Energy plays no role in the standard Cobb-Douglas Production Function (CDPF), and a trivial role in a three-factor CDPF where it is treated as a third input, independent of labour and capital. ...Starting from an epistemological perspective, we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital, without which production is impossible. We then derive an energy-based CPDF (EBCDPF) in which energy plays a critical role. We argue for the redefinition and measurement of real GDP in terms of exergy. We conclude that the “Solow Residual” measures the contribution of exergy to growth, and that the exponents in the EBCDPF should be based on cross-country comparative data as suggested by Mankiw (1995) rather than the “cost-share theorem”.
Environmental economics, which is a branch of resource economics – the environment as a scarce resource – is essentially about market failures, the costs of pollution and pollution abatement, and the ...economics of regulation. Sustainability economics includes the problem of maintaining economic growth, while reducing pollution and/or its impacts, with special attention to the linked problems of energy supply (not to mention the supply other exhaustible resources), climate change and – most urgently – fossil fuel consumption. There is a need for integration of resource and environmental economics under a new rubric, sustainability economics.
The demand for lithium has increased significantly during the last decade as it has become key for the development of industrial products, especially batteries for electronic devices and electric ...vehicles. This article reviews sources, extraction and production, uses, and recovery and recycling, all of which are important aspects when evaluating lithium as a key resource. First, it describes the estimated reserves and lithium production from brine and pegmatites, including the material and energy requirements. Then, it continues with a description about the current uses of lithium focusing on its application in batteries and concludes with a description of the opportunities for recovery and recycling and the future demand forecast. The article concludes that the demand of lithium for electronic vehicles will increase from 30% to almost 60% by 2020. Thus, in the next years, the recovery and recycling of lithium from batteries is decisive to ensure the long-term viability of the metal.
Increasing digitization of the economy and continued developments in information technology and computing require increasing amounts of rare elements (including, but not limited to, the rare Earth ...Elements or REEs). The motivation for this article is that many of the potentially important elements, which are by-products of other metals, are neither being recovered from existing sources, nor recycled from existing uses mainly because there is a disconnect between supply and demand for many of them. Corporate short-termism is incompatible with investment in increasing rare metal mining efficiency or creating effective metal recovery and recycling systems. Yet, the public policy case for recovery and recycling of rare metals is very strong. To address this need, this article suggests the creation of Metal-X, a government sponsored metals stockpile of rare metals. This could be a long-lived public-private venture supported by long-term investors such as pension funds. The purpose of Metal X would be, first of all, to raise prices to the point where secondary recovery becomes profitable. Furthermore, it would encourage new applications that have hitherto not been attractive due to supply constraints. Incidentally, it would also help break the Chinese production monopoly for heavy rare earth elements. And finally, it could (in principle) constitute a basis for national currencies (as gold once did.)
Conventional economic growth theory assumes that technological progress is exogenous and that resource consumption is a consequence, not a cause, of growth. The reality is different and more complex. ...A ‘growth engine’ is a positive feedback loop involving declining costs of inputs and increasing demand for lower priced outputs, which then drives costs down further, thanks to economies of scale and learning effects. In a competitive environment prices follow. The most important ‘growth engine’ of the first industrial revolution was dependent on coal and steam power. The feedback operated through rapidly declining fossil fuel and mechanical power costs. The advent of electric power, in growing quantities and declining cost, has triggered the development of a whole range of new products and industries, including electric light, radio and television, moving pictures, and the whole modern information sector. The purpose of this paper is to reformulate the idea of the ‘growth engine’ in terms of the service provided by energy inputs, namely ‘useful work’, defined as the product of energy (exergy) inputs multiplied by a conversion efficiency. We attempt here to reconstruct the useful work performed in the US economy during the twentieth century. Some economic implications are indicated very briefly.
A number of metals that are now important to the electronic industry (and others) will become much more important in the future if current trends in technology continue. Most of these metals are ...byproducts (or hitch-hikers) of a small number of important industrial metals (attractors). By definition, the metals in the hitch-hiker group are not mined by themselves, and thus their production is limited by the demand for the major attractors. This article presents a material flow analysis (MFA) of the complex inter-relationships between these groups of metals. First, it surveys the main sources of geologically scarce (byproduct) metals currently considered critical by one or other of several recent studies. This is followed by a detailed survey of their major functions and the quantities contained in intermediate and end-products. The purpose is to identify the sectors and products where those metals are used and stocked and thus potentially available for future recycling. It concludes with a discussion of the limitations of possible substitution and barriers to recycling.
This paper considers the arguments for “weak” vs. “strong” sustainability. The weak sustainability position, held by many mainstream neoclassical economists (such as Solow and Weitzman), is that ...almost all kinds of natural capital can be substituted by man-made capital. The contrary position, known as strong sustainability, holds that many of the most fundamental services provided by nature cannot be replaced by services produced by humans or man-made systems. The paper discusses the limits of substitution from a physical point of view. It concludes that, while there is considerable scope for substitution in some domains, the limits to substitutability in the medium term at least are real and important. In effect, the paper supports the strong sustainability position.
Summary
Human activities have significantly intensified natural phosphorus cycles, which has resulted in some serious environmental problems that modern societies face today. This article attempts to ...quantify the global phosphorus flows associated with present day mining, farming, animal feeding, and household consumption. Various physical characteristics of the related phosphorus fluxes as well as their environmental impacts in different economies, including the United States, European countries, and China, are examined. Particular attention is given to the global phosphorus budget in cropland and the movement and transformation of phosphorus in soil, because these phosphorus flows, in association with the farming sector, constitute major fluxes that dominate the anthropogenic phosphorus cycle. The results show that the global input of phosphorus to cropland, in both inorganic and organic forms from various sources, cannot compensate for the removal in harvests and in the losses by erosion and runoff. A net loss of phosphorus from the world's cropland is estimated at about 10.5 million metric tons (MMT) phosphorus each year, nearly one half of the phosphorus extracted yearly.
A semi-empirical endogenous growth theory was proposed by the authors in 2005. It is based on a model of the economy as a two-stage materials/energy processing system. Growth is simulated by a ...two-parameter production function with two traditional factors, labor and capital, and a non-traditional factor, namely ‘useful work’. The non-traditional factor is calculated from primary energy inputs multiplied by an empirically estimated average energy conversion efficiency, which is a function of changing technology over time. This model ‘explains’ past US growth from 1900 through 1973–74 with satisfactory accuracy but it slightly underestimates subsequent growth (
i.e. it leaves a small unexplained but increasing residual) for the period after 1975. However, by subdividing capital stock into traditional and ICT components, we are able to extend the theory to explain US economic growth accurately. In this paper we also extend the results to Japan. The revised production function has only three independent parameters. The new model also has implications for future economic growth, energy and environmental policy that differ significantly from the traditional growth theory. These implications are discussed briefly.
► Economic growth is simulated by a production function with three factors or production, labour and capital, and useful work. ► Useful work is calculated from primary energy inputs estimated energy conversion efficiency. ► The model has implications for future economic growth and energy policy that differ from the traditional growth theory.
Material efficiency: rare and critical metals Ayres, Robert U.; Peiró, Laura Talens
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences,
03/2013, Letnik:
371, Številka:
1986
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the last few decades, progress in electronics, especially, has resulted in important new uses for a number of geologically rare metals, some of which were mere curiosities in the past. Most of ...them are not mined for their own sake (gold, the platinum group metals and the rare Earth elements are exceptions) but are found mainly in the ores of the major industrial metals, such as aluminium, copper, zinc and nickel. We call these major metals 'attractors' and the rare accompanying metals 'hitch-hikers'. The key implication is that rising prices do not necessarily call forth greater output because that would normally require greater output of the attractor metal. We trace the geological relationships and the functional uses of these metals. Some of these metals appear to be irreplaceable in the sense that there are no known substitutes for them in their current functional uses. Recycling is going to be increasingly important, notwithstanding a number of barriers.
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