paper homepage. Frank Jotzo's recent paper was most popular this month.

The Role of Energy in the Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth

I wrote this paper with Astrid Kander a few months ago following my visit to Lund, but it has only just been added to RePEc. In the paper, we develop a simple model of economic growth that allows for a significant role for energy and we apply the model to the Swedish data for the 19th and 20th centuries. To keep things as simple as possible the model is an extension of the famous Solow growth

Omumbo et al. Revisit Temperature at Kericho, Kenya

Last year I wrote a series of http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-cru-database.html">blogposts about the controversy over malaria and climate change in highland East Africa, and most specifically at Kericho, Kenya. Our previous research had shown that there was no signficant trend in temperature in various locations across Eastern Africa and so the increase in malaria morbidity

Astrid Kander

There is an article about my collaborator Astrid Kander in the Sydsvenskan newspaper. Apparently the reporter went to the same high school as her. ">Google's translation into English sounds quite poetic :)

Grattan Institute Report on Australia's Carbon Emissions Reduction Policies

The Grattan Institute has put out a report reviewing the performance of Australia's policies to reduce carbon emissions. Maybe you are surprised to find that there are quite a lot of these, actually, including some semi-market based mechanisms. The most important of these is the Renewable Energy Target. Electricity generators have to generate 20% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

If You Only Have 2 Hours to Teach Environmental Economics, What Would You Say?

All of us teaching Introductory Economics face this problem. This is what I'm going to say on Tuesday.

CCEP Working Papers in March 2011

CCEP Working Papers got a nice bounce in hits in March. I think this is partly due to us putting links to RePEc onto the CCEP website as well as releasing some new papers (also see the paper by Eric Knight and Nick Howarth and Hugh Saddler.

Two New CCEP Papers

We have two new CCEP working papers on RePEc:Inequality, communication and the avoidance of disastrous climate change by Alessandro Tavoni et al.andCarbon Pricing that Builds Consensus and Reduces Australia's Emissions: Managing Uncertainties Using a Rising Fixed Price Evolving to Emissions Trading by Frank Jotzo.We've changed the numbering system from these two papers onwards. Now the numbers

ERA Consultation Part II

I previously submitted comments on the ARC's ranked journal list for the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise. You can also http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_2012/era_consultation_march11.htm">submit more general comments on the ERA process. I only submitted one comment, suggesting that economics should be evaluated using citation analysis. Psychology was the only social science evaluated using

New Journal: Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy

Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy (EEEP), is a new journal published by the International Association for Energy Economics, focusing on policy issues involving energy and environmental economics. The first issue will be published in January 2012 and a call for papers has been issued. The editors are Jean-Michel Glachant (European University Institute in Florence, Italy), Paul L. Joskow (

Japan Nuclear Crisis

Even the Chinese government has suspended it's nuclear power construction program to learn more about what has gone wrong in Japan, but George Monbiot argues that this shouldn't stop us from pursuing nuclear power with certain safeguards. However, the facts are that large earthquakes are possible perhaps anywhere though their probability within any timeframe is lower away from plate boundaries.

Global Trends in Carbon and Sulfur Emissions

I'm preparing a lecture on environmental economics for both my course "Economic Way of Thinking 1" at the Crawford School and as a guest lecture in an introductory economics course at the Treasury. I'm planning to open the lecture by presenting some global and regional trends, focusing on carbon and sulfur emissions. First the global trends using data from CDIAC and Steven Smith:and then data by

Jones and Romer's Stylized Facts

Actually this very readable article is titled: "The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital". Kaldor proposed six "stylized facts" about the economic growth process. Jones and Romer propose six new ones. They are (in bold with my comments in plain text after them):1) Increases in the extent of the market. Increased flows of goods, ideas, finance, and people—via

A Small World or Not?

Academia often seems like a small world where everyone knows everyone else. But http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?trk=hb_tab_pro_top">my experiences on LinkedIn suggest the opposite. Most of the people I am connected to on LinkedIn are only connected to perhaps 1-2 people that I am already connected to and when I browse their lists of connections there are normally only 1-2 other people that I

Director of LSE Resigns over Libya Connections

As an alumnus of LSE I got an e-mail this morning announcing that the Director had stepped down. Here is the full announcement. Here is more background of what must have forced him out.It's strange that it was fashionable in the last few years to be involved with Libya in Western circles and now again it isn't.

Australian Data Lacunae

I spent most of yesterday at a workshop sponsored by the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism on establishing an energy efficiency framework for Australia. The government has made improved energy efficiency a priority but now faces the challenge of being able to measure progress on that goal. My main impression from the meeting was the paucity of data available in Australia on many issues

Introducing BREE

In July 2010 ABARES was formed by the merger of ABARE (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics) and BRS (Bureau of Rural Sciences) two Australian government research agencies. Now ABARES will be effectively dismantled by transferring the resource and energy economics parts of ABARES into the Department of Resources, Energy, and Tourism to form the new Bureau of Energy and

"Academic Age" of Authors of American Economic Review Articles

Torgler and Piatti have written a massive paper on the American Economic Review with heaps of tables, graphs, and regression analyses. This is what most caught my eye:Academic age is the number of years since an author got their PhD. The modal author of an AER article is about 4 years post PhD and there's quite a low probability of publication more than 20 years post-PhD. Maybe this is why people

How Does CSIRO Compare to Australian Universities?

The Australian government http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2011/02/era-report-released.html">recently released the ERA Report, which compared research at Australian universities to the rest of the world. But this report does not evaluate the performance of CSIRO Australia's system of natural laboratories.An article by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Batterham">Robin Batterham in the

Moved Office Again!

My new office is just across the corridor from my old one in Room 2.83 JGC (Crawford Buidling #132). My new phone number is 6125-3366. This is my 4th office since starting at ANU in April 2009!

Article on John List

Saw this article on John List linked at Marginal Revolution and decided to link from here too. List has contributed to both environmental and experimental economics and is famous among job candidates in economics for "publishing up" from his initial job at Central Florida U.

Chinese Energy Intensity Goals

Xinhua, the Chinese official news agency released the following item yesterday (I deleted points that are not relevant to this blog DS):February 28, 2011 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during an on-line chat with the public Sunday answered questions concerning economic growth targets, housing prices, migrant workers, currency exchange rate reform, health care insurance, and other matters.The

Inflation in China

As a follow up to my post on consumer price inflation in the US here are trends in the last couple of years in China:Credit: CEIC.Whereas the US chart showed the levels of price indices this chart shows the rate of inflation. Inflation is China is currently at 4.9%. The fastest rising category is food, which has a much bigger budget share than the in the US, as is typical of developing economies.

Synthesizing Diesel Fuel Using Cyanobacteria

A US firm called Joule has bioengineered cyanobacteria to secrete diesel or ethanol. The picture above is from the Washington Post version of the story and shows panels containing the organisms. But as is the case with other recent inventions the economics are not yet clear. The company claims they could produce fuel at $30 per barrel - a third of the current price of crude oil. They also claim

Consumer Price Inflation in the USA

The graph shows the increase in consumer prices over the last decade for the eight subcategories in the consumer price index (CPI) in the US and energy. Energy isn't a separate subcategory in the CPI but is included in the transport and housing categories. As you can see, energy prices are very volatile but have increased by more than other spending categories over this decade. The graph gives

IAmScientist Again

I finally added a profile to IAmScientist, which I mentioned a long time ago in what turned out to be my most popular post.I was impressed by how it found links to my publications on the web. The site then generates an abstract for each publication. But it doesn't generate links to those publications on the web. You have to upload a copy to IAmScientist.Also its communication and friending

2011 Ecological Economics Reviews is Published

The 2011 edition Ecological Economics Reviews has been published. Ecological Economics Reviews is an annual special issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences - a special issues only journal. This edition includes my paper "The Role of Energy in Economic Growth". There are 12 articles in total and there are a lot of Australian authors!Peter Wood (ANU): Climate change and game

Submitted Comments to the ERA Public Consultation

I submitted some comments to the consultation. Of course, I recommended JEEM and the Energy Journal both be ranked A* and that the Energy Journal actually be included in economics (as it is published by IAEE). I also recommended that History of Political Economy be downgraded from A* to B, that International Journal of Urban and Regional Research not be included in economics, and Journal of

Public Consultation on 2012 ERA Journal List Now Open

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has opened public consultation on the list of journals for the 2012 ERA exercise. A lot of people were concerned with the anomalies in the 2010 list. So now is your opportunity to make your contribution to improving the next list.

Why "Jevons Paradox" is an Argument for Stronger Action on Climate Change not Weaker

The 19th century economist William Jevons suggested that improvements in the efficiency of energy use devices could increase energy use rather than reduce it. The more efficient machines etc. would reduce the cost of production thereby increasing the amount demanded and sold and, therefore, the energy used to produce the products. The rebound effect is a modern statement of this idea: "Efficiency

Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations During Ancient Greenhouse Climates were Similar to those Predicted for A.D. 2100

That's the title of a paper published last year by Breecker et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Also see the commentary on the article). The key figure is this:The yellow band are previous estimates of atmospheric CO2 concentrations based on calcium carbonate in ancient soils. The revised estimates from this paper are marked in red and are more in agreement with

Australia's 2010 Emissions Projection Released

The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has released projections of Australian GHG emissions till 2020-30. They project that emissions will increase by 1.8% p.a. from 2010 to 2020. This is much faster growth than from 1990 to 2010. The reason is that reductions in land-clearing offset strong growth in other emissions in the latter period. And now there isn't much ability to reduce

ARC Decision Process

This looks to be good advice about how the ARC (Australian Research Council) decision process works. It's a couple of years old but I don't think there have been major changes in this time frame.

CCEP Working Papers in January 2011

We had a fairly disappointing number of abstract views/downloads this month. But we didn't put up any new papers and it is the middle of the summer here in Australia.

Researcher ID to be More Integrated into Web of Knowledge

Researcher ID allows researchers to "claim" their articles on the Web of Knowledge. Though you can view a researcher's profile if you know their ID number or they provide you with a link, this feature hasn't been integrated with the citation index.Thomson-Reuters plan to change this. The integration is pretty superficial at this stage. Only when you go to an article's full details will you see

ERA Report Released

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has released the ERA report (Excellence in Research for Australia). I've blogged before about this process. The Australian newspaper provides a graphic of the ranking of universities:ANU comes top and Melbourne second which isn't a surprise. UQ is third though which is higher than many may have expected. Melbourne is top ranked in economics though. That isn't

Leadership, Social Capital and Incentives Promote Successful Fisheries

A paper in Nature by Nicolas Gutierrez et al. carries out a meta-analysis of the literature on fisheries management. 130 fisheries are included. The aim was to test whether community co-management can promote sustainability as argued by Ostrom and others. They coded success of the fishery according to number of social, ecological and economic outcomes achieved and also counted the number of

Book Citation Index

Thomson Reuters is adding a "Book Citation Index" to the Web of Science. With the exception of some book series, up till now if your book publication was cited in a journal covered by the Web of Science that citation to your work was included in the Citation Index. But citations to your work in books, even from prestigious presses such as Cambridge were not included. The main source I currently

Cold Fusion Again?

I still remember how excited I was back in 1989 when the original claim of achieving of cold fusion was made. I remember sitting in the communal kitchen where I lived in North London and excitedly telling someone about how important it might be if it was real. They were surprised that I was excited about this one news item. Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall were to come later that

ARC Releases New Discovery Program Instructions

A couple of weeks ago the ARC released the new funding rules for this years grant applications. Now they have finally http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/dp/dp_instructions.htm">released the instructions for this year's applications. The main change that I have noticed so far are:1. Instead of separate sections on "Significance and Innovation" and "Approach and Methodology" in the Project Description (

A New Index from Jorge Hirsch: h-bar

Jorge Hirsch is a physicist at the University of California, San Diego who is mostly famous (outside physics at least) for inventing the h-index. A scholar's h-index is the number of his or her academic papers that have received at least h citations. It has become popular in large I think because it is easy to compute using Google Scholar or the ISI citation index. The main obstacles to

Early Bird Registration Extended to 29th January

If you are interested in sustainability and cities you might be interested in attending this conference to be held next month in Melbourne. Early bird registration has been extended. Visit the conference website to register.

Appointment in Crawford School

As of today I am an associate professor * in the Crawford School at ANU though only for the duration of 2011 at the moment. I'll be moving to the Crawford Building some time soon. In the coming semester I am teaching POGO 8016 The Economic Way of Thinking I, which is part of the Graduate Diploma in Policy and Governance program.* This rank is equivalent to full professor in the US system or at

Limits to Craziness

Should some academic papers not be published just because they seem too crazy? There is an interesting debate in the New York Times about whether a psychology paper claiming experimental evidence for people being able to predict supposedly random future events should have been published or not. I am in favor of papers that use solid methods being published, however, crazy the hypothesis that they

And Today a New Lighting Technology...

Another new technology to report on: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/26230/?ref=rss">lighting using cathode ray tube type technology. The claim is that it is cheaper than LEDs and safer than fluorescents.

China Meets Goal of Reducing Energy Intensity by 20% from 2005 to 2010

China claims that the goal of reducing energy intensity by 20% over 5 years has been met. The article should state BTW that energy intensity was cut 14.4% "by" 2009 not "in" 2009. A lot of us were skeptical that China could achieve this target. Two things helped achieve the target:1. Revisions to GDP that resulted in the growth rate of GDP in the earlier years of the period being revised up.2.

ARC Releases Funding Rules for 2012 Discovery Program

The ARC has released the new rules for projects starting in January 2012. The deadline for applying is 21 March 2011. The rules have been significantly changed and much simplified. The new document is about 1/3 the length of the old one. The main change is the introduction of "Discovery Outstanding Research Awards" (DORA - not to be confused with Dora the Explorer :)). These replace the

Artificial Photosynthesis

Interesting innovation - solar furnace that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water to carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These are necessary inputs in the Fischer-Tropsch process of synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons. So, this is effectively artificial photosynthesis. At the moment, the efficiency is no better than plant-based photosynthesis and the reactors would be more expensive than

Nighttime Image of Beijing and Tianjin from the International Space Station

Another cool (?) image from NASA. Taken by an astronaut aboard the space station, hence the oblique angle.

December 2010 Report on CCEP Working Papers

The CCEP Working Papers Series is off to a nice start in terms of downloads through RePEc. Total downloads for December were 292 with 171 abstract views. A lot of the downloads were generated by the NEP reports that the papers appeared in, which is why some papers have more downloads than abstract views. The sustainable rate of downloads will likely not be so high for those papers. Peter Wood's