Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Business as Usual Emissions Projection from Sanchez and Stern Econometric Model

I finished preparing my presentation for Thursday in Brisbane. The topic of my talk is "Drivers of Industrial and Non-Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions". It's mostly based on my paper with Luis Sanchez. I'm also adding some material from Chapter 5 of the IPCC AR5 report (WG3) to give context. This is because this "trends and drivers" research theme came out of my work on the IPCC chapter. Reyer Gerlagh produced our original "iconic image" (yes, we called them that in the IPCC process) of the long-run growth rates of emissions and income per capita and then I suggested to do an econometric analysis along those lines. I think it was Reyer also who suggested how to model the EKC in a growth rates model.

I've also "added some value" by doing a business as usual projection using our model. This is something we are thinking to do as part of the revise and resubmit for a related paper. The graph shows projections to 2030 for 3 developing and 3 developed countries and the world (well, our 129 country sample) as a whole:


Indonesia and India have similar income per capita, so an EKC model would project similar emissions growth in both countries. The graph shows the value added of our model, which suggests that emissions will grow slower in Indonesia, which is more emissions intensive. The global outcome is similar (a little bit higher) to RCP 8.5, which is the highest emissions growth scenario used in AR5. RCP 8.5 assumes slower economic growth than we are here but slower than historic progress in energy intensity.

To get the projection, I used our model parameters estimated for the 1991-2010 period and the UN median projection for population growth. I used USDA ERS projections for economic growth rates in each country. Other variables are at their values for 2010.

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