Sustainable Macroeconomics, Climate Risks and Energy Transitions: Dynamic Modeling, Empirics, and Policies

Unurjargal Nyambuu · Willi Semmler

May 2023 · Springer Nature

About this ebook

Given the industrialized world’s historical dependence on fossil fuel-based energy resources and the now-realized perils of moving beyond the earth’s carbon budget, this book explores the myriad challenges of climate change and in reaching a low-carbon economy. Reconciling the medium-term competing, yet frequently complementary, needs for transition policies, the book provides guidelines for complex and often conflicting climate policy tasks.

The book presents empirical trends in the use of carbon-emitting resources and evaluates market-driven short-termism and its adverse impact on resource use and the environment; it emphasizes a medium-term macroeconomic perspective for the transition.

The authors attempt a paradigm shift towards a framework of sustainable macroeconomics. They survey relevant historical models, conduct empirical and numerical analyses of the climate change-relevant dynamic models, provide empirical illustrations, and evaluate diverse policy options and implementations together with their historical evolution.

New analytical issues are also considered, e.g., strategic behavior in the energy and resource sectors, energy competition and the dynamics of market shares in new energy technology, and supporting policies for dealing with the tipping points encountered in climate change.

The authors suggest a multitude of market-based strategies and public fiscal, monetary, and financial policies, and longer-run planning for resource extraction -all suitable for driving sustainable growth and a transformation of the energy sector.

The book also examines the multiple delaying forces slowing the transition to a low-carbon economy; these typically arise from short-termism, lock-ins, irreversibility, leakages, non-cooperative games, and other political strategies. Thus, they explain the snail’s pace evolution of current national and global climate policies.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of economics and environmental science. It is also relevant for policymakers and practitioners in multilateral institutions, research institutions as well as governments and ministries of countries interested in alternative energy sources, climate economists, and those who study the implementation of sustainable and low carbon-based policies.

About the author

Unurjargal Nyambuu is an economist and professor in the Department of Social Science, the New York City College of Technology, CUNY (USA). She is also a research fellow in Finance and Risk Engineering at NYU’s Tandon School. Dr. Nyambuu previously served as an economist with the Central Bank of Mongolia.

Willi Semmler is the Henry Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development at the New School for Social Research in New York (USA). There, he directs the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis’ Economics of Climate Change project. He is also a senior researcher at IIASA, Laxenburg (Austria), a research fellow at La Sapienza University (Rome) and affiliated with the University of Bielefeld (Germany).