Thomas Sterner recently held a talk on the role of nuclear power in the transition to a fossil free society and participated in a panel debate on the subject at Studieförbundet Näringsliv och Samhälle, Stockholm. See video below (Swedish only). Sterner also followed up the debate with an opinion piece in the daily newspaper Göteborgs Posten.

Thomas Sterner has together with Gernot Wagner published a new magazine piece in Resources for the Future Magazine with the title “Planetary Boundaries and the Anthropocene” as a follow up on their recent publication in Nature Sustainability.

New Environmental Defense Fund policy-making blog post by Gernot Wagner is up that summarizes the message from the Policy Design for the Anthropocene article.

“Earth Day will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. It shares the mix of success and failure so characteristic of the environment movement. It attracts great attention, helps educate and channel popular interest but we must admit: not enough is being done. Many large scale environmental issues are not only unresolved but deteriorating. This year’s theme “Protecting Our Species” is no exception: the problem is getting much media attention but we are in fact in the midst of the World’s Sixth mass extinction. We are taking the liberty of renaming the theme “Save our Species” (SOS). “

New blog post in Nature Research Blog by Alexandre Antonelli and Thomas Sterner is now posted. Find the full post here.

New survey of environmental policy instruments. Covering everything from carbon taxes to Trading schemes, refunded emission payments. From the regulation of individual chemicals to regulating everything in the Anthropocene. Written by Elizabeth Robinson and Thomas Sterner. It can be found here.

It all started with a workshop here in Gothenburg. Now we have a published article in Nature Sustainability. The article is featured on the cover and it can be found here. Monica Contestabile has written an excellent editorial on the subject and Thomas Sterner has written a “behind the paper” blog post. The School of Business, Economics and Law’s press release can be found here.

Some other media coverage on the article includes:

”Forskare: Det här är bästa skatten för miljön”. Interview of Thomas sterner by Jesper Vighagen for SVT Nyheter. 2019-01-17.

”New policy design needed to tackle global environmental threat” in Sience Daily. 2019-01-11.

”Styrmedel för en hållbar värld” by Kerstin Lundell in Miljö & Utveckling. 2019-01-18.

”Miljöproblem måste analyseras tillsammans” by Karin Montgomery in EXTRAKT. 2019-01-14.

”Forskare: Så får vi bättre miljöpolitiska lösningar” in Syre. 2019-01-25.

EFD blog post by Gernot Wagner. 2019-05-11.

“Planetary Boundaries and the Anthropocene” by Thomas Sterner and Gernot Wagner in Resources for the Future Magazine. 2019-05-16.

Thomas Sterner was recently interviewed  by Ingmar Schumacher. The interview can be found here.  Video summaries of the interview are posted below.

We are currently looking for a post-doc to the Environmental Economics Unit at the University of Gothenburg within the project “Restoration of contaminated areas after a nuclear accident:  societal problems and how best combinations of long-term  measures can be chosen to protect residents from radiation”. The add can be found here.

Fossil free Sweden (Fossilfritt Sverige) is a very special organisation. An official government body as can be seen from the “.gov” address in the hyperlink above, but at the same time an almost activist organisation. Their mandate is to create alliances with industry (and other organisations) for a transformation to a fossil-free society. The room was full of enthusiastic representatives from Swedish industry as well as government and NGOs, media etc. We spoke of the gigantic investments needed in industries like not only power and transport but notably cement and steel where large scale collaboration is necessary between government and industry. These are transformations that are virtually impossible to achieve with carbon pricing alone but I reminded the audience that industrial policy must still always be complemented with a price on carbon – otherwise the savings in say the steel industry could be dissipated by leakage to new uses if the price of fossil fuels were allowed to drop.

My talk can be seen in the video below (in Swedish):