This lecture discusses relationships between environmental and resource qualities and loads, and economic development, theoretically and empirically. We start in section 2 with a list of theoretical arguments that may or may not justify a tendency for environmental quality to first deteriorate,...

Several different theoretical models of economic growth and environmental quality each generate inverse-U-shaped pollution-income paths, or "environmental Kuznets curves." They rely on different assumptions to generate the reversal of pollution trends, with correspondingly different policy...

It is widely known that emissions of greenhouse gases from anthropogenic activities have been dramatically increasing at the unprecedented rate over the past several decades, and causing the global climate change. To assess the future trends of such global climate change, it is necessary to...