Abstract
To mitigate the problems associated with climate change, the low-carbon economy concept is now being championed around the world in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure sustainable economic growth. Therefore, to reduce the dependence on traditional energy sources, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been actively promoting the use of renewable energy. Past research has tended to neglect the influence of other pollutants such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) and have mainly been based on static analyses. To make up for these research gaps, this study examined OECD country data from 2010–2014, with labor, fixed assets, new energy, and traditional energy as the inputs, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), carbon dioxide (CO2), and PM2.5 as the outputs, from which it was found: (1) the overall efficiency of the individual countries varied significantly, with nine countries being found to have efficiencies of 1 for all five years, but many others having efficiencies below 0.2; (2) in countries where there was a need for improvements in traditional energy (which here refers to coal, petroleum and other fossil energy sources), there was also a significant need for improvement in new energy sources (which here refers to clean energy which will produce pollutant emissions and can be directly used for production and life, including resources like nuclear energy and “renewable energy”); (3) countries with poor traditional energy and new energy efficiencies also had poor CO2 and PM2.5 efficiencies; (4) many OECD countries have made progress towards sustainable new energy developments
Highlights
As the demand for energy continues to grow, the levels of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere have been increasing, which is adversely affecting efforts to combat climate change.The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has clearly stated that climate change is a reality and is continuing to intensify around the world
New energy research has focused on the impact of new energy on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or CO2 levels [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32], with most evaluations having been conducted using DEA methods such as CCR, BCC, Slacks-Based Measures (SBM), Distance functions and two-stage DEA analysis
Comparing the differences in annual energy efficiency indicators of traditional energy, new energy, CO2 and PM2.5 in OECD countries, this paper provides insight into the performance of OECD countries in terms of overall efficiency, traditional energy efficiency, new energy efficiency, CO2 and PM2.5 emission efficiency, and this research makes policy suggestions
Summary
As the demand for energy continues to grow, the levels of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere have been increasing, which is adversely affecting efforts to combat climate change. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 1122 most analyses have only considered CO2 and have ignored the comprehensive consideration of other air pollution indicators such as PM2.5. Public Health 2019, 16, 1122 most analyses have only considered CO2 and have ignored the comprehensive consideration of other air pollution indicators such as PM2.5 To resolve these shortcomings, this paper uses a modifies Dynamic DEA model to explore OECD new energy efficiency and sustainability. This model uses descriptive statistics and dynamic DEA to analyze annual input and output and efficiency performance of OECD countries during 2010–2014. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a literature review, Section 3 comprehensively describes the research method, Section 4 gives the empirical results and discussion, and Section 5 presents the conclusions and policy proposals
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