In spite of the increasing scientific certainty that the earth's climate is warming and that human activity is partially responsible, public willingness to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seems to be decreasing. How can the scientific consensus as to the urgency of the climate...

Many ecological and environmental economists take a microeconomic approach to environmental valuation and view the macroeconomy as one big firm whose primary task is to efficiently allocate scarce resources. In this framework, replacing freely provided ecosystem services with costly...

The recent human impact on the environment is so unique in the geological record that the official geological body that defines the division of geological time, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, is considering designating a new geographical epoch called the Anthropocene, calling...

This chapter focuses on metals as they provide the clearest example of the challenges and opportunities that mineral resources present to society, in terms of both primary production and recycling. Basic concepts, information requirements and sources of consumer and industrial resource demand...

We develop the absorbing Markov chain (AMC) for describing in detail the network of paths through an industrial system taken by an embodied resource from extraction through intermediate products and finally consumer products.  We refer to this as a resource-specific network. This work builds on...

Human cultural adaptability helped our species get through several extreme environmental crises during the 200,000 year history of Homo sapiens. Richerson, Boyd and Henrich (2010) argue that this adaptability is a product of gene-culture coevolution. Much has been written about cultural...

This chapter presents the economic logic behind the concept of discounting the future and discusses how it applies to biodiversity conservation. How should economists account for the effects of biodiversity and ecosystem losses in the immediate and distant future? We discuss how to integrate...

This paper econometrically tests whether deficits financed by government borrowing “crowd out” business and consumer spending reductions by reducing credit availability. To test the hypothesis, the government deficit variables are added to consumption and investment models to see if they...

Using a simplified Klein/Fair structural model of the U.S. economy, estimated using 1960 – 2000 data, the paper finds that the 12.9% dollar decline 2000-2009 had a positive effect on exports, but mildly negative effects for domestically produced investment and consumer goods. It is shown that...

We develop the rectangular choice-of-technology model with factor constraints, or RCOT, for analysis of the economy of a single region, or of multiple regions in the context of a model of the world economy. RCOT allows for one or more sectors to operate more than one technology simultaneously,...