The UK’s Emissions and Employment Footprints: Exploring the Trade-Offs

Sakai, Marco; Owen, Anne; Barrett, John

doi:10.3390/su9071242

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 68 publications

(54 reference statements)

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“…For further discussion of the UKMRIO database including additional notes on construction and application see Barrett et al (2013), Hardt et al (2018), Lenzen et al (2010), Owen et al (2018), Sakai et al (2017), Scott et al (2018), and Wiedmann et al (2010) and the Supporting Information (SI) for this article.…”

Section: Energy Footprints and The Uk Multiregional Input-output Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing inequality resulting from UK low-carbon policy

Owen

Barrett

2020

Climate Policy

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In the UK, the cost of low-carbon policies, such as renewable energy subsidies, household retrofit and installation of smart meters, adds an additional 13% to household energy bills. Given that the lowest income households spend 10% of their income on heating and powering their homes, whereas the highest spend less than 1.5%., any increase in prices hits the poor disproportionately. Using an energyextended multiregional input-output model combined with household expenditure survey data, we calculate the full supply-chain energy embodied in goods and services consumed by different households. First, we demonstrate that low-carbon policy costs are placed on a small percentage of household energy demandperversely on items representing a higher proportion of expenditure for low income households. The lifestyles of higher income households require nearly five times more energy than the lowest, but because levies are only raised on energy bills, those with high incomes pay only 1.9 times more towards policy costs. Second, we evaluate alternative approaches to funding low-carbon policy: a household energy footprint approach, taking account of households' full energy service demands; and funding the costs from general taxation payments. We explore the demographic characteristics of the households who would pay less towards funding policy costs and those who would take on a larger burden under these new proposals. While none of the approaches offer a 'perfect solution' in terms of distributional impacts, raising the funds through general taxation offers a fairer and practical solution. Key policy insights. Low income households currently pay disproportionately more towards lowcarbon policy costs in the UK.. Funding low-carbon policy through general taxation would better align energy demand with policy costs, and would reduce costs for 65% of UK households.. Households comprising women of retirement age living alone; single parent families; and households who have never worked or are long-term unemployed could see reductions in bills by recovering climate policy costs through general taxation.. A general taxation approach requires leadership and long-term commitment to avoid leaving the policy vulnerable to short-term budgetary changes.

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Section: Energy Footprints and The Uk Multiregional Input-output Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing inequality resulting from UK low-carbon policy

Owen

Barrett

2020

Climate Policy

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“…The adoption of a supply-chain perspective, which allows us to examine the embodied energy and labour inputs, is one of the key novelties of our analysis. To our knowledge, we provide the first study that compares embodied energy intensity and embodied labour productivity at a sectoral level, although there are a few examples of similar approaches used to examine the relationship between embodied labour and GHG intensities [17][18][19]. The supply-chain approach, which is based on input-output analysis, takes into account the labour and energy inputs along the whole global supply chain of sectors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural Change for a Post-Growth Economy: Investigating the Relationship between Embodied Energy Intensity and Labour Productivity

et al. 2020

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Post-growth economists propose structural changes towards labour-intensive services, such as care or education, to make our economy more sustainable by providing meaningful work and reducing the environmentally damaging production of material goods. Our study investigates the assumption underlying such proposals. Using a multi-regional input-output model we compare the embodied energy intensity and embodied labour productivity across economic sectors in the UK and Germany between 1995 and 2011. We identify five labour-intensive service sectors, which combine low embodied energy intensity with low growth in embodied labour productivity. However, despite their lower embodied energy intensities, our results indicate that large structural changes towards these sectors would only lead to small reductions in energy footprints. Our results also suggest that labour-intensive service sectors in the UK have been characterised by higher rates of price inflation than other sectors. This supports suggestions from the literature that labour-intensive services face challenges from increasing relative prices and costs. We do not find similar results for Germany, which is the result of low overall growth in embodied labour productivity and prices. This highlights that structural change is closely associated with economic growth, which raises the question of how structural changes can be achieved in a non-growing economy.

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“…At present, 31 countries (28 EU countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) are participating in the EU ETS; their total demand for carbon dioxide emissions is about 1.5 billion Mg/CO 2 . At present, it should be underlined that in the European Union, there is a claim that the prices for carbon dioxide emission allowances, at the levels observed in the recent years, are too low [55,64,68].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

EU Carbon Emissions Market Development and Its Impact on Penetration of Renewables in the Power Sector

Rabe¹,

Štreimikienė²,

Bilan³

2019

Energies

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This paper focuses on the analysis of the EU carbon trading scheme and its impacts on regional power system development and penetration of renewable energy sources (RES). The aim of the article is to analyze the forecasts of carbon dioxide (EUA) prices for the years 2019–2030 and to apply the results of this forecast in regional power system planning. The data employed in this paper come from many sources, including empirical data of the selected analytical companies, such as Thomson Reuters among others. The current low prices for carbon dioxide emission rights do not encourage the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide, and do not have a significant impact on the penetration of renewables. This paper presents the results of two scenarios (for 2021 and 2030) developed after the analysis of the EUA price impact on penetration of renewable energy sources in West-Pomeranian region assuming different electricity production and the EUA price forecasts. The results of two regional energy development scenarios run for 2021 and 2030 indicate changes in the structure of renewables in West-Pomeranian region. The results also show that the increase of EUA price has a significant impact on the increase of costs for power production and increase of unit cost of the installed 1GWh. In addition, the forecasted EUA price in 2030 is 3% lower as compared with 2021, which has its impact on the increased share of electricity produced by co-firing biomass with other fossil—from 42% to 68% in the electricity generation structure of West-Pomeranian region.

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The UK’s Emissions and Employment Footprints: Exploring the Trade-Offs

Cited by 14 publications

References 68 publications

Reducing inequality resulting from UK low-carbon policy

Reducing inequality resulting from UK low-carbon policy

Structural Change for a Post-Growth Economy: Investigating the Relationship between Embodied Energy Intensity and Labour Productivity

EU Carbon Emissions Market Development and Its Impact on Penetration of Renewables in the Power Sector

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