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"Ayres, Robert U"
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Lithium: Sources, Production, Uses, and Recovery Outlook
The demand for lithium has increased significantly during the last decade as it has become key for the development of industrial products, especially batteries for electronic devices and electric vehicles. This article reviews sources, extraction and production, uses, and recovery and recycling, all of which are important aspects when evaluating lithium as a key resource. First, it describes the estimated reserves and lithium production from brine and pegmatites, including the material and energy requirements. Then, it continues with a description about the current uses of lithium focusing on its application in batteries and concludes with a description of the opportunities for recovery and recycling and the future demand forecast. The article concludes that the demand of lithium for electronic vehicles will increase from 30% to almost 60% by 2020. Thus, in the next years, the recovery and recycling of lithium from batteries is decisive to ensure the long-term viability of the metal.
Journal Article
System Complexity Versus Environmental Sustainability: Theory and Policy
We discuss the relationship between environmental sustainability and system complexity. This is motivated by the fact that solutions to environmental challenges often create additional complexity in the overall socioeconomic system, at local to global levels. This increase in complexity might hamper the ultimate achievement of sustainability. This theme is over utmost importance but is overlooked in studies of environmental sustainability, environmental and climate policy, and sustainability transitions. It merits serious attention as this can provide a general basis and clarification of related topics that are currently studied in isolation—think of energy rebound, carbon leakage, green paradox (fossil fuel market responses to climate policy), circular economy, and environmental problem shifting. The relationship between complexity and sustainability is examined from thermodynamic and systemic perspectives, resulting in identifying a set of mechanisms of complexity increase and clarifying how this potentially creates barriers to meeting sustainability goals. While this issue is pertinent to all economies and countries, it is of high relevance to developing countries as their economies are likely to undergo considerable complexity increases in the near future due to further development. The question is then whether countries will be able to steer their development in a sustainable direction while simultaneously limiting a more roundabout nature of their production structure. We contend that this may require “complexity policy” and outline ideas in this regard. An important role can be played by cap‐and‐trade, but this will work mainly for carbon emission and not for other environmental pressures. Ultimately, a policy mix could guide different subsystem complexities in terms of environmental pressures and welfare impacts—resulting in optimizing system complexity for sustainability.
Journal Article
Material efficiency: rare and critical metals
In the last few decades, progress in electronics, especially, has resulted in important new uses for a number of geologically rare metals, some of which were mere curiosities in the past. Most of them are not mined for their own sake (gold, the platinum group metals and the rare Earth elements are exceptions) but are found mainly in the ores of the major industrial metals, such as aluminium, copper, zinc and nickel. We call these major metals 'attractors' and the rare accompanying metals 'hitch-hikers'. The key implication is that rising prices do not necessarily call forth greater output because that would normally require greater output of the attractor metal. We trace the geological relationships and the functional uses of these metals. Some of these metals appear to be irreplaceable in the sense that there are no known substitutes for them in their current functional uses. Recycling is going to be increasingly important, notwithstanding a number of barriers.
Journal Article
On the Creation and Destruction of National Wealth: Are Financial Collapses Endogenous?
This paper traces US national wealth from 1914 through 2015 and constructs a multivariate econometric model that combines elements of short-term and long-term dynamics. We find that US wealth depends on a range of macroeconomic variables, including the wealth itself observed in the previous period, change in market capitalization, change in US house price index and inflation. Less impactful, statistically significant factors included unemployment, changes in oil price, and change in debt-to-GDP ratio. Another significant result is that the Glass–Steagall Act, which prohibited commercial banks from speculative activity in the stock market after 1933, had a statistically significant positive impact on wealth in the US. We test the model by asking whether it could have anticipated the actual collapse in 2008, given prior data up to 2000, 2005 and 2010. All three tests forecasted a sharp wealth decline starting in 2008, followed by a recovery. These results suggest the possibility of forecasting future financial collapses. We have found our model to be slightly more accurate in the short run than in the long run.
Journal Article
The Bubble Economy
The global economy has become increasingly, perhaps chronically, unstable. Since 2008, we have heard about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, banks \"too big to fail,\" financial regulation (or the lack of it), and the European debt crisis. Wall Street has discovered that it is more profitable to make money from other people's money than by investing in the real economy, which has limited access to capital--resulting in slow growth and rising inequality. What we haven't heard much about is the role of natural resources--energy in particular--as drivers of economic growth, or the connection of \"global warming\" to the economic crisis. InThe Bubble Economy, Robert Ayres--an economist and physicist--connects economic instability to the economics of energy. Ayres describes, among other things, the roots of our bubble economy (including the divergent influences of Senator Carter Glass--of the Glass-Steagall Law--and Ayn Rand); the role of energy in the economy, from the \"oil shocks\" of 1971 and 1981 through the Iraq wars; the early history of bubbles and busts; the end of Glass-Steagall; climate change; and the failures of austerity. Finally, Ayres offers a new approach to trigger economic growth. The rising price of fossil fuels (notwithstanding \"fracking\") suggests that renewable energy will become increasingly profitable. Ayres argues that government should redirect private savings and global finance away from home ownership and toward \"de-carbonization\"--investment in renewables and efficiency. Large-scale investment in sustainability will achieve a trifecta: lowering greenhouse gas emissions, stimulating innovation-based economic growth and employment, and offering long-term investment opportunities that do not depend on risky gambling strategies with derivatives.
eBook
From LTER to LTSER
Concerns about global environmental change challenge long term ecological research (LTER) to go beyond traditional disciplinary scientific research to produce knowledge that can guide society toward more sustainable development. Reporting the outcomes of a 2 d interdisciplinary workshop, this article proposes novel concepts to substantially expand LTER by including the human dimension. We feel that such an integration warrants the insertion of a new letter in the acronym, changing it from LTER to LTSER, “Long-Term Socioecological Research,” with a focus on coupled socioecological systems. We discuss scientific challenges such as the necessity to link biophysical processes to governance and communication, the need to consider patterns and processes across several spatial and temporal scales, and the difficulties of combining data from in-situ measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys, and soft knowledge from the humanities. We stress the importance of including prefossil fuel system baseline data as well as maintaining the often delicate balance between monitoring and predictive or explanatory modeling. Moreover, it is challenging to organize a continuous process of cross-fertilization between rich descriptive and causal-analytic local case studies and theory/modeling-oriented generalizations. Conceptual insights are used to derive conclusions for the design of infrastructures needed for long-term socioecological research.
Journal Article
Scarcity and growth revisited
In this volume, a group of distinguished international scholars provides a fresh investigation of the most fundamental issues involved in our dependence on natural resources. In Scarcity and Growth (RFF, 1963) and Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (RFF, 1979), researchers considered the long-term implications of resource scarcity for economic growth and human well-being. Scarcity and Growth Revisited examines these implications with 25 years of new learning and experience. It finds that concerns about resource scarcity have changed in essential ways. In contrast with the earlier preoccupation with the adequacy of fuel, mineral, and agricultural resources and the efficiency by which they are allocated, the greatest concern today is about the Earth's limited capacity to handle the environmental consequences of resource extraction and use. Opinion among scholars is divided on the ability of technological innovation to ameliorate this 'new scarcity.' However, even the book's more optimistic authors agree that the problems will not be successfully overcome without significant advances in the legal, financial, and other social institutions that protect the environment and support technical innovation. Scarcity and Growth Revisited incorporates expert perspectives from the physical and life sciences, as well as economics. It includes issues confronting the developing world as well as industrialized societies. The book begins with a review of the debate about scarcity and economic growth and a review of current assessments of natural resource availability and consumption. The twelve chapters that follow provide an accessible, lively, and authoritative update to an enduring-but changing-debate.
eBook
Energizing Growth in a Bubble Economy
This guest editorial presents four theses.First, economic theory today has not caught up with the changes in the world since Adam Smith and David Ricardo when externalities were comparatively rare and unusual; today they are pervasive, thanks to urbanization, networking and globalization, and the financial externalities associated with bubbles now far exceed in damage the profits to the bubble-makers.Second, economic growth since that time has been demand driven because energy prices kept falling—on average—until the beginning of this century. Future growth is not guaranteed in a world of “peak oil,” and oil price bubbles. It is not certain that our grandchildren will be much richer than we are. Secular stagnation may be caused by energy constraints.Third, the policy response by central banks, low and lower interest rates, creates the condition for the next bubble. This cannot continue.Fourth, there is a profit opportunity approaching with a huge payoff. If grasped, it will kickstart growth, reduce unemployment, ameliorate the Greenhouse effect and help solve the problems of the pension funds.
Journal Article
