A history of the transitions in energy service demand
- Start Tuesday 05 Nov 2019 5:00pm
- Finish Tuesday 05 Nov 2019 6:30pm
Even in the face of catastrophic climate and health damage, why is it so hard for us to break our energy consumption habits? To better understand why it is so hard to reduce energy consumption, this talk explores how the demand for energy services has grown and changed over time. Charting the transitions in energy consumption to meet our needs for heat, transportation and light since the Industrial Revolution, this talk shows dramatic increases in net benefits to consumers associated with the transformations in society and lifestyles that mobility and illumination provided between 1850 and 1950. These past transformations highlight the challenges of reducing energy consumption, given that they threaten modern lifestyles.
Speaker
Roger Fouquet is Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He investigates the changing relationships between economic development, energy use and its environmental impacts, with an emphasis on drawing lessons from economic history to provide a long run perspective on energy and climate change issues. In 2006, his joint article was chosen for the Campbell Watkins Award for Best Paper in The Energy Journal. In 2010, his book, ‘Heat, Power and Light’, was selected by Choice Magazine as one of its Outstanding Academic Titles. He is the editor of the Handbook on Energy and Climate Change, the Handbook on Green Growth and The Economics of Renewable Energy.