Factors affecting fuelwood production and consumption in Greece

Wood, one of the most important renewable energy sources (RES), has been used as a fuel since ancient times. Wood was the first material to be used for energy production. Gradually its use as a fuel dwindled as other sources gained popularity. However, following the oil crises of the 1970s, various countries switched to RES and in particular to wood as a primary heat source. The current paper attempts to highlight the factors that affect fuelwood production and consumption in Greece in recent decades and to propose a number of policy measures. More specifically, fuelwood production in Greece over the last decades is constantly declining mainly due to overgrazing, forest fires, urban sprawl, poor management and inadequate transport infrastructures; all these factors considerably impact the country’s forest productive capacity. Several decades ago, fuelwood was in great demand in Greece. Gradually, however, it lost its popularity to other heating fuels and was only used in rural residences or in a small number of urban homes. The last decade, however, owing to the deep economic crisis afflicting the country, there has been a marked increase in the demand for fuelwood mainly by low-income households.

Our Future is Still the Future of 1973: Shell's Foresight and the Petrocultural Penumbra

This article argues that the economic abstraction of fossil fuels into the medium of the market after 1973 makes its force and function in the global economy difficult to see, in the way that the source of a penumbra is obscured by the distribution of its effects over the visual field, but that Shell's invention of a unique (and now widely adopted) technique for scenarios thinking on the cusp of the 1970s oil crises helps us see the emergence of that recursive futurity in media res. Hence, while the eventual dominance of energy futures trading would, by the end of the 1980s, come to hold the present and future of the global economy to the concrete and abstract materialism of fossil fuels, the focus in this essay is on a novel form of writing that same future strategically and analytically moments before the energy market is restructured. The genealogy offered is of the so-called 'decision scenario' invented by Shell and it is interesting today for its redefinition of oil from commodity to medium of the market as such, narrating an emergent concept of oil that would eventually get actualised and operationalised in the financial sector over a decade later – even as it would recede from view in discussions of neoliberalism, the post-industrial, and postmodern culture.

The Rehn-Meidner model and its role in the Swedish economic policy

This paper aims to describe the Swedish Rehn-Meidner model, the cause of its creation, its features and the reasons for changes in the Swedish economic policy over several decades. The model was developed by two Swedish economists in 1951 and it impacted the economic policy over the following decades. It was intended to facilitate achieving the goals of full employment, price stability, economic growth and equality in a redistribution of income through the policies of solidarity wage, restrictive economy, active labour market and marginal employment. The model was designed as a solution to the "overheating" of the Swedish economy in the 1950s. The implementation of the model initially proved to be successful. However, in the 1970s the economic policy began to be more influenced by trade unions, acting mainly in their own interest. Due to the growing globalisation other external factors, such as oil crises and negative demand shocks, started to have an increasing impact on Sweden. It was when economic decisions started to shift away from the recommendations of the model, and the "golden age" of the 1950s and 1960s came to an end. The following analysis intends to explain what was the model characterisation, how it influenced Sweden's development, and why the country economic policy has changed over time. It also states that despite changes in the economy, certain elements of the model have remained valid until today.

Prediction of Air Flight Cancellation during COVID-19 using Deep Learning Methods

Air traffic is vulnerable to external factors, such as oil crises, natural disasters, economic recessions and disease outbreaks due to COVID-19. This reason seems to have a more severe and more rapid impact on air traffic numbers as sudden increases in flight cancellations, aircraft groundings and travel bans. Various Airways loose revenues and it is difficult for them to sustain for a long period. This problem as been facing the entire world. The reductions in passenger numbers are significant. It is due to flights being cancelled or planes flying empty between airports. It is in turn massively reducing revenues for airlines and forced many airlines to lay off employees or declare bankruptcy. Airways also have to attempt refunding cancelled trips in order to diminish their losses. The airliner manufacturers and airport operators have also laid off employees. According to some commentators, this crisis is the worst ever encountered in the history of the aviation industry. Aircraft cancellation prediction is accomplished by utilising deep learning framework. In this framework, two dissimilar recurrent neural networks are assembled as a single entity while inferring the prediction results. Long-short term memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) are employed to design the proposed predictive model. This predictive model is compared against traditional neural network based Multi-layer perceptron model. Experimental results indicated an accuracy of 98.7% by the proposed model.

Stuck in the Seventies: Gas Prices and Consumer Sentiment

Using daily consumer survey data, we analyze the transmission of gas prices to consumer beliefs and expectations about the economy. We exploit the high frequency and geographic disaggregation of our dataset to facilitate identification. Consumer sentiment becomes more pessimistic with rising gas prices. This effect is strongest for consumers who lived through the recessionary oil crises in the 1970s, consistent with models of learning from personal experience. For younger respondents, the sensitivity of sentiment to gas prices is stronger for college-educated respondents. Sensitivity is also higher in states with greater gas expenditures per capita.

The responses of the authoritarian national developmentalism to the structural economic crisis (1973-1985)

ABSTRACT This research analyzes the Brazilian structural economic crisis throughout the 1970s and 1980s and the political responses of the Authoritarian National Developmentalism (1964-1985). Firstly, the study highlights the nature of the international oil crises of 1973 and 1979, showing an unexpected rise in interest rates by the US Central Bank and the tightening of external credit after 1979. Rising interest rates meant the end of liquidity in the international credit finance market and the beginning of a drastically recessive policy in Brazil. These factors contributed to the erosion of the growth model based on external debt, a model reflected in two main paradigms: the “economic miracle” (1968-1973) marked by high GDP growth rates; and the II National Development Plan (II PND) (1974-1979), focused on deepening the import substitution industrialization (ISI). The collapse of authoritarianism led to hyperinflation, external indebtedness, and the state’s fiscal crisis, exposing the hegemony of rentier, nonproductive financial capitalism. The second part of the article investigates the negative externalities of the structural economic crisis at the social level, such as concentration, centralization, and closing of the decision-making process, hindering workers’ participation; the intensification of union mobilizations for wage recomposition; the spread of unemployment/underemployment in metropolitan regions; the wage squeeze; the increase in unhealthy labor relations and, therefore, the thinning of the social fabric.

The Utilization of Abandoned Petroleum Wells in Geothermal Energy Sector. Worldwide Trends and Experience

Since the oil crises in the 1970s, geothermal resources have received much attention and researches aimed at its recognition have been conducted all around the globe. Nevertheless, the investment cost associated mainly with drilling works is a crucial limitation for the successful implementation of new geothermal projects. The radical solution affecting the cost effectiveness of any geothermal investments might be an adaptation of existing un-exploited boreholes of the oil and gas sector for geothermal purposes. Moreover, a few studies on heat and/or energy recovery from oil and gas provinces have indicated that a tremendous amount of geothermal energy co-exists with petroleum fields. Thereby, the article centres on global concepts related to the adaptation of boreholes after the exploitation of hydrocarbon deposits or negative exploratory wells in order to exploit geothermal energy resources. Selected concepts focused on possible electricity production and the space heating sector are discussed. Other potential technologies based on utilization of geothermal energy attained by borehole heat exchangers are also indicated.

Detecting West Texas Intermediate (WTI) Prices’ Bubble Periods

Oil prices have had considerable surges and bursts since the first oil crisis of 1973. Until then its price was stable, with almost zero volatility. Since then, apart from the two oil crises of 1973 and 1978/9, oil prices had consecutive bubble episodes like the surges up to 2008 and 2014 and their successive bursts, respectively. The trace of these bubble periods is of crucial importance for policymakers, since their drivers and consequences impact global economic developments. Phillips et al. and Phillips et al. methodologies are applied to detect whether West Texas Intermediate prices experienced bubble periods. Both methodologies suggest that WTI prices experienced explosive episodes, which could be fundamentally, speculatively, or politically attributed. Some suggested periods coincide for both methods, but the second methodology seems to be more sensitive than its predecessor is, leading to better bubble detection but also to identification of non-existent bubbles. The identified bubble periods are compared to relevant research in the literature concerning their presence, duration, and explosiveness. The main goal of the research, apart from the detection of bubbles’ presence and duration, is to identify the causal underlying reasons for each explosive episode. Further, we compare the start and endpoints of each bubble episode with time-points when structural changes occurred. The contribution of the paper is that it clearly defines the bubble episodes with their corresponding drivers. The paper identifies the importance of market fundamentals’ swifts in explaining the bubble periods. The findings of the papers can help policymakers and other stakeholders to monitor oil price shifts and their underlying reasons, and then proceed with prompt actions. Since bubble episodes are fundamentally explained, then the practical utility is that by focusing on the market fundamentals, stakeholders can avoid actions that could result in market failures.