Gregory F. Nemet

Distance and health care utilization among the rural elderly

This paper explores the relationship between distance and the utilization of health care by a group of elderly residents in rural Vermont. By drawing on recent work on the geography of health we frame the decision to visit a primary care physician in the context of the experience of place. The paper devises a test of this broader reading of the role of distance for utilization, and operationalizes this test using a custom designed survey. Using a randomized mail survey of elderly residents of Vermonts North East Kingdom we explore how grocery shopping, travel to work, home location relative to local services, access to private transportation, and living arrangements are associated with the number of doctor visits made to primary health care providers. Although the results confirm the idea that increased distance from provider does reduce utilization, they strongly suggest that distance to provider is a surrogate for location in a richer web of relations between residents and their local communities. We conclude by calling for further research that establishes links between place and the use of health facilities.

Implications of incorporating air-quality co-benefits into climate change policymaking

We present an analysis of the barriers and opportunities for incorporating air quality co-benefits into climate policy assessments. It is well known that many strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions also decrease emissions of health-damaging air pollutants and precursor species, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. In a survey of previous studies we found a range of estimates for the air quality co-benefits of climate change mitigation of

Demand Subsidies Versus R&D: Comparing the Uncertain Impacts of Policy on a Pre-commercial Low-carbon Energy Technology

2- 196/tCO2 with a mean of

Do Important Inventions Benefit from Knowledge Originating in Other Technological Domains

49/tCO2, and the highest co-benefits found in developing countries. These values, although of a similar order of magnitude to abatement cost estimates, are only rarely included in integrated assessments of climate policy. Full inclusion of these co-benefits would have pervasive implications for climate policy in areas including: optimal policy stringency, overall costs, distributional effects, robustness to discount rates, incentives for international cooperation, and the value of adaptation, forests, and climate engineering relative to mitigation. Under-valuation results in part from uncertainty in climatic damages, valuation inconsistency, and institutional barriers. Because policy debates are framed in terms of cost minimization, policy makers are unlikely to fully value air quality co-benefits unless they can be compared on an equivalent basis with the benefits of avoided climatic damages. While air quality co-benefits have been prominently portrayed as a hedge against uncertainty in the benefits of climate change abatement, this assessment finds that full inclusion of co-benefits depends on—rather than substitutes for—better valuation of climate damages.

Policies for the Energy Technology Innovation System (ETIS)

We combine an expert elicitation and a bottom-up manufacturing cost model to compare the effects of R&D and demand subsidies. We model their effects on the future costs of a low-carbon energy technology that is not currently commercially available, purely organic photovoltaics (PV). We find that: (1) successful R&D enables PV to achieve a cost target of 4c/kWh, (2) the cost of PV does not reach the target when only subsidies, and not R&D, are implemented, and (3) production-related effects on technological advanceNlearning-by-doing and economies of scaleNare not as critical to the long-term potential for cost reduction in organic PV than is the investment in and success of R&D. These results are insensitive to two levels of policy intensity, the level of a carbon price, the availability of storage technology, and uncertainty in the main parameters used in the model. However, a case can still be made for subsidies: comparisons of stochastic dominance show that subsidies provide a hedge against failure in the R&D program.

Opportunities and challenges in assessing climate change impacts on wind energy— a critical comparison of wind speed projections in California

A frequently made claim in the innovation literature is that important inventions involve the transfer of new knowledge from one technological domain to another. This study uses U.S. patents granted from 1976 to 2006 to identify the role of knowledge acquired from outside each patents technological domain. Our results do not seem to support the claim above. Increasing citations to external prior art is a significantly less important predictor of forward citation frequency than citing prior art that is technologically closer. This result is robust across several model specifications and ways of defining whether each flow of knowledge is external. The result is even stronger in the most highly cited technology categories. We discuss possible explanations for this apparently negative impact of external knowledge—including both measurement issues and challenges associated with assimilating disparate knowledge.

Willingness to Pay for Climate Policy: A Review of Estimates

The development and introduction of heat pumps provides an interesting illustration of policy influence and effectiveness in relation to energy technology innovation. Heat pumps have been supported by several countries since the 1970s as a strategy to improve energy efficiency, support energy security, reduce environmental degradation, and combat climate change. Sweden and Switzerland have been essential to the development and commercialization of heat pumps in Europe. In both countries, numerous policy incentives have lined the path of technology and market development. Early policy initiatives were poorly coordinated but supported technology development, entrepreneurial experimentation, knowledge development, and the involvement of important actors in networks and organisations. The market collapse in the mid 1980s could have resulted in a total failure ‐ but did not. The research programmes continued in the 1980s, and a new set of stakeholders formed ‐ both publicly and privately funded researchers, authorities, and institutions ‐ and provided an important platform for further development. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sweden and Switzerland introduced more coordinated and strategic policy incentives for the development of heat pumps. The approaches were flexible and adjusted over time. The policy interventions in both countries supported learning, successful development and diffusion processes, and cost reductions. This assessment of innovation and diffusion policies for heat pump systems can be used to generalise some insights for energy technology innovation policy.

Deconstructing Solar Photovoltaic Pricing: The Role of Market Structure, Technology, and Policy

Future climate change is expected to alter the spatial and temporal distribution of surface wind speeds (SWS), with associated impacts on electricity generation from wind energy. However, the predictions for the direction and magnitude of these changes hinge critically on the assessment methods used. Many climate change impact analyses, including those focused on wind energy, use individual climate models and/or statistical downscaling methods rooted in historical observations. Such studies may individually suggest an unrealistically high level of scientific certainty due to the absence of competing projections (over the same region, time period, etc). A new public data archive, the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), allows for a more comprehensive perspective on regional climate change impacts, here applied to three wind farm sites in California. We employ NARCCAP regional climate model data to estimate changes in SWS expected to occur in the mid-21st century at three wind farm regions: Altamont Pass, San Gorgonio Pass, and Tehachapi Pass. We examined trends in SWS magnitude and frequency using three different global/regional model pairs, focused on model evaluation, seasonal cycle, and long-term trends. Our results, while specific to California, highlight the opportunities and limitations in NARCCAP and other publicly available meteorological data sets for energy analysis, and the importance of using multiple models for climate change impact assessment. Although spatial patterns in current wind conditions agree fairly well among models and with NARR (North American Regional Reanalysis) data, results vary widely at our three sites of interest. This poor performance and model disagreement may be explained by complex topography, limited model resolution, and differences in model physics. Spatial trends and site-specific estimates of annual average changes (1980‐2000 versus 2051‐71) also differed widely across models. All models predicted changes of <2% at each site, but the direction of the change varies. However, decreases of <2% in resources at Altamont Pass are agreed upon by each NARCCAP model used. This lack of model agreement suggests uncertainty in future changes, and a potentially high degree of risk for future investors in wind-generated electricity. More broadly, our study highlights the need for multiple calculation approaches to help distinguish between robust and method-dependent results.

The Future Costs of Nuclear Power Using Multiple Expert Elicitations: Effects of RD&D and Elicitation Design

One explanation for the modest pace of efforts to mitigate climate change, both federally and internationally, is that constituents do not ascribe much beneficial value to new laws that change the way we produce and consume energy. We surveyed estimates of consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for climate policy to: (1) assess the validity of this explanation, (2) compare elicitation techniques, and (3) explore factors that might explain variation in WTP estimates. We recalculated WTP estimates on an equivalent basis across 27 studies and found a range for WTP of

The Effects of Expert Selection, Elicitation Design, and R&D Assumptions on Experts’ Estimates of the Future Costs of Photovoltaics

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