Exam 19: Natural Resource and Energy Economics

If per-capita energy usage has leveled off while per capita GDP has risen, then it must mean that each dollar of output produced required a larger amount of energy.

A Middle Eastern country has an oil reserve that it can extract for a profit of $50 a barrel today, $55 a barrel in two years, $60 a barrel in three years, and $65 in four years. The current market rate of interest is 10 percent. When should this country tap into its oil reserve to obtain the most profit per barrel in present value terms?

Individual transferable quotas are limited in their effectiveness because

Refer to the diagram, representing Slippery Slope Oil Company. What is the user cost of extracting a barrel of oil this year?

Which of the following is true regarding the famous bet about future resource prices, made between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon?

Renewable energy sources account for about 50 percent of U.S. electricity generation.

The long-run fall of commodity prices implies that commodity supplies have grown

Which one of the following statements is true? The fertility rates for major industrialized countries in recent years show that Malthus's theory regarding population is

About one-half of U.S. electricity is generated using petroleum.

Which of the following, in order, describes the three steps of the demographic transition?

Petroleum is the largest source of electric energy generated in the U.S.

Compare the real cost of commodity resources today with their cost in the 1845-1850 period. What explains the change?

The higher a resource's current price, the more extraction should be delayed to a later period.

Recent studies indicate that as the price of a barrel of oil rises to $80, the use of biodiesel as an alternative fuel becomes economically viable.

The table shows the quantity of gold bars in thousands, the extraction cost for each thousand bars (in millions of dollars), and the user cost of each thousand bars (in millions of dollars)facing the OZ Mining Company this year. Suppose that a new government regulation is going to shut down OZ's mining operation one year from now. Assuming that all gold extracted is sold in the same year (cannot be stockpiled for later sale), how will the regulation affect the user cost?

A total fertility rate of 1.0 will cause the

The Malthusian prediction of Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb in 1968 proved to be wrong because population growth

Encouraging conservation is especially difficult in the open ocean, where it is impossible to either define or enforce property rights over fish.

Many demographers expect world population to

The graph shows the extraction costs for TX Oil Company in the first year in a situation where it will extract oil from a reserve over two years. If user costs increase, then the total cost line will