Editorial

Writing successfully for Energy Policy

Taking a long-run historical perspective, we analyze how debates about energy efficiency have evolved in the economic literature since the mid-19th century. We distinguish three periods: the classical age, focused on the rebound effect, from Jevons in the 1860s to American institutionalism in the mid-20th century; the modern age, marked by the rise of the energy efficiency gap concept, from the 1970s to the 1990s; the contemporary age, from the early 2000s onwards, focused on the concept of energy performance gap. We find that reflections on energy efficiency have embraced more general developments in the economics discipline: emergence of institutionalism in the classical age, primarily concerned with policy; public economics in the modern age, emphasizing the concept of market failure; behavioral economics and the so-called credibility revolution in empirical economics in the contemporary age, which made energy efficiency a much-favored context for conducting experiments, questioning rationality and implementing nudges. The transitions between phases closely paralleled changes in societal concerns, from resource depletion in the classical age to energy security in the modern age to climate change in the contemporary age. Throughout this long history, we have detected a change in focus from macro- to micro-perspectives. Despite increasing sophistication and constant reinterpretation, energy efficiency remains a subject of controversy, such that no consensus has yet been reached on its potential and effective benefits. In closing, we propose to update Jaffe, Newell and Stavins' landmark energy efficiency gap framework to account for the most recent developments and trace avenues for future research.

This work quantifies the conduction mechanism of energy prices on carbon emissions and carbon intensity from the perspective of space and quantile. Taking China's Eight Economic Regions as an example, we explore how to optimize energy price policy to promote regional carbon reduction by combining the GWR model, quantile regression and scenario analysis. The study finds that (1)the energy prices can promote or suppress carbon emissions and carbon intensity through five variables, including economic development, industrial structure, energy efficiency, energy investment and energy consumption etc.(2) the current energy investment and consumption structure lead to a high level of carbon emissions, while such effect from economic development is relatively limited, and the influence direction and level of industrial structure and energy efficiency on carbon emissions are regionally different. (3) with the exception of the energy consumption structure, four other factors have varying restraining effects on carbon intensity, and (4) scenario analysis shows that optimizing industrial and energy consumption structure are crucial to reduce carbon emissions，and optimizing industrial structure helps to reduce carbon intensity. Finally, this paper proposes policy suggestions, aiming to realize regional carbon reductions by using price leverage.