Carbon Lock-In: Types, Causes, and Policy Implications

By Karen C. Seto, Ronald B Mitchell, Eleanor C. Stokes, Gregory C. Unruh, D. Ürge-Vorsatz. 2016

1,025 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ff57e5d97b44f8ef06e71fc34cd945cb2f0629a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. J. Barrett
2. D. Ivanova
3. Felix Creutzig
4. Richard Wood
5. Marieke Oteman
6. R. Denniss
7. J. Palm
8. M. Mehling

In Environmental Engineering

1. Richard Wood
2. D. Ivanova
3. J. Barrett
4. Felix Creutzig
5. Dominik Wiedenhofer
6. J. Palm
7. M. Mehling
8. Endre Tvinnereim

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. D. Ivanova
2. J. Barrett
3. Felix Creutzig
4. Richard Wood
5. R. Denniss
6. J. Palm
7. M. Mehling
8. Karen C. Seto

Citations in the corpus

• Between grassroots and treetops: community power and institutional dependence in the renewable energy sector in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. (2018, background): “Once an energy infrastructure has been established, the large investments ensure that it remains dominant for decades, a mechanism that is described as ‘carbon lock-in’ [96].”
• The unequal distribution of household carbon footprints in Europe and its link to sustainability (2020, background): “Important infrastructural, institutional and behavioural lockins (Seto et al., 2016) and powerful forces of highly profitable (fossil fuel) industries (Fuchs et al., 2016; Roberts et al., 2020) constrain the transition to a low-carbon society.”
• Cutting with both arms of the scissors: the economic and political case for restrictive supply-side climate policies (2018, background): “This is known as Block-in^ (see generally Seto et al. 2016, 429–30; see Erickson et al. 2015 on lock-in from fossil fuel supply infrastructure specifically).”
• Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options (2020, background): “Table 3 communicates a list with the options with the highest mitigation potential and potential actions towards overcoming the main infrastructural, institutional and behavioral carbon lock-ins [126].”
• Carbon pricing and deep decarbonisation (2018, background): “That, in turn, incurs carbon lock-in throughout the normal economic life of the technology (Seto et al., 2016), which, in the case of road vehicles, can be a decade or more.”