The option of adapting to climate change is becoming more important in climate change policy. Hence, responding to climate change now involves both mitigation to address the cause and adaptation as a response to already ongoing or expected changes. These changes are also of relevance for the...

Recent efforts to promote a transition to a low carbon economy have been influenced by suggestions that a low carbon transition offers challenges and might yield economic benefits comparable to those of the previous industrial revolutions. This paper examines these arguments and the challenges...

Coal-fired power stations are responsible for around a third of Germany's carbon emissions. Failure to reduce the persistently high level of coal-fired power generation threatens Germany's climate targets for 2020 and 2050 and undermines a sustainable energy transition. Calculations by DIW...

Fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions have risen dramatically since 1800. We identify the long-run drivers of CO2 emissions for a sample of twelve developed economies using an extended Kaya decomposition. By considering biomass and carbon-free energy sources along with fossil fuels we are...

This article examines energy transition political process from a sector-based approach, through the analysis of recent shift in the French forest policy regime. We demonstrate that, since 2007, energy transition policies have led to a harvesting turn within the French forest policy framework,...

The 20th Century saw major human triggered transitions that cumulatively are threatening the safety of the habitat for humans on planet earth. Population, resources, and the rapid accumulation of wealth all are intertwined in the 5 major transitions from the past to our new global future. These...

We develop a stylized application of a new evolutionary model to study an energy transition in electricity production. The framework describes a population of boundedly rational electricity producers who decide each period on the allocation of profits among different energy technologies. They...

The German energy transition repeatedly faces harsh critiques questioning its economic and environmental merit. This article defends the Energiewende and argues that Germany has chosen a rational and particularly forceful approach to securing sustainable energy supply. Though current...

It is often argued that energy policy is too fragmented across EU Member States and should be Europeanized to pave the way towards an efficiently organized European power system, which rest on the internal market for energy and a pan-European super-grid. However, this view neglects i) the...

In this paper, I use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the German energy system into a renewable energy sources (RES)-based system, the so-called Energiewende, as a regime shift. This regime shift comprises several transformations, which are currently altering the...