Barcelona Talk

I'll be giving a presentation in the "distinguished speakers series" at ICAT, Autonomous University of Barcelona on 5th December. I just wrote the abstract:

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

Abstract: Ecological and mainstream economists have debated the importance of energy in economic growth. Ecological economists usually argue that energy plays a central role in growth, while mainstream economists usually downplay the importance of energy. Using the (mainstream) theory of directed technological change, I show how increasing scarcity of biomass could induce coal-using innovation in Britain, resulting in the acceleration in the rate of economic growth known as the Industrial Revolution. Paradoxically, industrialization would be delayed in countries with more abundant biomass resources. However, as energy has become increasingly abundant, the growth effect of additional energy use has declined. Furthermore, both directed technological change theory and empirical evidence show that innovation has increasingly focused on improving the productivity of labor rather than that of energy. This explains the focus of mainstream economic growth models on labor productivity enhancing innovation as the driver of economic growth.

The paper will draw on my 2012 paper with Astrid Kander – it shares the same title after all – my recent working paper with Jack Pezzey and Yingying Lu, and maybe my ongoing work with Akshay Shanker on understanding trends in energy intensity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. The talk is for an interdisciplinary audience, so that will be challenging, but I think I can do it :)

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.

My Year in Review 2014

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011, they're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. It is now a full year since I ended my term as research director at the Crawford School. As a result, it has been a really productive year research-wise :)

I published five articles in the following journals: PLOS ONE, Biomass and Bioenergy, Energy Economics, The Energy Journal, and Climatic Change, and we have a paper in press at The Energy Journal. We also released three working papers that aren't yet published: "Modeling the Emissions-Income Relationship Using Long-run Growth Rates", "Substitutability and the Cost of Climate Mitigation Policy", "Global Energy Use: Decoupling or Convergence". There are four more papers that we have sent for review but have not yet posted as working papers.

We also published our edited book of classic papers on the economics of climate change with Edward Elgar. There is also Chapter 5 of the IPCC Report on trends and drivers of emissions and a small piece on the environmental Kuznets curve and there is an updated review of the EKC, which will be published in the Elsevier Online Resources.

The release of the IPCC 5th assessment report in April was of course a big event and I appeared on TV and radio several times - first on the release day and then in some follow-up coverage on the supposed cover up in the Summary for Policymakers.

ABC News24

This was the final year of our ARC grant (actually, March 2015 is formally the end of the project). Astrid Kander visited Sydney in February to work with researchers at UNSW and Jack Pezzey and I went to meet up with her and work on our project. She rented a house for her and two other Swedish researchers close to Coogee Beach (and to UNSW), so it was a very nice research trip :) The weather wasn't quite as good when I visited Lund in November for a week!

Coogee Beach, Sydney


I also visited England and Germany on my October-November trip giving seminars at LSE, Lund, and University of Kassel. That was my third international trip of the year. In June-July I did a round the world trip including the IAEE conference in New York City, the Atlantic Workshop in A Toxa, and the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul. In September I attended the IAEE Asia meeting in Beijing as well as a workshop at Tsinghua University. The AARES Conference in Port Macquarie, NSW rounds off the conference list and I also gave a couple of seminars in Canberra in the first half of the year.

 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Two researchers visited me to collaborate - Zsuzsanna Csereklyei in January and February and Chunbo Ma in April. I wrote an ARC Discovery proposal with Zsuzsanna, which wasn't funded but we were in the top 10% of the unfunded proposals and so we'll give it another go. Chunbo came to work on the current ARC grant. We have now submitted a paper on substitution elasticities in China, which I presented at the Tsinghua workshop in September.

The special issue of Energies on "Energy Transitions and Economic Change", which I guest edited is now completed with fourteen papers are already published including the final paper by Astrid Kander and colleagues.

It was my last time teaching the introductory micro-economics class The Economic Way of Thinking 1. This course was great for the positive feedback I got from some of the students on the course. All the students are from developing countries and many are a bit "scared" of math and economics. After going through this course a lot of students feel much more confident dealing with this kind of material. In the coming year I will be teaching quantitative methods to environmental studies students instead. I also taught my energy economics course again and will continue to teach it in the future. It is being rebranded next year as an economics course, IDEC8029, instead of a general Crawford School course (CRWF8017).

It's hard to believe, but I posted more than 100 blogposts this year. The most popular was this one, a close runner-up is the post on the animated gif of energy use and growth, which we produced at James Hamilton's suggestion. I met Hamilton at the IAEE meeting in New York. I also got much more involved with Twitter this year. Mostly, I tweet my blogposts, but also tweet short items, which don't really need comment or analysis, that in the past I might have blogged about.

Energy and Growth: The Animated GIF

As always, it is possible to predict some of the things that will be happening in the coming year. I expect a couple more papers will get completed over the summer. Also, we are going to resubmit the ARC proposal, hopefully this time successfully. There will also be a couple of book chapters surveying the energy and growth topic. One for Palgrave. I've submitted abstracts to a bunch of conferences in Rotorua (AARES), Perth (at Curtin U), Leeds (ESEE), and Antalya (IAEE) and will likely submit to the EAERE conference in Helsinki. Not sure how many of these I can actually go to. Maybe my coauthors will present at some of them. Hopefully Donglan Zha will get funding to visit Crawford from the middle of next year.

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.

Seminar at University of Kassel

I promised more details on my seminar at University of Kassel: here they are. I will present our paper on modeling the emissions income relationship using long-run growth rates. My presentation will be at 2pm on 18 November in Sitzungsraum K33/FB07. If you need more details about location, ask Stephan Bruns who is organizing the "Empirical Workshop on Energy, Environment, and Climate Change" of which this talk is part. The workshop starts at 10 am and there will also be presentations by Heike Wetzel, Andreas Ziegler, Astrid Dannenberg, and Stephan.

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.

Help Fund a Cool Research Project

Pun intended :) A bit off the beaten path for this blog, but I did warn you it would be a random walk. Faruk Kececi is an online friend who unfortunately wasn't in Istanbul the week we visited. You can contribute money on Kickstarter.

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.

The New York Times Spends 36 Hours in:

Canberra! There are a couple of places on the list I hadn't heard of, like Hippo Co...

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.

Travel Cost Study: Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenya

I was interested to see a working paper on pricing Lake Nakuru National Park, which I recently visited.  They find that the revenue maximizing price for foreign visitors is $1500 compared to a fee of $75 currently. It is hard to imagine it could be this high given the existence of substitutes, though obviously some foreign visitors would be able to pay it. For comparison our whole trip for four days to Lake Nakuru and Maasai Mara cost less per person than than this suggested entrance fee for one day at one national park.

Back from IPCC Meeting

I'm finally back in Australia after travelling for almost 4 weeks including a week spent at the IPCC meeting in Addis Ababa. In the meantime Australia changed prime minister and all bets seem to be off about what party will be in power in Australia after the next federal election which should take place later this year. I was also in Spain, Israel, and Kenya, which was especially fascinating. This is one of the best of the many pictures that Shuang took:


Lion, Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya

In Addis I confirmed that I am very sensitive to high altitudes (2400m) got altitude sickness and then when I had apparently covered really got ill and am still recovering. So, I only got to about half the meetings I was supposed to be at. This is the fourth and final meeting for regular authors on the Working Group III's contribution to the 5th Assessment Report. We were addressing the comments from government representatives as well as additional comments from academics, NGOs etc. There is also a continued effort to try to make the report an integrated and readable whole which is a real challenge with so many chapter teams working most of the time alone and so many authors in each chapter team. Using the time at the author meetings effectively is important and difficult. The IPCC is seeking comments from member governments on its future. Here are the responses of the UK and Dutch governments. Both suggest the obvious that the IPCC should use the web more effectively and perhaps update its products on more of a rolling basis. The UN structure that the IPCC is embedded in makes this difficult I think. Everything needs to be approved by member governments. The inflexibility of the table of contents of each chapter which was laid out at an IPCC plenary meeting has been quite frustrating for some of us authors but we have had to stick to what was laid down several years ago before the actual subject specialists entered the picture. It's hard to see the governments giving up these powers for a more flexible approach.

2012 ISI Impact Factors Released

I'm in Malaga, Spain (above) on a circuitous route to the IPCC Working Group III 4th lead author meeting in Addis Ababa. I just saw that the 2012 Journal Citations Report is out. PLoS ONE's impact factor fell to 3.73 (exactly as a reader recently predicted in the comments on my post from last year). It's five year impact factor for 2012 is 4.244, which is also down a bit from last year.

Also of interest to me is Nature Climate Change, which debuts with an impact factor of 14.472!

Update...

I haven't blogged much recently as things have been very busy, teaching, admin, service (reviewing things), and lots of research projects in progress  - 5 papers in review or under revision and at least 12 at various stages from basic research to near completed - almost all my current papers now involve coauthorship. This is also the time of the semester when we also start preparing for the next semester's teaching. I'll be teaching my energy economics course for the second time. And I have been planning my travel over the winter break. First, I am going to Guelph to the workshop on econometric applications in climatology. It's all planned and they've posted my paper. I just need to write a presentation and go. Though I've been to Canada, all my visits so far have been to Quebec. I'll also visit a friend in Virginia. I'll be back here just in time for my students' exam and essay grading. Then I'll be off on another trip that will include Addis Ababa, where the 4th Lead Author meeting of the IPCC Working Group 3 will be held. It's in Addis because one of the co-chairs of the working group is from Ethiopia. Another is from Cuba. That would have been interesting too, but I suppose that no Americans would go to the meeting, which would kind of be a problem... I'll go to some other places too, which maybe I'll report on when I get back :)

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.

Update

I haven't posted so far this month. I have been travelling. First I was at the IPCC Working Group 3 meeting in Vigo, Spain. Then I was in Vienna where I gave a presentation on trends, drivers, and mitigation of climate change at W.U.. Now I am in Israel visiting family. Just coincided with kind of a war going on... Early tomorrow morning I start the long trip back to Australia.

WG3 FoD Now Available for Review

Register here as an expert reviewer of the FoD. This will give you access to the first order draft of Working Group III's part of the 5th IPCC Assessment Report. I'm a coauthor of Chapter 5. In November we will meet in Vigo, Spain to process the comments.

Jobs at Lund

Astrid Kander writes: We have one or more permanent positions as senior lecturer in Economic History out in Lund now. Deadline 9th September. Please look here. We welcome international researchers/teachers!

Lund has a large department of economic history as well as a regular economics department. I visited there in 2010 and am scheduled to visit again in each of the next two years as part of my ARC grant activity.

Presentation at IAEE Meeting in Perth

I'm presenting on Tuesday afternoon at the IAEE Conference in Perth in one of the parallel sessions from 2-3:30pm. I've put my slides up on the web but as usual they probably aren't that informative without the accompanying talk. Several of us from ANU will be at the meeting and I am looking forward to meeting up with old and new colleagues from elsewhere. This is also my first time ever visiting Western Australia the only Australian state or mainland territory I haven't yet been to.