Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

This paper investigates the relationship between emissions of carbon dioxide and the ongoing process of demographic transition in OECD countries. Our research is motivated by suggestions in the literature that emission-relevant consumption patterns may depend on the position in the life cycle and on the birth cohort to which people belong. We augment standard macroeconomic [...]

Carbon capture and geological sequestration is the only available technology that both allows continued use of fossil fuels in the power sector and reduces significantly the associated CO2 emissions. Geological sequestration requires a deep permeable geological formation into which captured CO2can be injected, and an overlying impermeable formation, called a caprock, that keeps the buoyant [...]

A case study of Denver, Colorado explores the roles of three social actors—individual users, infrastructure designer-operators, and policy actors—in near-term greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation in U.S. cities. Energy efficiency, renewable energy, urban design, price- and behavioral-feedback strategies are evaluated across buildings–facilities, transportation, and materials/waste sectors in cities, comparing voluntary versus regulatory action configurations. GHG mitigation [...]

In carbon capture and storage (CCS), CO2 is captured at power plants and then injected underground into reservoirs like deep saline aquifers for long-term storage. While CCS may be critical for the continued use of fossil fuels in a carbon-constrained world, the deployment of CCS has been hindered by uncertainty in geologic storage capacities and [...]

Converging evidence from the behavioural and brain sciences suggests that the human moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify climate change — a complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused phenomenon — as an important moral imperative. As climate change fails to generate strong moral intuitions, it does not motivate an urgent need for action [...]

Peters et al.1 show that global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion, cement production and gas flaring grew faster than the historical average annual rate during 2010, negating the decrease in 2009 associated with the global financial crisis. We extend the work of Peters et al. by using decomposition analysis to show that the rising [...]

Following a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today proposed the first Clean Air Act standard for carbon pollution from new power plants. EPA’s proposed standard reflects the ongoing trend in the power sector to build cleaner plants that take advantage of American-made technologies, including new, clean-burning, efficient natural gas generation, [...]