Meeting 2050 CO2 emissions reduction targets:The potential for electric vehicles

This chapter explores the potential for electric vehicles to contribute to decarbonising surface transport. Decarbonising transport is a major global challenge-meeting CO2 emissions reduction targets for 2050, with a rapidly growing, and urbanising global population.

The two limits debates: "Limits to Growth" and climate change

In this article we compare the current debate about global warming with the earlier discourse of Limits to Growth (LtG) of the 1970's. We are especially interested in the similarities of and differences between the two cases and therefore compare the policy challenges and lessons to be drawn. While the two debates differ on important issues, they share a technocratic orientation to public policy, and susceptibility to similar pitfalls. In both debates alarming scenarios about future catastrophes play an important role. We suggest that climate change policy discourse needs to focus more closely on the social, economic, and political dimensions of climate change, as opposed to its excessive emphasis on emission reduction targets. We also argue that an excessive faith in the market mechanisms to supply global warming mitigation technologies is problematic. In this respect, we provide a reality check regarding the political implications of emission targets and timetables and suggest how policy issues can be moved forward.

Optimal input/output reduction in production processes

While conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models set targets for each operational unit, this paper considers the problem of input/output reduction in a centralized decision making environment. The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to input/output reduction problem that typically occurs in organizations with a centralized decision-making environment. This paper shows that DEA can make an important contribution to this problem and discusses how DEA-based model can be used to determine an optimal input/output reduction plan. An application in banking sector with limitation in IT investment shows the usefulness of the proposed method.

CO2 emissions reduction of Chinese light manufacturing industries:a novel RAM-based global Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index

Climate change has become one of the most challenging issues facing the world. Chinese government has realized the importance of energy conservation and prevention of the climate changes for sustainable development of China's economy and set targets for CO2 emissions reduction in China. In China industry contributes 84.2% of the total CO2 emissions, especially manufacturing industries. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist productivity (MP) index are the widely used mathematical techniques to address the relative efficiency and productivity of a group of homogenous decision making units, e.g. industries or countries. However, in many real applications, especially those related to energy efficiency, there are often undesirable outputs, e.g. the pollutions, waste and CO2 emissions, which are produced inevitably with desirable outputs in the production. This paper introduces a novel Malmquist-Luenberger productivity (MLP) index based on directional distance function (DDF) to address the issue of productivity evolution of DMUs in the presence of undesirable outputs. The new RAM (Range-adjusted measure)-based global MLP index has been applied to evaluate CO2 emissions reduction in Chinese light manufacturing industries. Recommendations for policy makers have been discussed.