Energy

The role of speculation in the crude oil market in the increase in the WTI crude oil price.

Were the sharp increases in prices during 2020-2022 due to fundamental shifts in supply and demand or are they attributable to excessive market speculation?

Revenues to GB electricity generators in 2022 increased by almost £30bn, compared to pre-COVID levels.

The current energy market structures, including the short-run-marginal-price-on-all nature of the current wholesale market, are not fit for a transition to a renewables-dominated system.

Moving away from fossil fuels, towards a system with a far greater contribution from variable renewables, means that the current system is not fit for purpose.

Price inflation, marginal cost pricing, and principles for electricity market redesign in an era of low-carbon transition

Veteran researcher sheds light on what’s going on, how long the pain might last, and possible paths forward.

A global carbon tax alone will not be enough to significantly reduce CO2 emissions

And electric vehicles don’t do a lot better

Texas’s electricity market “reforms” made the current crisis inevitable

What ails the EU Green Deal is exactly what troubles the Union in general — an absence of social democracy at work

This paper considers the ambition, scale, substance and strategy of the European Union’s Green Deal

Economist James K. Boyce explains how to fight climate change and rising income inequality in one shot

The central goal of any serious climate policy is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The central question is how.

How free electricity could fight climate change and inequality

Chaired by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, INET has assembled a global team of leaders and scholars calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

The new IPCC Report is overly optimistic about global productivity growth and fossil fuel energy use. More dramatic, immediate action is needed

Economist James K. Boyce argues that the distribution of carbon tax revenue is just as important as the price itself

China is now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, accounting for over 25% of the global total. But the country has also demonstrated a growing understanding that a truly green economy promises to improve quality of life and create enormous opportunities for technological and political leadership.

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

Two years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, where we stand today is better than you may think 

A discussion with Michael Grubb, INET Grantee and Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College of London.

The path to holding fossil fuel producers accountable for climate change & climate damages 

Climate Change and Denial

Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and a global team of leading thinkers are calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

Faced with rapid cost reductions for clean electricity generation, some commentators suggest that we no longer need the Paris agreement or other policy interventions, because technology alone can solve all problems.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord sets the US economy back

Ocean expert Peter Neill says the watery depths hold solutions to earth’s most pressing challenges

The energy transition is happening. But the pace of change depends on a range of technical, business, and societal factors.

The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are organizing India’s first “Law Economic Policy Conference (LPEC 2016)”. The aim is to bring together economic, legal and policy thinkers together to consider policy issues in a holistic manner.

Estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are reassuringly trivial, at 0.5-1% of global land area. For individual countries however, the challenges vary greatly, reflecting dramatic differences in population density.

We are grateful to Michael Grubb, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Igor Bashmakov, and Richard Wood for their interesting, empirically rich and structurally insightful commentary on our paper on the production-based and the consumption-based Carbon Kuznets Curve (CKC).

A comment on Goher-Ur-Rehman Mir and Servaas Storm’s Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production Based vs Consumption-Based Evidence on Decoupling

We assess the Carbon-Kuznets-Curve hypothesis using internationally consistent and comparable production-based versus consumption-based CO2 emissions data for 40 countries (and 35 industries) during 1995-2007 from the World Input Output Database (WIOD).

A stark warning from Institute researchers on the probability that ‘2°C capital stock’ will be reached in 2017

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

How well do our assumptions about the global challenges of energy, environment and economic development fit the facts?

Is moving away from coal and into shale - rather than directly into renewables - a worthy move from an economic as well as environmental point of view?

This research project traces the history of German energy policy from 1945 to the present. It explores the political economy behind Germany’s transition from coal, to oil, to green energy, the crises driving these shifts, and the evolving efforts to balance affordability with security and environmental protection.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Where will today’s innovation come from?

Many models of economic growth exclude materials from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate.

The present paradox, as ecological economist Bill Rees is fond of putting it, is simple yet profoundly troubling: “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.”

Evidence of climate change is widely accepted by scientists.

Three major crises are confronting the world. The first is the increasing and uneven burden of humans on the biosphere, and the observation that we have already surpassed the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity with respect to three planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.

How can we distribute growth globally when the developed world needs growth to emerge from debt overhangs and inequality between nations is still quite formidable?

Our shared concern – 20 years after Rio, yet poor progress towards wellbeing

Globalization has improved the living standards of hundreds of millions of people – but growing resource scarcity means it risks becoming a victim of its own success.

All cultural narratives, worldviews, religious doctrines, political ideologies, and academic paradigms are ‘social constructs.’