Gregor Semieniuk

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst

Reducing the energy demand has become a key mechanism for limiting climate change, but there are practical limitations associated with large energy savings in a growing global economy and, importantly, its lower-income parts. Using new data on energy and GDP, we show that adopting the same near-term low-energy growth trajectory in all regions in IP...

A key aim of climate policy is to progressively substitute renewables and energy efficiency for fossil fuel use. The associated rapid depreciation and replacement of fossil-fuel-related physical and natural capital entail a profound reorganization of industry value chains, international trade and geopolitics. Here we present evidence confirming tha...

The distribution of ownership of transition risk associated with stranded fossil-fuel assets remains poorly understood. We calculate that global stranded assets as present value of future lost profits in the upstream oil and gas sector exceed US$1 trillion under plausible changes in expectations about the effects of climate policy. We trace the equ...

In an otherwise excellent analysis of fair regional shares of global mitigation investments, Pachauri et al. (Policy Forum, 9 December 2022, p. 1057) dramatically overestimate developing countries' 'capability' to invest by estimating GDP using purchasing power parity exchange rates. Since internationally sourced investment goods must be paid for a...

This paper analyzes the cross-border risks that could result from a decarbonization of the world economy. We develop a typology of cross-border risks and their respective channels. Our qualitative and quantitative scenario analysis suggests that the mid-transition – a period during which fossil-fuel and low-carbon energy systems co-exist and transf...

The San Diego Regional Decarbonization Framework’s Technical Report provides technical and policy pathways to decarbonization in the medium-term to inform near-term policymaking in regional, County, and city governments. The report models science-based pathways to net zero carbon emissions for the San Diego region by 2045, consistent with the Paris...

A model based on plausible changes in expectations of future oil and gas demand identifies the ultimate financial owners of potential stranded assets to be predominantly OECD-based individual investors (through pension funds and shareholdings) and governments of non-OECD countries.

The low-carbon energy transition sees countries compete about where the low-carbon products are manufactured. In their recent Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews article, Sharma, Surana, and George ask whether imposing unilateral anti-dumping tariffs helps the imposing country move more of the value chain into its own country and answer in the...

Widespread implementation of energy efficiency is a key greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measure, but rebound can “take back” energy savings. However, conceptual foundations lag behind empirical estimates of the size of rebound. We posit that development of solid analytical frameworks for rebound is hampered by the interdisciplinary nature of th...

The majority of global energy scenarios anticipate a structural break in the relationship between energy consumption and gross domestic product (GDP), with several scenarios projecting absolute decoupling, where energy use falls while GDP continues to grow. However, there are few precedents for absolute decoupling, and current global trends are i...

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/to-fight-climate-change-save-energy-and-reduce-inequality

Does what you exported matter? We build a new global commodity-level export database for the previous era of globalization and find persistence in productive capabilities proxied by economic complexity, export diversification, and sophistication across a century. We also show that productive capabilities at the turn of the 20th century are a powerf...

A key aim of climate policy is to progressively substitute renewables and energy efficiency for fossil fuel use. The associated rapid depreciation and replacement of fossil fuel-related physical and natural capital may entail a profound reorganisation of industry value chains, international trade, and geopolitics. Here, we present evidence confirmi...

Improving energy efficiency quickly is key to mitigating climate change and requires improvements implemented in firms. As these require upfront investments, good access to external finance is important. Theory suggests that information asymmetries may prevent lenders from including energy efficiency into their lending assessment, even though highe...

The transition to a low‐carbon economy will entail a large‐scale structural change. Some industries will have to expand their relative economic weight, while other industries, especially those directly linked to fossil fuel production and consumption, will have to decline. Such a systemic shift may have major repercussions on the stability of finan...

Understanding inequality energy consumption at the global level delivers key insights for strategies to mitigate climate change. Recent contributions [4, 28, 48, 49] have studied energy inequality through the lens of maximum entropy. They claim a weighted international distribution of total primary energy demand should approach a Boltzmann-Gibbs ma...

Ambitious scenarios of carbon emission redistribution for mitigating climate change in line with the Paris Agreement and reaching the sustainable development goal of eradicating poverty have been proposed recently. They imply a strong reduction in carbon footprint inequality by 2030 that effectively halves the Gini coefficient to about 0.25. This p...

Ambitious scenarios of carbon emission redistribution for mitigating climate change in line with the Paris Agreement and reaching the sustainable development goal of eradicating poverty have been proposed recently. They imply a strong reduction in carbon footprint inequality by 2030 that effectively halves the Gini coefficient to about 0.25. This p...

Rapid structural change towards a low-carbon energy supply requires significant additional investments into innovative but high-risk low-carbon technologies. Mobilising greater private investments requires applying the right policy instruments, but while fiscal measures and regulation have been well researched, systematic quantitative evidence abou...

Mitigating climate change requires information about the inequality in energy consumption. Recent contributions (Banerjee and Yakovenko, 2010; Lawrence et al., 2013; Yakovenko, 2010, 2013) have studied energy inequality through the lens of maximum entropy. They claim a weighted international distribution of total primary energy demand should approa...

Rapid structural change towards a low-carbon energy supply requires significant additional investments into innovative but high-risk low-carbon technologies. Mobilising greater private investments requires applying the right policy instruments, but while fiscal measures and regulation have been well researched, systematic quantitative evidence abou...

American radical economists in the 1960s perceived China under Maoism as an important experiment in creating a new society, aspects of which they hoped could serve as a model for the developing world. But the knowledge of “actually existing Maoism” was very limited due to the mutual isolation between China and the US. This chapter analyses the Firs...

While investments into renewable energy technologies are growing almost everywhere, the chances to meet ambitious emission and climate targets, as those envisaged in the Paris Agreement, are scant. To speed up the transition, policy makers need to design and implement a policy mix that could affect not just the quantity of green finance, but its qu...

American radical economists in the 1960s perceived China under Maoism as an important experiment in creating a new society, aspects of which they hoped could serve as a model for the developing world. But the knowledge of ‘actually existing Maoism’ was very limited due to the mutual isolation between China and the US. This paper analyses the First...

This paper surveys the current state of financing green growth in the energy sector, based on the insight that there are different qualities of finance. In past transformational changes in other sectors, public monies played a key role across the innovation landscape. Public financing was central also in a number of past national energy transitions...

An influential theoretical hypothesis holds that if aggregate productivity growth accelerates, then so does the decline in energy intensity. Whether faster growth is greener in this sense is crucial for modeling future growth and climate change mitigation, but empirical evidence is lacking. This paper characterizes the global, long-run historical r...

Successful financing of innovation in renewable energy (RE) requires a better understanding of the relationship between different types of finance and their willingness to invest in RE. We study the ‘direction’ of innovation that financial actors create. Focusing on the deployment phase of innovation, we use Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) data...

This article examines Thomas Piketty’s explanation of a falling wage share. Piketty explains rising income inequality between labor and capital as a result of one parameter of a production function: an elasticity of substitution, σ, between labor and capital greater than one. This article reviews Piketty’s elasticity argument, which relies on a non...

Economic theory justifies policy when there are concrete market failures. The article shows how in the case of innovation, successful policies that have led to radical innovations have been more about market shaping and creating through direct and pervasive public financing, rather than market fixing. The paper reviews and discusses evidence for th...

Accelerating innovation in renewable energy (RE) requires not just more finance, but finance servicing the entire innovation landscape. Given that finance is not ‘neutral’, more information is required on the quality of finance that meets technology and innovation stage-specific financing needs for the commercialization of RE technologies. We inves...

Motivated by classical political economy we detail a probabilistic, 'statistical equilibrium' approach to explaining why even in equilibrium, the equalization of profit rates leads to a non-degenerate distribution. Based on this approach we investigate the empirical content of the profit rate distribution for previously unexamined annual firm level...

Climate change mitigation challenges national economies to increase productivity while reducing fossil energy consumption. Fossil energy-saving technical change has been assumed to accomplish this, yet empirical evidence is scarce. This paper investigates the long-run relationship between the rate and direction of technical change with respect to f...

Existing methods for sample selection from noisy profit rate data in the industrial organization field of economics tend to be conditional on a covariate’s value that risks discarding valuable information. We condition sample selection on the profit rate data structure instead by use of a Bayesian mixture model. In a two- component (signal and nois...

Using the financial balances accounting identity, we analyze whether there is evidence in recent national accounting data and the projections of the Stability Programmes (SP), that the focus on fiscal deficits to the exlusion of other economic magnitudes risks further deterioration of the euro area economy's growth rate. We find that, in the past a...

This paper evaluates whether the 2011 national stability programs (SPs) of the euro area countries are instrumental in achieving economic stability in the European Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, we analyze how the SPs address the double challenge of public deficits and external imbalances. Our analysis rests, first, on the accounting identiti...

We analyse the newly updated Stability Programmes of the Euro area governments by applying the simple accounting identity by which the financial balances of the government, the private sector and the foreign sector always sum to zero. While the focus of the old Stability and Growth Pact was solely on the government balance, the current euro crisis...