Frederick "Rick" van der Ploeg (born 28 April 1956, in Rotterdam) [1] is an Anglo-Dutch economist and former politician.
Frederick "Rick" van der Ploeg (born 28 April 1956, in Rotterdam) [1] is an Anglo-Dutch economist and former politician.
After having obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge, he held professorships in economics at the University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University, and the London School of Economics. After having served as an MP for the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) from 1994 until 1998, he became State Secretary for Culture and Media in the government of Prime Minister Wim Kok from 1998 until 2002. [2]
Van der Ploeg is currently a professor of economics at the University of Oxford and the VU University Amsterdam, and the research director at the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies. [3] In 2010 he became a correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. [4]
Van der Ploeg's studies the potential impact of climate change on the economy. To meet proposed carbon emissions reductions, and prevent temperature increases beyond 2 degrees, up to one-third of global oil reserves, half of gas reserves and 80 percent of coal reserves will have to remain unburned, making them stranded assets. [5] [6] This will affect oil, gas, and coal companies, and "carbon-intensive industries such as steel, aluminum, cement, plastics, and greenhouse horticulture". [6] Van der Ploeg emphasizes the need for investors to be aware of climate-related financial risk and take them into account for long-term planning. [5] [6]
Van der Ploeg has Dutch nationality. His father is Dutch, his mother is British. He is married and has a son called Boris. [8]
A fossil fuel is a hydrocarbon-containing material such as coal, oil, and natural gas, formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of dead plants and animals that is extracted and burned as a fuel. Fossil fuels may be burned to provide heat for use directly, to power engines, or to generate electricity. Some fossil fuels are refined into derivatives such as kerosene, gasoline and propane before burning. The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, containing organic molecules created by photosynthesis. The conversion from these materials to high-carbon fossil fuels typically require a geological process of millions of years.
A carbon tax is a tax levied on the carbon emissions required to produce goods and services. Carbon taxes are intended to make visible the "hidden" social costs of carbon emissions, which are otherwise felt only in indirect ways like more severe weather events. In this way, they are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing prices of the fossil fuels that emit them when burned. This both decreases demand for goods and services that produce high emissions and incentivizes making them less carbon-intensive. In its simplest form, a carbon tax covers only CO2 emissions; however, it could also cover other greenhouse gases, such as methane or nitrous oxide, by taxing such emissions based on their CO2-equivalent global warming potential. When a hydrocarbon fuel such as coal, petroleum, or natural gas is burned, most or all of its carbon is converted to CO2. Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, which damages the environment and human health. This negative externality can be reduced by taxing carbon content at any point in the product cycle. Carbon taxes are thus a type of Pigovian tax.
Energy economics is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy in societies. Considering the cost of energy services and associated value gives economic meaning to the efficiency at which energy can be produced. Energy services can be defined as functions that generate and provide energy to the “desired end services or states”. The efficiency of energy services is dependent on the engineered technology used to produce and supply energy. The goal is to minimise energy input required to produce the energy service, such as lighting (lumens), heating (temperature) and fuel. The main sectors considered in energy economics are transportation and building, although it is relevant to a broad scale of human activities, including households and businesses at a microeconomic level and resource management and environmental impacts at a macroeconomic level.
The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) is a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was published in 2000. The greenhouse gas emissions scenarios described in the Report have been used to make projections of possible future climate change. The SRES scenarios, as they are often called, were used in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), published in 2001, and in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), published in 2007. The SRES scenarios were designed to improve upon some aspects of the IS92 scenarios, which had been used in the earlier IPCC Second Assessment Report of 1995. The SRES scenarios are "baseline" scenarios, which means that they do not take into account any current or future measures to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The economic analysis of climate change explains how economic thinking, tools and techniques are applied to calculate the magnitude and distribution of damage caused by climate change. It also informs the policies and approaches for mitigation and adaptation to climate change from global to household scales. This topic is also inclusive of alternative economic approaches, including ecological economics and degrowth. In a cost–benefit analysis, the trade offs between climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation are made explicit. Cost–benefit analyses of climate change are produced using integrated assessment models (IAMs), which incorporate aspects of the natural, social, and economic sciences. The total economic impacts from climate change are difficult to estimate, but increase for higher temperature changes.
The energy industry is the totality of all of the industries involved in the production and sale of energy, including fuel extraction, manufacturing, refining and distribution. Modern society consumes large amounts of fuel, and the energy industry is a crucial part of the infrastructure and maintenance of society in almost all countries.
Hans-Werner Sinn is a German economist who served as President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research from 1999 to 2016. He currently serves on the German economy ministry’s advisory council. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich.
Richard S. J. Tol is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex. He is also professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
Norway is a large energy producer, and one of the world's largest exporters of oil. Most of the electricity in the country is produced by hydroelectricity. Norway is one of the leading countries in the electrification of its transport sector, with the largest fleet of electric vehicles per capita in the world.
Terry Barker is a British economist and former Director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) part of the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the Tyndall Centre, the Chairman of Cambridge Econometrics, and chairman of the Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics, which is a charitable organisation with a mission to promote new approaches to solving economic problems.
Stranded assets are "assets that have suffered from unanticipated or premature write-downs, devaluations or conversion to liabilities". Stranded assets can be caused by a variety of factors and are a phenomenon inherent in the 'creative destruction' of economic growth, transformation and innovation; as such they pose risks to individuals and firms and may have systemic implications. Climate change is expected to cause a significant increase in stranded assets for carbon-intensive industries and investors, with a potential ripple effect throughout the world economy.
The carbon bubble is a hypothesized bubble in the valuation of companies dependent on fossil-fuel-based energy production, resulting from future decreases in value of fossil fuel reserves as they become unusable in order to meet carbon budgets and recognition of negative externalities of carbon fuels which are not yet taken into account in a company's stock market valuation.
Wim Driehuis is a Dutch economist, Emeritus Professor Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam.
Fossil fuel divestment or fossil fuel divestment and investment in climate solutions is an attempt to reduce climate change by exerting social, political, and economic pressure for the institutional divestment of assets including stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments connected to companies involved in extracting fossil fuels.
Professor Paul Ekins OBE is a British academic in the field of sustainable economics, currently Professor of Resources and Environment Policy at University College London. He was formerly co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre (2004–2014). He is a former member of the Green Party.
Carbon Tracker is a London-based not-for-profit think tank researching the impact of climate change on financial markets.
Gilbert E. Metcalf is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, emeritus, at Tufts University, where he was a professor of economics. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School as well as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a University Fellow at Resources For The Future. Under the Obama Administration, he served as the deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy at the U.S. Department of Treasury where he was the founding U.S. Board Member for the UN based Green Climate Fund. His research interests are in the areas of energy, environmental, and climate policy.
The Department of Economics is an academic department of the University of Oxford within the Social Sciences Division. Relatively recently founded in 1999, the department is located in the Norman Foster-designed Manor Road Building.
The Netherlands is already affected by climate change. The average temperature in the Netherlands rose by more than 2 °C from 1901 to 2020. Climate change has resulted in increased frequency of droughts and heatwaves. Because significant portions of the Netherlands have been reclaimed from the sea or otherwise are very near sea level, the Netherlands is very vulnerable to sea level rise.
Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis is a Dutch economist. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, at Cornell University. Her research addresses salient questions in finance, particularly in climate finance.
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