EMC Working Papers

The Intersection of Neurochemistry and Environmental Cognition in Climate Change

Let me introduce you to the concept of relativity, particularly relative status. Why can we not stop consuming? A first hint is the very nature of human survival and social structures. Within these social structures, hierarchy and hence status is particularly important. However, we have not evolved to have an absolute criterion for reaching a certain status, as it wouldn’t be viable on largely different scales. That is why we rely on relative status. As you may already know, our brain relies on neurotransmitters to carry electrical signals from one neuron to the next.

Driving the Paris Agreement

Article 6 of the Paris Agreement includes provisions allowing countries to cooperate to achieve National Determined Contributions (NDCs), specifically through carbon pricing, to meet mitigation commitments. Carbon markets are an emerging tool that incentivises businesses to pollute less and invest in clean technologies by putting a price on carbon emissions. As this article explores further, compliance and voluntary carbon markets are poised to reshape the energy landscape and contribute to achieving the ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement.

Compliance Carbon Markets

Compliance carbon markets are a key tool in the fight against climate change, and they aim to establish a carbon price by laws or regulations which control the supply of allowances distributed by national, regional and global regimes through the following compliance mechanisms: (1) Cap and Trade: Sets a pollution limit (the cap) and lets companies buy or sell allowances to meet their obligations, creating a market for carbon credits with a price driven by supply and demand; (2) Carbon Tax: A fixed price is set per ton of carbon emitted. Companies must pay tax for their emissions, incentivising them to reduce pollution.

The United Kingdom is in the right place to become a global leader in the industrial Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) sector. Specific, UK associated industrial development has set a great potential for Industrial Carbon Capture (ICC) application. In fact, the operation of Oil and Gas (O&G) offshore fields has allowed for decades of data on suitable carbon storage sites to be collected, determining that the North Sea’s saline aquifers and depleted reservoirs have a 78,000 MtCO₂ capacity. Figure 1 exhibits the distribution of both CO₂ emission sources from industrial clusters and offshore storage points.

This paper evaluates the energy efficiency of EU countries over the period 2000-2010. At the first stage, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is employed, combining multiple energy consumption data, economic outputs, structural indicators, and environmental factors. The efficiency estimates obtained from the analysis are evaluated in a second stage through a multiple criteria decision aiding methodology (MCDA). The proposed non-parametric approach combining DEA with MCDA enables the modeling of the problem in an integrated manner, providing not only energy efficiency estimates, but also supporting the analysis of the main contributing factors, as well as the development of a benchmarking model for energy efficiency evaluation in country level.

In this paper we present an empirical study to verify the assertion of a negative impact of economic growth on carbon efficiency using a cross country analysis. More precisely we are concerned with the relation between past growth and CO2 emissions, assuming that rapid growth in the past may explain lower carbon efficiency today. The central idea tested is that hasty growth is likely to slow down the improvement of energy and carbon efficiency. In other words, using an ordinary least square multifactor model to explain carbon intensity, we verify that the coefficient for an exogenous variable measuring the average past growth rate (apgr) for each country in our sample, is significantly positive.