In the past years biofuels have received increased attention since they were believed to contribute to rural development, energy security and to fight global warming. It became also clear, though, that bioenergy cannot be evaluated independently of the rest of the economy and that national and...

Marine and permafrost-based methane hydrates are the largest existing fossil carbon resource, whereby the marine deposits far outweigh the terrestrial ones. Their broad geographic distribution, especially in comparison to oil and conventional gas, make them a promising future source of energy....

Well-intended policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions may have unintended undesirable consequences. Recently, a large literature has emerged showing under what conditions this so-called 'Green Paradox' may occur. We review this literature and identify the key mechanisms behind these...

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeing is often taken as a proxy measure for...

Die hier vorgestellten Überlegungen nehmen direkt Bezug auf die im Zuge der projektinternen Synopse identifizierten Unzulänglichkeiten aktuell diskutierter Wohlfahrts- und grüner Wachstumskonzepte in ihrem Verhältnis zu dem bislang in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland etablierten...

What makes people happy in life? This is a crucial question that has the potential to shake up economics. In recent years, the dissatisfaction with the understanding of welfare in economics together with the new opportunities to empirically study people's subjective wellbeing have spurred...

Der vorliegende Beitrag ist eine Kurzfassung zur Studie I im Rahmen des Projektes Eckpunkte eines ökologisch tragfähigen Wohlfahrtskonzepts als Grundlage für umweltpolitische Innovations- und Transformationsprozesse für das Bundesumweltministerium (BMU). Die Auswertung hatte zum Ziel,...

I offer a selective review of discounting and climate policy. Analytic and numerical models show that different assumptions greatly change the degree to which decisions about climate policy depend on the discount rate. I discuss a claim that standard models exaggerate the current generation's...