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Environmental policies are increasingly informed by behavioral economics insights. ‘Green nudges’ in particular have been suggested as a promising new tool to encourage consumers to act in an environmentally benign way, such as choosing renewable energy sources or saving energy. While there is an emerging literature on the instrumental effectiveness of behavioral policy tools such as these, their ethical assessment has largely been neglected. This paper attempts to fill this gap by, first, providing a structured overview of the most important contributions to the literature on pro-environmental nudges and, second, offering some critical considerations that may help the practitioner come to an ethically informed assessment of nudges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy security ranks high on the policy agenda of many countries. To improve on energy security, governments undertake regulatory measures for promoting renewable energy, increasing energy efficiency, or curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The impacts of such measures on energy security are typically monitored by means of so-called energy security indicators. In this paper, we show that the common use of wide-spread energy security indicators falls short of providing a meaningful metric. Regulatory measures to improve on energy security trigger ambiguous effects across energy security indicators. We conclude that a major pitfall of energy security indicators is the lack of a rigorous microeconomic foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a trade-off between spending on the green economy and an economy's strength? This paper addresses this question by estimating output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, and by comparing these to multipliers of spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we arrive at two key results. First, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar's worth of economic activity, whereas non-green spending returns less than a dollar. Second, for categories of spending where formal comparisons are possible, like renewable versus fossil fuel energy, we find that multipliers on green spending are about twice as large as their non-green counterparts. The point estimates of the multipliers are 1.1–1.7 for renewable energy investment and 0.4–0.7 for fossil fuel energy investment, depending on horizon and specification. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses that find that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss go hand in hand with economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]