In the news / New articles / Conference and seminar annoucements / Open positions

In the news:

  • Is there going to be a new energiewende in Germany’s energiewende? While renewables now make up a 1/3 of electricity production in Germany it also seems as if the German government wants to move away from the principle of energy liberty- i.e. electricity is produced locally, to handing more power back to larger utilities.
  • Peter Fairley questions whether energy saving settings on devices are actually used or useful. I totally agree with him, most people that I know don’t rely on the in-built energy saving settings. If I use the dish washer in energy saving mode then the dish washer smells after a day.
  • El Niño Is Still Growing And Set To Get Even Stronger In The Next Few Months. It is good that science can help us now to predict – at least to some extend – the extent of these problems. Let’s hope though that governments are sufficiently far-sighted to plan ahead, too.
  • Off topic: Tyler Cowen asks whether the fact that there are passport controls in some parts of the EU is the end of Schengen. And of course it is not. This is a reasonable response by countries to the migration inflow. Given that there is such a large scale inflow, it is only understandable that national goverments want to get a grasp of the figures and know who enters their country.

Articles:

  • Ecological macroeconomics: Introduction and review, forthcoming Ecological Economics, by Armon Rezai and Sigrid Stagl. Though I didn’t yet go through the full paper I know Armon and he generally does good work.
  • Economic growth, inequality and well-being, forthcoming Ecological Economics, by Richard Howarth and Kevin Kennedy. Rising inequality has contributed strongly to the gap between per capita income and the Genuine Progress Indicator. The authors review the literature and discuss this.

Conferences:

  • Climate Ethics and Climate Economics: Discounting the Future Conference
    I will be discussing Partha Dasgupta’s presentation “Discounting the Commons”

  • Matt Liski presents “Carbon prices for the next hundred years” at École Polytechnique – Department of Economics, Library (Ground Floor), Route de Saclay, on Tuesday, 19/01/2016, from 3-4.30pm.

Open positions:

  • Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at The Department of Management, Technology and Economics (www.mtec.ethz.ch) and the Department of Environmental Systems Science (www.usys.ethz.ch) at ETH Zurich invite applications. More details HERE
  • Research Associate position at The Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies e.V. (IASS) is an international, interdisciplinary research institute located in Potsdam
  • An der Universität Graz gelangt die Post-Doc-Stelle (tenure track)
    eines/r Umweltökonmen/in. Nähere Details: http://jobs.uni-graz.at/de/MB/16/99/2688