Update on Energies Special Issue

We now have nine papers published in the special issue of Energies on energy transitions and economic change and there are more to come. The latest paper is by Robert Kaufmann on the end of cheap oil and the implications for the United States and the former Soviet Union. This was one of the invited papers. The other published so far was the paper by Steve Sorrell. Also recently published is a paper by James Kahn et al. on Brazil's plans for expanding hydropower and by Rodriguez-Molina et al. on the smart grid.

Upcoming Seminars

I am giving three seminars in Europe in October and November. First up is 28th October at 1pm at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics. I will talk about "Energy Transitions and the Industrial Revolution." Then on 12th November at 2:15pm I will talk at the Department of Economic History at Lund University. Topic: "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylised Facts"  - a topic that blog readers should be pretty familiar with by now.

Finally, I will be presenting at the University of Kassel in Germany on 18th November. More details to come.

Fuel Choices in Rural Maharashtra Accepted for Publication

My paper with former masters student Jack Gregory was just accepted for publication in Biomass & Bioenergy. Jack is just starting his PhD at University of California, Davis.

This paper went through one of the more tortuous paths to publication, largely because we didn't have any sort of price data, which made the paper less interesting to economics journals. This is where we sent it: World Development (submitted 27 Jan 2012, desk reject, too narrow case study), Environment and Development Economics (referee review), Energy Policy (referee review), Energy (desk reject, too economics focused), Biomass and Bioenergy (revise and resubmit and accept). More than 2.5 years to get it published. But that's not very unusual...

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.

New Professorial and Research Positions at SPRU, University of Sussex

SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex, UK is embarking on an ambitious new research strategy, focused on long-term transformative change and innovation. As part of this strategy, we are looking to recruit three dynamic, innovative and highly respected academic leaders to join the SPRU team as Professors. In addition, we are seeking to appoint two experienced research staff to join the Research Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED), led by the Sussex Energy Group at SPRU. The posts are as follows:

Professor of Energy Policy: This person will lead the Sussex Energy Group and will have an outstanding background in energy and climate policy, preferably with an emphasis on innovation and transitions.

Professor in Sustainability Transitions: This person will have an outstanding background in sustainability transitions, history of technology and/or science and technology studies.

Professor in Innovation and Evolutionary Economics: This person will have an outstanding background in evolutionary economics, economics of innovation, institutional economics, economic history and/or development economics.

Senior Fellow in Innovation and Energy Demand: This person will have a strong track record in innovation studies and/or energy and climate policy and will be expected to help shape the Centre’s research programme and design and lead research projects.

 Research Fellow in Innovation and Energy Demand: This person will have a background in innovation studies and/or energy and climate policy and will be expected to design and lead research projects and conduct empirical research.

 Full details of the jobs can be found here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/newsandevents/apps/jobs

Citation Data for Citation Prediction Paper Now Available

The data underlying my recent working paper: "High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information" are now available from the ANU Data Repository. The data set includes most journal articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and included in the Web of Science and the number of citations that received each year through 2012. There is also a worksheet with all economics articles from 1999 too. That's not mentioned in the working paper but is mentioned in the revised version of the article I just resubmitted to the journal. The journal's (PLoS ONE) data policy requires all data to be made available with DOI's if possible. This is definitely the current trend and looks like becoming the norm. For example, Energy Economics requires both data and code to be submitted prior to publication. I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously I am in favor of replicability but putting together datasets costs time and/or money and so it seems a bit unfair to force authors to make their data freely available as the price of publication.

P.S. 9th September
My paper was accepted at PLoS ONE! :)

"Economic Growth and the Transition from Traditional to Modern Energy in Sweden" to be Published in Energy Economics

We started working on this paper when I visited Sweden in September 2010. It took a while till we were both happy with the paper. Then we submitted it to what I think is the top economic history journal. We got a revise and resubmit. I worked hard to do exactly what the referees wanted but the editor rejected the paper. I think this was a first for me. Of course, I had declined to resubmit papers in the past because I thought the chances were better elsewhere. Then we submitted to another economic history journal who gave us a revise and resubmit too. But this time we decided to not resubmit as it seemed unlikely we could please the referees. So, then I submitted the paper to Energy Economics and got a "minor revisions" and now it is accepted. This is a fairly typical story I think in terms of time taken and submissions made.

Jakob et al. (2012) Revisited

A recent paper by Jakob et al. (2012) finds that there is decoupling between growth in energy use and growth in GDP in developed countries. The authors regress the first differences between five year period means of log per capita energy use on the same transformation of GDP per capita separately for panels of OECD and non-OECD countries. They have 21 OECD and 30 non-OECD countries between 1971 and 2010. They estimate that the elasticity in developing countries is 0.631 (standard error = 0.167) and in developed countries -0.181 (0.343).

I was curious why these results are very different from those in our stylized facts paper where we find a stable monotonic relationship between energy use and PPP GDP per capita over the 1971-2010 period for 99 countries (75 non-OECD, 24 OECD) with an elasticity of around 0.70. Obviously, Jakob et al.'s method is different, their sample is smaller, and they also use market exchange rates. So, I re-estimated their model using our dataset. I find that the elasticity in developing countries is 0.395 (0.081) and in OECD countries 0.479 (0.078). This is in line with our stylized facts results. The numbers are lower probably due to using differences and country and time fixed effects.

In supplementary material, Jakob et al. report that when they use PPP GDP data from the World Development Indicators the elasticity estimates are 0.626 (0.180) and -0.353 (0.474) for non-OECD and OECD countries respectively. I would have doubted that the differences are mostly due to the different source of PPP data  - we used the Penn World Table - but our OECD sample only includes three countries omitted by Jakob et al. So, this will need further investigation.

Reference

Jakob, M., M. Haller, and R. Marschinski (2012). “Will History Repeat Itself? Economic Convergence and Convergence in Energy Use Patterns.” Energy Economics 34: 95–104.

Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax with Global Temperature Indexation

The Climate Colab at MIT is running a competition for innovative climate policy proposals. Richard Hobbs is a local contender in this competition. You can support his proposal or make comments here. The winner will get to fly to MIT to present their proposal to US politicians, policy makers, economists, business executives and NGOs. Richard's proposal is a revenue-neutral carbon tax meant as a policy platform for the Republicans to bring forward to the next US election. It is revenue-neutral (cutting capital gains taxes and corporate taxes) and it is temperature indexed (so if climate sceptics are right the price trends to a low level).

Online Accessibility of Scholarly Literature, and Academic Innovation

Kevin Staub presented this paper today at ANU. They download data on all papers in fifty core economics journals over the decades of the 1990s and 2000s during which academic journals gradually went online. They test the effect of the fraction of references cited in article being online on the diversity of references cited. Diversity is measured by the average citation difference between articles in the reference list. Imagine I write an article and in the reference list I cite this paper by Kevin Staub and Martin Weitzman's article on recombinant growth cited by Staub then the distance between those two articles is 1. If I also cite Paul Romer's article "The Origins of Endogenous Growth" cited by Weitzman then the distance between Staub's paper and Romer's is 2 and between Weitzman and Romer is 1. Controlling for time and journal fixed effects and some other control variables they found that there were significant increases in the share of references with distances of 3 or greater the more of the reference list was available online. This seems expected to me as people find it easier to search for literature beyond the reference lists or even the forward citations of articles they have already seen as more of the literature is searchable online.

But the paper contains another result which I found much less expected and much more interesting that I think deserves a paper of its own. They found that papers with higher average distances between items on their reference lists received higher numbers of citations 20, 30, or 40 years down the track than papers with less diverse reference lists. So, this supports the notion that papers that bring together articles that were not previously cited together are more innovative. One might expect papers with more eclectic references to be produced by less professional more dilettantish authors. Of course, these papers were all published in the fifty core economics journals, so that probably acts to filter out the more outlandish papers or papers written by "outsiders" that are doomed to be ignored.

Frank Jotzo Responds to Danny Price

Frank has an op ed in today's Australian Financial Review - responding to Danny Price's op-ed last Wednesday which I also commented on, on this blog, last week. Here is a non-paywalled version of Frank's op-ed.

Follow Me on Twitter

I'm planning on tweeting all my blogposts from now on, so you can follow me on Twitter. My username is sterndavidi. I've had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it much until now.

New ANU Open Access Policy

ANU researchers are now required to submit all published research outputs to our institutional open access repository. Details of the policy are here. Material should be submitted here. Previously, this was on a voluntary basis. Holders of ARC grants would have needed to justify why outputs of their project were not available on an open access basis. As in economics we have a very strong working paper culture this seems unnecessary. But that isn't the case in other disciplines and I guess a one size fits all policy is easier to implement and enforce.

Direct Action vs. Carbon Pricing

There was an op-ed in yesterday's Australian Financial Review by Danny Price criticising the 59 economists including me who agreed to sign a statement in favour of carbon pricing and praising direct action. First, a clarification. By signing that statement we were not endorsing the previous Labor government's Emissions Trading Scheme. We were simply endorsing some pricing mechanism on carbon. Price criticises carbon pricing because of the "cost to the broader economy of any tax". Here he seems to be referring to the tax interaction effect. Where there are existing distorting taxes,  a new tax interacts with these and increases the costs of the new tax beyond the amount of the direct costs involved with abating pollution. The advantage of a carbon tax is that the revenue from the tax can allow the government to cut existing distorting taxes and reduce of offset this effect. This is known as a "green tax reform" and was much discussed in the so-called "double dividend debate". But imposing a regulatory cap on emissions (and issuing free tradeable permits) results in the same increased costs in the presence of existing distortionary taxes. So, this is why economists generally recommend auctioning emissions trading permits rather than giving them away.* This raises revenue allowing other distortionary taxes to be cut. Direct action is effectively a cap on emissions where the government subsidizes firms reducing emissions through a reverse auction. But this uses government revenue and doesn't allow the cutting of other taxes unless the government budget is cut drastically, which doesn't look like happening. If other spending isn't cut at all then the government will have to increase the existing distortionary taxes. So, direct action is worse than a carbon tax or traded permits on this basis. However, Price says that under direct action the government only imposes one dollar of costs on the economy for every dollar spent. This seems to be incorrect.

On top of that are the problems of the incentives for firms to inflate the baseline from which they claim they will reduce emissions.

So, I'm still in favor of carbon pricing of some sort though I think there are also important problems with emissions trading schemes that only provide a very volatile short-term price signal. The article by Ottmar Edenhofer in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change discusses some of these issues.

* I've argued that the Australian scheme failed because due to objections by the Greens, not enough free permits were given away allowing the scheme to be characterised as a "huge tax". The Australian scheme was less generous than the European scheme. But any such giveaway should be a transitory policy that would be replaced by more auctioning of permits over time.

Environmental and Resource Economics Journals

There aren't that many field journals in environmental, resource, and energy economics in the Journal Citation Reports:

REEP and JEEM are clearly the top journals in terms of article influence scores but Ecological Economics dominates the field as measured by Eigenfactor Score or total citations because it is a much bigger journal. JEEM is also ranked 48th among economics journals by Article Influence, so this whole field is not that highly ranked.

2013 JCR Released

The 2013 edition of Journal Citation Reports has been released. I don't like the new interface that was recently introduced and it wasn't obvious how to download data easily but then I discovered there was a button at top right to download everything you had results on at that point without selecting journals individually. So, now I figured that there will be more analysis coming. Anyway, here is the report for PLoS ONE, which is the journal visitors to my blog seem most interested in :)

Yes, the journal lost ground again on all impact metrics as has been expected. It still does fairly well for a journal that publishes so many papers. I have an article under review with submission number 40332 submitted on 16th July. So, using those numbers and last year's number of published articles we get an acceptance rate of 42%, which is likely to be an underestimate if the number of articles published is still rising.

Ed Prescott to Speak at ANU

Ed Prescott (Nobel Laureate in Economics) will give the Trevor Swan Distinguished Lecture at ANU on 13th August. The lecture will be titled: Neoclassical Growth Theory: From Swan to Now. The blurb says:

"The Swan 1956 growth model is the cornerstone of secular growth theory. To broaden the model to encompass aggregate business cycle fluctuations Kydland and Prescott added an aggregate household to explain investment- savings and labor-leisure decisions. With this addition, neoclassical growth theory came into existence. Extensions of this theory have proven successful in the study of stock markets, growth miracles, prosperities and depressions, alternative tax policies, and differences in aggregate labor supply across countries and time. Deviations from the predictions of this theory are puzzles to be resolved and their resolutions have advanced neoclassical growth theory."

Unfortunately, I have to teach at that time, but I am hoping it will be recorded and some people will ask some good questions. Some of Prescott's work on growth is pretty fundamental to our current research on economic growth and economic history.

Future of Solar

At the workshop in A Toxa I attended in late June, Richard Schmalensee presented findings of a yet to be released MIT report on the "Future of Solar". This will be part of their series on the future of energy. He was skeptical of how much of a role solar can play any time soon in addressing the climate issue. It's not clear that the costs of solar can come down a lot more when most of the costs are now in the non-silicon components. There is also the issue of rare materials needed for alternatives to silicon. Then there is the intermittency / storage issue. Yes, we keep hearing about storage breakthroughs, but they aren't yet commercial products. And even when they will be they will add further huge costs to the cost of solar. There is a need for new transmission infrastructure to the renewable locations. Electricity markets may need to be reformed again to handle the intermittent new renewables effectively.  Back in April, I noted that Ottmar Edenhofer stated that there was an increasing realisation of the difficulties of integrating renewable energy on a large scale into electricity supply systems. These are some of the issues alluded to and the reason that CCS and other alternatives are getting renewed consideration.

Essential Concepts of Global Environmental Governance Now Available

This book, which I contributed an entry on the EKC to, is now available from Routledge. There are some nice blurbs from well-known people:

"This volume provides an essential glossary of critical terms and concepts in the field of international environmental politics for diplomats, analysts and students. The interdisciplinary array of expert authors provide terse and authoritative overview of the key concepts and debates that have defined the field of international environmental governance over the years. The entries carefully survey the intellectual ecosystem of the concepts applied to understanding and managing our global environmental crisis." –Peter M. Haas, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

"In a truly unique way, this book helps to connect the dots and navigate between the concepts, ideas and schools of thought in global environmental policy today. As environmental issues climb higher on the global agenda, I would highly recommend this book to all who wish to better understand the insights of sustainable global governance." –Connie Hedegaard, European Union Commissioner for Climate Action

"The global community is at a crossroads in respect to addressing climate change. A solid understanding of global environmental governance empowers people to better shape positive democracy that determines a safer future. This book makes a valuable contribution to societal understanding and societal change. Those who care about the world we leave to our children should take inspiration from its many and varied contributors drawn from so many disparate but interlocking disciplines." –Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 

Henriques PhD Dissertation on the Energy History of Portugal Now Available on the Web

Sofia has posted her dissertation to Academia.edu. It includes the data. She studied in Lund with Astrid Kander and is now at the University of Southern Denmark.

Latest Journal Metrics Released

Elsevier have released the latest edition of their journal metrics - SNIP and SJR. There is also a new metric - Impact per Publication (IPP), which is just a simple three year impact factor. This time the Energy Journal has an SJR (1.533) but still no SNIP. That makes it the 120th ranked journal in economics. Energy Economics ranks 89th with an SJR of 2.025, and Resources and Energy Economics at 151st with an SJR of 1.274. There are 890 economics journals. Ecological Economics is 98th (SJR=1.91). The QJE is the top ranked economics journal (SJR=25.2), Econometrica is second (18.9), and Journal of Political Economy is third (18.5).

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.

Global Growth Rate of GDP and Energy Use

Another slide from Wednesday's opening lecture. It shows the tight correlation between the annual global economic growth rate and the growth rate of energy use. In all but one year, energy use grew more slowly than GDP implying a decline in energy intensity. That year was 2010 - the year of strong rebound growth in the global economy and energy use following the Great Recession in the US and Europe. We analysed these movements in our short 2012 paper in Nature Climate Change.

Top Twenty Carbon Emitters, Coal Consumers, and Coal Producers

Some slides from my upcoming introductory lecture for my Energy Economics course:

This slide uses CDIAC data on the top twenty countries by emission of carbon dioxide globally in 2010. Carbon dioxide emissions here include only those from fossil fuel combustion and cement production. I also have summed up the emissions from the European Union and added it as if it was a single country (as the EU negotiates as a bloc) in addition to including all its member countries in the ranking. The three big emitters stand out clearly from all the rest. Emissions are measured by mass of carbon. To get carbon dioxide multiply by 3.66.

 

Of course, coal use is a big driver of CO2. This chart shows how China consumers so much more coal than any other country and after the US and India, the rest look pretty inconsequential.

 

On the whole, coal is consumed where it is produced with two important exceptions - Indonesia and Australia - the two biggest coal exporters. China produces the overwhelming majority of the coal it uses despite large imports. The majority of Australian exports are coal for iron smelting, so-called "metalurgical coal".