Managing the Transition to a Sustainable Economy

On Thursday morning at 9:35am I'll be presenting at the Managing the Transition to a Sustainable Economy Conference at Griffith University in Brisbane. I'll be presenting my paper on Drivers of Industrial and Non-Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions. This is a slight change from the original paper I was supposed to present, as that got published in the meantime, and the organizers only want unpublished research. I blogged about the paper in March. Right after me, John Foster is speaking.  John Gowdy from my former university RPI is also speaking at the conference. The full schedule is here.

Update

Haven't blogged for over a month. Partly this is because I am doing more tweeting and also because I have been busy with the end of semester and traveling to Turkey (IAEE conference), Israel, and Abu Dhabi (International Energy Workshop). This was my first time attending the IEW. I think there is good feedback in the parallel sessions - better than at the IAEE meeting. On the other hand, the IAEE plenaries are more consistent, I think. IEW is strongly tied to the ETSAP modeling forum, which precedes it - TIMES/MARKAL models - and is attended by "modelers" rather than the mix of business, government, and academic communities at IAEE.

In other news, our paper on the behavior of carbon dioxide emissions in the short-run has been published in Global Environmental Change. The article is open access until 26 July. Also our survey paper in the Review of Economics is also open access.

Workshop on Research Metrics

I submitted one of the 152 responses to HEFCE's call for evidence on research metrics. BTW, my paper was just accepted by PLoS ONE :) Anyway, HEFCE and the University of Sussex are holding a one day workshop at SPRU on the potential for metrics in research assessment. Register here and see the program here. As I am in Australia, unfortunately I can't attend - I'm actually going to be in England in late October and early November - but maybe some of you can.

A Toxa Meeting Website

The website with links to recordings of all the presentations at the 6th Atlantic Workshop in A Toxa is now up. I presented our paper on modelling the emissions-income relationship using long-run growth rates. There are also a few pictures. I'm somewhere in the back row in this one:

Call for Papers: 2015 IAEE International Conference in Antalya

The call for papers has been released for the 38th International Conference of the IAEE in Antalya, Turkey in May 2015 (25th-27th). The conference will be held at a golf resort. Deadline for abstract submissions is 19th December.

World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics

I am, like almost 1200 other participants, at the WCERE in Istanbul. Yesterday there was an interesting panel session on climate change with Jeffrey Sachs, Ottmar Edenhofer (who is apparently meeting the Pope today), Marianne Fay from the World Bank,  Laurence Tubiana - the new French climate change ambassador - and Carlo Carraro as chair. All the participants agreed that the new framework for climate change policy that will be established at Paris next year must make a break from previous agreements and pledges in consisting primarily of designing long-term transformation pathways rather than primarily short-term targets. Obviously, short-term steps will still be needed. The thinking behind this was best expressed by Marianne Fay. She showed a slide with a picture of the Freedom Tower in New York and a small cottage side by side. She asked: "If you wanted to build this tower, would the house on the left be a reasonable first step?" Similarly, we could ask whether shifting to natural gas is a reasonable first step to decarbonizing the economy. A long-term perspective is needed. Jeffrey Sachs made a point that spot carbon markets aren't an appropriate tool for long-term climate policy. The short-term price keeps fluctuating and there is no long-term futures market. Instead a predictably rising carbon tax is needed. Technology policies are also needed to complement the carbon price. The consensus is that this is where we should head.

Follow Up on "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts" at Econbrowser

James Hamilton has a new post on Econbrowser based partly on our paper Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts which I recently presented at the IAEE meeting in New York. I'd add that oil use has been flat in recent years but that was compensated for by increases in the use of natural gas, coal, and renewables. So, recent data don't substantially deviate from our stylized fact.

Today, I arrived at A Toxa, an island in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain. It is really beautiful here. Tomorrow the 6th Atlantic Workshop on Energy and Environmental Economics
starts here. I am giving a presentation in the final session tomorrow on our paper on modeling the emissions-income relationship using long-run growth rates.

IAEE Asia Conference

I just agreed to give a presentation in a dual plenary session at the IAEE Asia Conference in Beijing in September. The topic of the session will be climate change policy. I'll report on our research on understanding the costs of mitigation policies.

Presentation at AARES Conference

I am giving a presentation at AARES in Port Macquarie next week. Thursday afternoon to be precise. It's titled "Rethinking the Emissions-Income Relationship in Terms of Growth Rates" and is an extension of the Environmental Kuznets Curve and Green Solow Models. My coauthors are Reyer Gerlagh, Paul Burke, and Zeba Anjum. I'm presenting in a session on climate change. My postdoc, Yingying Lu is also presenting in the session on our joint work on sensitivity analysis of the costs of climate change policies. The other two papers are from my colleague Frank Jotzo and Simon Dietz from LSE.

ANZSEE 2013 Presentation

I'm at the ANZSEE 2013 conference. As it is in the Crawford Building, I don't actually need to go anywhere to be "at" the conference :) So far it has been quite interesting with an opening plenary by John Thwaites from Monash on the report of the National Sustainability Council. My presentation is on Thursday morning at 8:30am in Weston Theatre in the Crawford Building. It's titled: "Identifying the effect of the elasticity of substitution on the rate of economic growth"...

World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics 2014

The European Association of Environmental and Resource Economics (EAERE) and the US based Association of Environmental and Resource Economics hold a joint meeting every four years called The World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics. 2014's meeting will be in Istanbul from 28 June to 2 July. The deadline for submission of sessions is 1 December 2013 and for individual papers 15 January 2014. Submissions are peer reviewed. Details of submission requirements are yet to be released.

I was at the first of these World Congresses in Venice in 1998. But I haven't been to one since. I've always wanted to visit Turkey, but the nearest I've got is Istanbul airport this year in June. So, this looks like a good opportunity.

2014 IAEE Conference in New York City

Next year's IAEE international meeting is in New York City from 15th to 18th June. I went to my first IAEE meeting in 2012 in Perth, this year's meeting was in Korea and I was tempted to go as I enjoyed my previous visit to Korea but it clashed with everything else I was doing this northern summer. In Perth I gave a presentation on the stylized facts of energy and economic growth. Until recently there was only a presentation and no paper. But I have been working recently with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei at WU on turning the presentation into a real paper. Maybe I could present on it again in New York? Some of the facts have changed a little since my presentation, as we have analyzed the data... but only my energy economics class has seen the new version.

First International Workshop on Econometric Applications in Climatology: Report

I spent last week in the US and Canada including attending the First International Workshop on Econometric Applications in Climatology. There was a spectrum of presentations on the scepticism dimension. I don't think anyone convinced anyone else but it was all very civilised. There were also both economists and natural scientists, papers on paleo and recent data etc. The papers are available from the conference website. I thought the most interesting presentation was by Shaun Lovejoy. He expanded more in his presentation along the lines of his recent paper "The climate is not what you expect". Christopher Essex's presentation was also very interesting. He presented long-time exposure (6 months - an example above) photos that show that what is visible on that time scale is different than our everyday experience. Cars on roads disappear but cars in parking lots become like quantum mechanical probability peaks. I got some helpful comments on my paper too.

ANZSEE Conference 2013

The 2013 ANZSEE Conference will take place in November at the Crawford School. All abstracts are due by 26th July. There will both be traditional papers and "working groups" that sound something like panel discussions. The last ANZSEE conference went to was the ANZSEE Conference in Darwin in 2009, which I thought was a great conference. The last ANZSEE or ISEE conference in Canberra was the 2000 ISEE Conference.

IAEE 2013

There are only a few days left to submit a paper to IAEE 2013. It overlaps with IEW 2013 so you can't got to both. I would love to visit Korea again though and the IAEE meeting in Perth last year was pretty good. But even if my abstract isn't accepted at IEW, I still want to go to Europe so I think I'll drop the idea of going to Korea.

Upcoming Conference Deadlines

I just submitted papers to EAERE 2013, which is in Toulouse and the International Energy Workshop, which is in Paris. Both in June. The deadline for both is 1st February. EAERE requires presenters to submit a full paper, while IEW says your chances of getting accepted are better if you do.

First International Workshop on Econometric Applications in Climatology

There is a Call for Papers for the First International Workshop on Econometric Applications in Climatology to be held at the University of Guelph, Canada June 5-7, 2013. The deadline is 28 February.

It is interesting that there is enough activity in this space to hold a conference. It has definitely been attracting more and more attention. We - Robert Kaufmann and I - were pioneers in this area starting with our paper in Nature in 1997. Despite the relative success of this first paper I didn't find it an easy field to make much headway in and gave up on that line of inquiry around 2005-6. Robert persevered with some success. I now actually have a new paper in preparation. I hoep to get round to finishing it later this month. Maybe I should submit it to this conference?

Posts on 2012 MAER Colloquium

Margaret Giles and Tom Stanley have both posted some information and links about the recent MAER Colloquium in Perth. I'm the tall guy in the middle of the back row. The next colloquium will be in London. Greenwich to be exact. Organized by Mehmet Ugur.

MAER-Net Colloqium

Somehow I never mentioned that I will be participating in this year's MAER-Net Colloqium in Perth. MAER-Net is a network of researchers using meta-analysis in economics. Meta-analysis is of course the statistical analysis of existing quantitative studies. It started in the area of medical and drug trials and is now used in many fields. There have been annual MAER Net Colloqia so far in Conway, Arkansas (home of Hendrix College and Tom Stanley), Cambridge, and now Perth. I'm presenting on our meta-analysis of the energy-GDP causality literature. We have a rough draft of a paper completed (as of yesterday) but I'd prefer to get some feedback at the workshop first before putting it up as an official working paper. We do have some interesting findings regarding this literature as well as some suggestions for new meta-analysis models. But if you are interested you will have to be patient :)

Also, a reminder that I will be giving a presentation at UWA on Friday.

The Future of Homo Sapiens