gdp

GDP/shutterstock

It isn’t about “Green GDP” or “green accounting.” It’s honest accounting. Every ton of coal, every barrel of oil causes more in external damages than it adds value to GDP. Properly measured GDP ought to reflect that fact.[read more]

desertification

Drought and desertification have become increasingly pressing problems for a growing number of countries. The UN estimates land degradation costs between 3-5 percent of global agricultural Gross Domestic Production.[read more]

global energy intensity

There’s no question that using energy more efficiently is crucial in both meeting the rising global demand and in minimizing climate change. The good news is the US has been on a long trend of becoming more efficient.[read more]

Most approaches to emissions control rest on the assumption that responding to climate change depends on managing the rate of emissions from the global economy, not how the atmosphere sees our emissions of CO2.[read more]

The tie between energy supply, population, and the economy goes back to the hunter-gatherer period. Hunter-gatherers managed to multiply their population at least 4-fold, and perhaps by as much as 25-fold, by using energy techniques which allowed them to expand their territory from central Africa to virtually the whole world, including...[read more]

Strange as it may seem, humans seem to have evolved in a way that we have a need for external energy, such as energy from burning wood or fossil fuels. While the evidence is not 100% certain, it appears that we learned to use fire long enough ago that it is now  necessary for our food to be cooked. Otherwise, we would need to spend...[read more]

We talk about the possibility of reducing fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050 and ramping up renewables at the same time, to help prevent climate change. If we did this, what would such a change mean for GDP, based on historical Energy and GDP relationships back to 1820?Back in March, I showed you this graph in my post, World Energy...[read more]

A few days ago, I showed the close relationship between growth in world oil consumption and growth in world GDP. In this post, I will extend that analysis by building a model that shows how much of an increase in world oil supply is need for a given increase in world GDP. This model indicates that if we want the world economy to grow by...[read more]

The usual assumption that economists, financial planners, and actuaries make is that future real GDP growth can be expected to be fairly similar to the average past growth rate for some historical time period. This assumption can take a number of forms–how much a portfolio can be expected to yield in a future period, or how high real (...[read more]

Matthew Stepp and Jesse Jenkins examine whether voluntary economic contraction is a key strategy in reducing emissions “as quickly as possible.” What do you think?[read more]

We’ve known at least since Robert F. Kennedy’s first speech as a presidential candidate that gross domestic product “measures everything…except that which makes life worth living”. While it’s tough to quantify the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, we do have ways to quantify the impact of pollution and could, in theory, amend GDP to account for its costs.[read more]

At Grist, Sean Casten muses on the macroeconomic implications of trends in electricity consumption. His musings focus on the established correlation between electricity consumption and economic activity, an association that he fleshed out in an earlier post. In these two posts he looks at trends in residential, commercial, and industrial...[read more]

by Josh Freed and Sam Hodas This piece was originally posted on Huffington Post. China today is driven by one number: eight. That’s the annual percentage growth in GDP China needs to lift the more than one-third of its population still mired in poverty into the middle class. That’s 600 million people in a country of 1.3 billion. And...[read more]

Environmentally friendly in Chengdu, China (image by: preetamrai) Back in the mid-2000s China began to experiment with the notion of Green GDP as a new way of accounting for its growth in an environmental context. This was touched on in a previous blog post, but I thought a more in depth look into exactly what Green GDP showed and why...[read more]

Last week, China announced that it will reduce carbon "intensity" by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. The emissions intensity (emissions/$GDP) approach taken by the Canada and the US in the past has been much maligned here as a dishonest dodge. First, it looks like a reduction in actual emissions until you realize...[read more]