Tuesday, November 18, 2014

How Ambitious is China's Proposal to Peak CO2 Emissions by 2030?

A few days ago China and the US jointly announced emissions targets for 2030. China proposes that their carbon emissions will peak by not later than 2030. How ambitious is this goal? In our 2010 paper in Energy Policy, Frank Jotzo and I asked how ambitious China's 2020 target to reduce emission intensity by 40-45% between 2005 and 2020 was. We concluded that it represented significant effort beyond expected intensity reductions under business as usual.

In a recent paper Xiliang Zhang and coauthors project Chinese emissions under three scenarios. Under a no policy scenario, emissions rise to 16.5 billion tonnes (Gt) in 2030 and continue to rise throughout the century. Under their "continued effort" scenario where current policy initiatives are continued, emissions rise to 11.8 Gt in 2030 and peak in 2045. Finally, under their accelerated effort scenario, emissions rise to 10.2 Gt in 2030 where they peak. So, on this basis, China's proposal does constitute a new accelerated effort.

Another way of looking at these scenarios is in terms of the rate of reduction in emissions intensity in 2030. The rates are -1.9%, -3.4%, and -4.1% respectively. China's 2020 emissions intensity target represents a 3.6% annual rate of reduction in emissions intensity from 2005 to 2020. So, by this metric the new target represents an increase in effort over the current policies.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Figshare

I just signed up for Figshare. In case you haven't heard about it yet, it is a site for sharing all kinds of research data. I uploaded the citation data I used in my 2013 article in the Journal of Economic Literature. This was a lot easier than adding data to my university's data repository so, in future, I think I will use Figshare exclusively for larger datasets I want to make public. The service is free and you get a DOI for your dataset.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Article Published Today in PLoS ONE

My paper "High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information" was published today in PLoS ONE. For background on the paper, check out my blogpost or this story on the Crawford School website.

I'm travelling tomorrow to Kassel where I will be working with Stephan Bruns on what we think is a really awesome (Stephan's words :)) extension to this paper. We are also hoping to finish an econometric theory paper we are writing.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Stylized Facts Paper Accepted for Publication

My paper with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and Mar Rubio: "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts" has been accepted for publication in the Energy Journal. I've already blogged quite a bit about the paper so won't repeat that here. What is new is that we also now have a working paper version available. The working paper version has color figures, which I think are prettier and easier to understand in some cases than the black and white ones we had to use for publication.