Energy, Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability: Five Propositions

By S. Sorrell. 2010

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper advances five linked and controversial propositions that have both deep historical roots and urgent contemporary relevance. These are: (a) the rebound effects from energy efficiency improvements are significant and limit the potential for decoupling energy consumption from economic growth; (b) the contribution of energy to productivity improvements and economic growth has been greatly underestimated; (c) the pursuit of improved efficiency needs to be complemented by an ethic of sufficiency; (d) sustainability is incompatible with continued economic growth in rich countries; and (e) a zero-growth economy is incompatible with a fractional reserve banking system. These propositions run counter to conventional wisdom and each highlights either a "blind spot" or "taboo subject" that deserves closer scrutiny. While accepting one proposition reinforces the case for accepting the next, the former is neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/712638084a341ce4fa60b2a1bf41b5371bdf6cee

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

The effects of environmental innovations on CO2 emissions: Empirical evidence from Europe (2021, background): “Sorrell (2010) claims that the rebound effects raise the question of the effectiveness of energy efficiency policies given the behavioral responses that tend to reduce the scale of energy savings.”
How to deal with the rebound effect? A policy-oriented approach (2016, background): “The ulterior motives may therefore be different, for instance, the difficulty of combining policies aimed at constraining demand with the current widespread GDP-based economic growth paradigm (Sorrell, 2010).”
Growth Theory and "Green Growth" (2014, background): “Further insights along these lines are provided by Sterner and Damon (2011) and Damon and Sterner (2012), who spotlight institutional and perceptual/political economy aspects.”
Digitalization and energy consumption. Does ICT reduce energy demand? (2020, background): “However, most rebound researchers conclude that rebound effects are great enough to prevent a sufficient absolute reduction in energy demand (Azevedo et al., 2012; Greening et al., 2000; Maxwell et al., 2011; Ruzzenenti and Bertoldi, 2017; Santarius, 2015; Sorrell, 2010).”