This Is the Way the World Ends, Not With a Bang but Bonds and Bullets

This article explores instinctive frames of human decision-making in environmental and resource economics. Higher-moment asset pricing combines rational, mathematically informed economic reasoning with psychological and biological insights. Leptokurtic blindness and skewness preference combine in particularly challenging ways for carbon mitigation. At their worst, human heuristics may generate perverse decisions. Information uncertainty and the innate preference for bonds-and-bullets portfolios may impair responses to catastrophic climate change.

Selection of Energy Upgrades for Canadian Single-Detached Residential Households Based on Occupancy Profile

The use of energy efficient building systems can play a key role in reducing energy consumption and the adverse impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. The occupancy profile of residential dwellings has a notable influence on the effectiveness of selecting appropriate energy upgrade retrofits. Building simulation models can be integrated to determine the impact of independent occupancy profile in realizing a building’s carbon mitigation target. In this paper, the most desirable energy upgrade retrofits are suggested for three different occupancy profiles by considering important economic parameters, such as the initial investment, payback period and environmental parameter such as GHG emissions. The three occupancy profiles considered were a single adult, couple without children and couple with children. For this purpose, a calibrated energy model was developed for a single-detached family household in British Columbia, Canada, which was equipped with power sensors for monitoring the real time energy data. From the calibrated energy model, three different energy upgrade retrofits (solar, window, and wall/roof insulation) were modelled for the occupancy profiles chosen and the most suitable energy upgrades were suggested. The results show that solar panels contributed the most in energy cost reduction and upgraded windows had the least GHG emission. With suitable financial initiative, the combination of all the three energy upgrades can be the best option in terms of environment and economy.

Exploring the Dependence and Influencing Factors of Carbon Emissions from the Perspective of Population Development

Working towards sustainable population development is an important part of carbon mitigation efforts, and decoupling carbon emissions from population development has great significance for carbon mitigation. Based on the construction of a comprehensive population development index (PDI), this study adopts a decoupling model to explore the dependence between carbon emissions and PDI across 30 Chinese provinces from 2001 to 2017. Then, the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology (STIRPAT) model is used to investigate the impact of population factors on carbon emissions. The results show that the decoupling relationship between carbon emissions and PDI has experienced a transformation from expansive negative coupling to expansive coupling and then to weak decoupling at the national level, while some provinces have experienced the same evolutionary process, but the decoupling state in most provinces is not ideal. Sending talent to western provinces and developing low-carbon supporting industries will accelerate carbon decoupling. At the national level, incorporating environmental protection into the existing education system as part of classroom teaching could contribute to carbon decoupling.