Whether China maintains its business-as-usual energy-intensive growth trajectory or changes to a sustainable development alternative has significant implications for global energy and climate governance. This paper is motivated to theoretically examine ChinaÕs potential transition from its...

We examine the key factors driving change in energy use globally over the past four decades. Our econometric approach is robust to the presence of unit roots, unobserved time effects, and spatial effects. We test for both strong decoupling where economic growth has less effect on energy use as...

Physics shows that energy is necessary for economic production and, therefore, economic growth but the mainstream theory of economic growth, except for specialized resource economics models, pays no attention to the role of energy. This paper reviews the relevant biophysical theory and...

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. As economies get richer environmental impacts first rise but eventually fall. In reality, though some types of environmental degradation have been...

We adopt a new representation of the relationship between emissions and income using long-run growth rates. Our approach allows us to test multiple hypotheses about the drivers of per capita emissions in a single framework and avoid several of the econometric issues that have plagued previous...

The clearing of forests for agricultural land and other marketable purposes is a well-trodden path of economic development. With these private benefits from deforestation come external costs: emissions from deforestation currently account for 12 per cent of global carbon emissions. A widespread...