Measuring Residential Energy Efficiency Improvements with DEA

This paper measures energy efficiency improvements of US single-family homes between 1997 and 2001 using a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, an indicator of energy efficiency is derived by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and the analogy between the DEA estimator and traditional measures of energy efficiency is demonstrated. The second stage employs a bootstrapped truncated regression technique to decompose the variation in the obtained efficiency estimates into a climatic component and factors attributed to efficiency improvements. Results indicate a small but significant improvement of energy efficiency over the studied time interval, mainly accounted for by fuel oil and natural gas users

Access and allocation in earth system governance: Water and climate change compared

A significant percentage of the global population does not yet have access to safe drinking water, sufficient food or energy to live in dignity. There is a continuous struggle to allocate the earth's resources among users and uses. This article argues that distributional problems have two faces: access to basic resources or ecospace; and, the allocation of environmental resources, risks, burdens, and responsibilities for causing problems. Furthermore, addressing problems of access and allocation often requires access to social processes (science, movements and law). Analysts, however, have tended to take a narrow, disciplinary approach although an integrated conceptual approach may yield better answers. This article proposes a multi-disciplinary perspective to the problem of access and allocation and illustrates its application to water management and climate change. © The Author(s) 2010

Energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in the steel sector in key developing countries

Iron and steel production consumes enormous quantities of energy, especially in developing countries where outdated, inefficient technologies are still used to produce iron and steel. Carbon dioxide emissions from steel production, which range between 5 and 15% of total country emissions in key developing countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa), will continue to grow as these countries develop and as demand for steel products such as materials, automobiles, and appliances increases. In this report, we describe the key steel processes, discuss typical energy-intensity values for these processes, review historical trends in iron and steel production by process in five key developing countries, describe the steel industry in each of the five key developing countries, present international comparisons of energy use and carbon dioxide emissions among these countries, and provide our assessment of the technical potential to reduce these emissions based on best-practice benchmarking. Using a best practice benchmark, we find that significant savings, in the range of 33% to 49% of total primary energy used to produce steel, are technically possible in these countries. Similarly, we find that the technical potential for reducing intensities of carbon dioxide emissions ranges between 26% and 49% of total carbon dioxide emissions from steel production in these countries