Sustainable Resource Management and the Depreciation of Environmental Capital: Applications to Energy-use and Global Warming

最近一项被广泛引用的研究得出的结论是，为了满足迅速增长的世界人口的需要，并开始减少大规模贫困，经济活动需要在未来五十年增加五到十倍。如此规模的持续经济增长预示着生态困境。一方面，减少贫穷所必需的增长将需要进一步消耗显然正在减少的自然资源和使环境恶化。另一方面，除非迅速大大减少贫穷，否则对日益减少的全球基本资源的压力将迅速增加。解决这一困境的建议是持续发展，其目的是在不减少自然资源存量或使自然环境退化的情况下提高生活水平。与资源的资源可持续性概念密切相关的是资源折旧的概念，它类似于适用于机床等资产的熟悉的资本折旧概念。本研究的目的是发展可持续资源管理的理论和资源与环境贬值的一致措施。为衡量资源和环境贬值而制订的方法将适用于全球能源使用和温室效应变暖的问题，并特别着重于石油是主要出口商品的印度尼西亚。旨在有效应对全球变暖威胁的政策必须在节约能源与限制温室气体排放的替代机制的相对成本效益之间取得平衡。这项研究将特别强调二氧化碳的排放。具体的建模问题是计算全球能源使用的有效概况，考虑到二氧化碳排放的外部性成本，在引入预计的扭曲后重新计算模型，然后计算环境折旧的价值。

A recent, widely quoted study has concluded that a five to ten fold increase in economic activity will be required over the next fifty years in order to meet the needs of a burgeoning world population, as well as to begin reducing mass poverty. Continued economic growth of this magnitude portends an ecological dilemma. On the one hand, the requisite growth for poverty reduction will require further depletion of apparently dwindling stocks of natural resources and deterioration of the environment. On the other hand, unless poverty is reduced significantly and soon, pressure on diminishing global stocks of basic resources will increase rapidly. The proposed solution to this dilemma is sustained development which aims at improving living standards, without diminishing natural resource stocks or degrading the natural environment. Closely related to the idea of resource sustainability of a resource is the notion of resource depreciation, which is analogous the familiar concept of capital depreciation as is applied to an asset like a machine tool. The purpose of this research is to develop a theory of sustainable resource management and a consistent measure of resource and environmental depreciation. The methodology developed for measuring resource and environmental depreciation will be applied to the problem of global energy use and greenhouse warming, with a particular focus on Indonesia whose oil is a major export commodity. Policies aimed at effectively dealing with the threat of global warming must balance energy conservation, against the relative cost effectiveness of alternative mechanisms for limiting emission of greenhouse gases. This study will place particular emphasis on carbon dioxide emissions. The specific modeling problem is to compute an efficient profile of global energy use, taking in to account the externality costs of carbon dioxide emissions, to recompute the model after the introduction of projected distortions, and then to compute the value of environmental depreciation.