Time series models of global climate change have tended to estimate a low climate sensitivity and a fast adjustment rate to equilibrium. These results appear to be biased by omission of a key variable - heat stored in the ocean. I develop a time series model of the ocean atmosphere climate...

The policy recommendations of most economists are based on the rational actor model of human behavior. Behavior is assumed to be self-regarding, preferences are assumed to be stable, and decisions are assumed to be unaffected by social context or frame of reference. The related fields of...

This paper describes the mathematical basis for input-output economics, the major types of models, and the underlying economic theory. The features of these models that make them especially well suited for understanding the connections between the economy and the environment are emphasized...

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...

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,...

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...