Interactions among energy consumption, economic development and greenhouse gas emissions in Japan after World War II

Hong-fang Lu, Bin-le Lin, Daniel E. Campbell, Masayuki Sagisaka and Hai Ren

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2016, vol. 54, issue C, 1060-1072

Abstract: The long-term dynamic changes in the triad, energy consumption, economic development, and Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in Japan after World War II were quantified, and the interactions among them were analyzed based on an integrated suite of energy, emergy and economic indices. The results quantitatively showed that two different energy strategy periods, one before 1973 using new sources of higher quality energy and one after 1973 focused on improving the efficiency of energy generation methods, could explain the linear increase in national economic development in Japan over the 66 years from 1946 to 2011. Japan benefited both ecologically and economically from importing fossil fuels, which accounted for 8.7% of the nominal GDP of Japan averaged over the entire study period. The total environmental impacts of GHG (i.e., CO2, CH4 and N2O) emissions measured by emergy decreased after 1997, and since 2009 they have remained lower than 76% of the emissions in 1990, even though no decrease in the global warming impact based on the weight of CO2 was observed. Emergy methods and Energy Systems models revealed aspects of the complicated interactions among energy consumption, economic development, and the potential environmental impact of GHG emissions which formerly had not been recognized.

Keywords: Energy consumption; Economic development; GHG emissions; Emergy evaluation; Post WWII Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032115011417
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:54:y:2016:i:c:p:1060-1072

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2015.10.062

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().