Fossil energy in economic growth: A study of the energy direction of technical change, 1950-2012

Climate change mitigation challenges national economies to increase productivity while reducing fossil energy consumption. Fossil energy-saving technical change has been assumed to accomplish this, yet empirical evidence is scarce. This paper investigates the long-run relationship between the rate and direction of technical change with respect to fossil energy and labor in the world economy. Growth rates of labor productivity and the fossil energy-labor ratio are examined for more than 95 of world output between 1950 and 2012. The average elasticity of the energy-labor ratio with respect to labor productivity is close to one, implying highly energy-using technical change, but no trade-o between factor productivity growth rates. This stylized fact suggests the importance of a cheap, abundant energy supply for robust global growth, and a more important role for renewable energy. Integrated assessment models do not incorporate this restriction which may result in poorly speci ed baseline scenarios

Torsion of the Omentum: Report of a Case and a Brief Review of the Literature

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What Explains The Increased Utilization Of Powder River Basin Coal In Electric Power Generation?

This article examines possible explanations for increased utilization of Powder River Basin (PRB) coal in electric power generation that occurred over the last two decades. Did more stringent environmental policy motivate electric power plants to switch to less polluting fuels?Or, did greater use of PRB coal occur because relative price changes altered input markets in favor of this fuel. A key finding is that factors other than environmental policy such as the decline in railroad freight rates together with elastic demand by power plants were major contributors to the increased utilization of this fuel. © 2008 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association