Essays
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Economics of Renewable Energy Production - Nemet, Gregory F.
Renewable energy (RE) includes a diverse set of technologies that produce useful energy from nondepleting resources, emit little pollution, and involve no fuel costs. While RE comprises only about an eighth of world energy supply, it is growing quickly and could become a much larger share without approaching resource supply constraints. Valuation of the costs and benefits of RE has improved as studies have become more comprehensive in scope and more precise. Still valuation remains complicated and subject to wide bands of uncertainty for several reasons: heterogeneity among RE technologies; accounting for externalities, such as pollution, that are not always traded in markets; and benefits that depend on counterfactuals that vary substantially by time and location. Costs have to account for intermittency, which depends on many factors such as how thin a reserve margin to maintain, as well as technology dynamics, which over the long term may reduce costs. Experience with substantial shares of RE generation in real commercial settings has provided data and opportunities to analyze the integration of RE with the surrounding energy market. A key research challenge is to use this fuller accounting of costs and benefits to produce general insights about energy markets, without being limited by the technological, location, and temporal idiosyncrasies, which so far appear dominant. Future research questions revolve around whether costs are increasing or decreasing in deployment and include considerations of resource availability, temporal correlation in production across space and technologies, technological change in RE and complementary technologies, and emergent properties at large scale. -
Environmental Accounting - Muller, Nicholas Z.
While metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP) constitute important means to gauge the value of production, it is widely recognized that indices that focus exclusively on market production are incomplete. Omitted environmental assets include (i) those that have the capacity to act as a source of valuable inputs to production such as timber, subsurface minerals, or fisheries; and (ii) media that serve as a sink for anthropogenic residuals such as air, water, or soil. The human health impacts depend crucially on two parameters in the integrated asset models (IAMs): the effect that exposures to fine particles have on adult mortality rates and the value attributed to small changes in mortality risk. This essay focuses on recent research that augments standard measures of output to include damages from air and greenhouse gas pollution into national output. -
Natural Resources and Development - Morrison, Kevin M.
The idea that there is a “resource curse”—that countries with more natural resources tend to do poorly economically and politically—has gained widespread currency in the popular press and elsewhere. Despite the paradoxical nature of the hypothesis, in some ways it seems intuitive because one can look around the world and see many resource‐rich countries that are authoritarian or seem to have squandered their wealth. Nevertheless, recent research has cast doubts on whether there is actually a relationship between natural resources and economic growth or democracy, once one has controlled for other factors. And an alternative line of research argues that natural resources do affect these economic and political outcomes, but whether they do so in a positive or negative way depends on the institutions a country has in place. That is, countries with poor economic and political institutions will suffer a “curse,” but countries with better institutions will not. In this entry, I review the foundational works on natural resources and development as well as these more recent responses, analyzing the trajectory of the literature and key issues for future research. Despite two decades of intensive research, we still have much to learn about whether developing countries will suffer or benefit in an era of increasing commodity prices and resource exploration. -
Sociological Theory After the End of Nature - Brulle, Robert J.
Anthropogenic climate change poses a fundamental challenge to the cultural beliefs and social structure of global social order. However, the social sciences treat the natural world as a passive backdrop in which the human project unfolds, and focus primarily on the relation between social facts. In a world where human activities are being manifestly impacted by a continuously shifting climate, it is no longer adequate to only look to human social interactions to gain an understanding of how social order is constituted and changed. This realization has led a number of scholars across the range of social sciences to identify a need to move beyond anthropocentric social sciences. This essay provides an overview of the major efforts to create a social science that integrates social and natural facts within the field of sociology. Three areas of foundational research in this area are discussed, including the reinterpretation of sociological classics, the development of constructed society/nature hybrids, and the creation of linked society–natural systems models. Examples of empirical research demonstrating these approaches are then provided. The essay concludes with a survey of ongoing sociological theory projects on this topic. -
Sustainability - Tainter, Joseph A.
Research needs in sustainability encompass a range of topics spanning much of social and behavioral science. Sustainability requires understanding human cognition, capacity to reason and make decisions, capacity for long‐term planning, understanding trade‐offs, risk perceptions, communication techniques, innovation, the consequences of improvements in efficiency, energy and other resources, complexity in problem solving, and other matters. We discuss research accomplishments and needs in the four most important areas of sustainability: (i) risk perceptions; (ii) influencing behavior; (iii) resources and economics; and (iv) problem solving and complexity. -
The Social Science of Sustainability - Urpelainen, Johannes
The sustainability of socioeconomic systems is widely recognized as a key global challenge, and a social science of sustainable societies is now emerging. Social scientists have made commendable progress in quantifying the cost‐effectiveness of different environmental policy instruments, explaining their diffusion across nations, and documenting the phenomenon of historical and ongoing sustainability transitions. However, social scientists should pay much more attention to the political economy of environmental policy formulation, the challenge of building coalitions that support more ambitious policies to promote sustainability, and the development of analytical models and testable hypotheses about sustainability transitions. Owing to the inherently problem‐oriented nature of sustainability, the social science of sustainability must be strongly interdisciplinary, both among social sciences and with respect to the natural sciences. For the social science of sustainability to survive and thrive over time, academic researchers must both maintain the highest analytical standards and focus on research questions and answers that contribute to the solution of problems that practitioners face.