Climbing the Energy Ladder: How Energy Resources Hinder, Facilitate, and Fuel Economic Growth
Derek is a leading environmental economist who has done some of the most innovative research on the clean energy transition, climate policy, and the macroeconomy.
—Kyle Meng, Associate Professor, Bren School
ABSTRACT
I show that the nature of the energy resources available to an economy qualitatively determines long-run growth outcomes. A harvested resource such as biomass drags on growth, a mined resource such as coal enables output per capita to hold constant, and both a tapped resource such as oil and a manufactured resource such as solar panels risk degrowth if energy return on energy invested (EROI) cannot stay above a threshold. The only energy resource that can fuel long-run growth is a manufactured resource such as solar panels. Either that resource must rely on substitutable energy inputs that have a sufficiently large EROI, or it must be produced by robots that are themselves produced from robots and energy. Even in these cases, coal and oil economies may have been necessary stages on the way from a biomass economy to a solar economy.
BIO
Derek Lemoine is Professor of Economics and codirector of the Consortium for Environmentally Resilient Business at the University of Arizona. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His recent research explores how to learn about the cost of climate change from weather impacts, how to value the production of short-run weather forecasts from mortality data and of seasonal climate forecasts from financial market data, and how to incentivize carbon removal technologies, among other topics. His Ph.D. is in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011.