The Unassuming Economist

From Conversable Economist:

“Global primary energy grew by 2.9% in 2018 – the fastest growth seen since 2010. This occurred despite a backdrop of modest GDP growth and strengthening energy prices. At the same time, carbon emissions from energy use grew by 2.0%, again the fastest expansion for many years, with emissions increasing by around 0.6 gigatonnes. That’s roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions associated with increasing the number of passenger cars on the planet by a third.” Spencer Dale offers these and other insights in his introduction to the the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. It’s one of those books of charts and tables I try to check each year just to keep my personal perceptions of economic patterns connected to actual statistics.  Here are a few figures that jumped out at me.

One main drive of the rise in world energy use is economic growth in emerging market countries. The horizontal axis of this figure shows average energy use per person. The vertical axis shows the cumulative share of total world population. The yellow line shows the pattern for 1978, while the green line shows four decades later in 2018.”

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The International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) has awarded Ian Parry (IMF) the 2019 annual prize for outstanding contributions to the field of energy economics and its literature.

Ian Parry is Principal Environmental Fiscal Policy Expert in the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, specializing in fiscal analysis of climate change, environment, and energy issues. Before joining the Fund in 2010, Ian held the Allen V. Kneese Chair in Environmental Economics at Resources for the Future. Below are some of latest posts by Ian Parry.

• Countries Are Signing Up for Sizeable Carbon Prices
• Climate Change: How To Price Paris
• Carbon Pricing: Good for You, Good for the Planet
• Too Much At Stake: Moving Ahead with Energy Price Reforms
• Sins of Emission and Omission in Durban

From American Enterprise Institute:

“A big thanks to my former AEI colleague Olivier Ballou for helping me find the UK-based website Flourish, which allowed me create the “bar chart race” visualization above showing annual oil production (barrels per day) in the top ten oil-producing states (including federal offshore production) from 1981 to 2018. Perhaps the most interesting trend is to watch the rise of oil production in North Dakota. The state ranked No. 10 until about 2005, when revolutionary drilling and extraction technologies tapped into previously inaccessible shale oil deposits in the Bakken Formation in western North Dakota, and the state then rose to the No. 2 oil-producing US state by 2015 behind only Texas (and offshore production). Also notice the significant declines in conventional oil production in Alaska (from more than 2 million barrels per day in 1988 to below 500,000 bpd by 2014) and California (from more than 1 million bpd in the early 1980s to below 500,000 bpd in 2017).

The Flourish website is pretty user-friendly and I’ll try to produce more “bar chart race” visualizations in the future. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comment section.”

From the Financial Times:

The Greens’ surge in last week’s European Parliament elections confirmed that a growing share of voters want their politicians to do something about climate change. But it is far from clear that the majority is ready to pay the higher energy and fuel prices that would result from any serious effort to limit the rise in global temperatures — and that would hit some groups much harder than others.

Economists, who for years have been debating the best ways to fine-tune carbon pricing mechanisms, are now turning their attention to the bigger challenges of political economy.

A paper by IMF staff, published earlier this month, shows just how far off we are from making carbon as expensive as it needs to be. Many major economies could achieve the emissions cuts pledged under the 2015 Paris accord with a carbon price of $35 per tonne, they calculate — a level that would roughly double coal prices and add 5 per cent to 7 per cent to pump prices for road fuels.

But to contain global warming to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels would require a global carbon price of about $70 per tonne, they estimate. At present, despite a proliferation of national and sub-national carbon taxes and trading schemes, the average global carbon price is $2 per tonne.”

 

 

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From EconoSpeak:

“The U.K. think tank Autonomy has issued a report calling for much shorter working weeks, “The Ecological Limits of Work: on carbon emissions, carbon budgets and working time,” which is featured in a Guardian article published today, “Much shorter working weeks needed to tackle climate crisis – study.”

People across Europe will need to work drastically fewer hours to avoid disastrous climate heating unless there is a radical decarbonising of the economy, according to a study.

The research, from thinktank Autonomy, shows workers in the UK would need to move to nine-hour weeks to keep the country on track to avoid more than 2C of heating at current carbon intensity levels. Similar reductions were found to be necessary in Sweden and Germany.

The findings are based on OECD and UN data on greenhouse gas emissions per industry in the three countries. It found that at current carbon levels, all three would require a drastic reduction in working hours as well as urgent measures to decarbonise the economy to prevent climate breakdown.

Will Stronge, the director of Autonomy, said the research highlighted the need to include reductions in working hours as part of the efforts to address the climate emergency.”