2006/15 | LEM Working Paper Series | |
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Energy, Development, and the Environment: An Appraisal Three Decades After the "Limits to Growth" Debate | ||
Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi |
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Keywords | ||
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Energy Consumption, Emissions, Sustainability
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Abstract | ||
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This work builds upon some long-term secular regularities concerning
the relation between consumption of energy, technological progress and economic
growth and reassesses the old question raised around forty years ago
in the "limits to growth" discussion (Meadows et al. [1972]), namely are the
current patterns of development and in particular the current patterns of
energy use environmentally sustainable?
The questions we shall address are the following. First, the environmental
sustainability of patterns of energy consumption that for long have
implied the notion of the environment as a free good, without any negative
social externalities and even less so any environmental threat. Second, the
importance - and limits - of relative price changes with respect to the dynamics
of consumption of energy. Third, the role of fundamental discontinuities
between different "technological paradigms".
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