Discussion on low carbon future at the ICTA-UAB MdM Seminar Series

The lecture, which is part of the ICTA-UAB MdM Seminar Series, will report on insights for a transition to a sustainable low carbon energy future that can be drawn from the role of energy technologies in historical waves of techno-economic change. Drawing on evolutionary economics and ecological economics, Prof. Tim Foxon will examine the role that access to new sources of (fossil fuel) energy and economy-wide energy efficiency improvements have played in these historical waves, which have driven surges of economic growth, and what this implies when moving towards a low carbon future.

Prof. Tim Foxon is Professor of Sustainability Transitions at SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. His research explores the technological and social factors related to the innovation of new energy technologies, the co-evolution of technologies and institutions for a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy, and relations and interdependencies between energy use and economic growth. He is member of the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand, the UK Energy Research Centre and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy. He is currently writing a book on the implications for a low carbon transition of the role of energy in past surges of economic development.