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Nate Hagens: evolution, addiction and economic demand (Audio)
Jason Bradford, Global Public Media
Nate Hagens returns to discuss evolution, addiction and economic demand; or, how our brains trick us to want more than we need. Nate is a former Wall Street investments manager and has an MBA from University of Chicago.
He is completing his doctoral studies at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. Nate is also an editor for The Oil Drum, an online source for news, analysis and discussions about energy and our future. Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA.
(3 January 2008)
Ecological Economics on the Reality Report (Audio)
Jason Bradford, The Reality Report via Global Public Media
In this edition of the Reality Report, economics Professor Joshua Farley of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont discusses the false assumptions of dominant economic theory, why this leads to problems, and what an alternative economic system might look like.
During the interview, Prof. Farley explains how policies to protect the environment, stem the loss of biodiversity, conserve fossil fuels, and deal with climate change will fail without economic reform that first sets the sustainable scale of the human economy, secondly decides what is a just distribution, and finally allows the market to find the most efficient allocation.
Among many publications, Prof. Farley is coauthor with Herman Daly of the college text book “Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications.” Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA.
(26 December 2007)
Carbon quota an eerie echo of Technocracy
Neil Reynolds, Globe & Mail
OTTAWA — We all need similar amounts of air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat, a Globe and Mail reader observes, and we know the average amounts. Could we not determine the average amount of fossil fuel that we need? Could we not then use this information to ration fossil fuel, giving all people the right to an equal amount?
“Just as nations and industries trade carbon rights,” he said, “individuals could buy carbon rights from other people or sell their own surplus carbon to them. Wealthy people would get the same allotment as everyone else – and would need to buy unused carbon quota from other people for fuel consumption beyond the per-capita norm.”
Well, indeed, we could. We would be crazy – but we could. The British government commissioned a research report on this question last year.
Prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Energy, the report – A Rough Guide to Individual Carbon Trading – described personal carbon allowances as “a potentially practical policy option.” At a theoretical level, it said, they were “attractive.”
…All of this is an eerie echo of Technocracy, the weird mass movement that attracted a great deal of support in the Great Depression by promising to end North America’s money economy and replace it with an energy economy.
Led by a onetime cement mixer named Howard Scott, the Technocrats proposed the merger of Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Central America into a single “Technate.” The government would consist of engineers and scientists who would rule – wisely, of course – through scientific management of energy resources.
The Technocratic visionaries of this earlier era were fashionably scientific, fashionably socialistic, fashionably fascist.
They presumed that the energy of the continent could be calculated precisely in all its forms and then be divided equally. In return, each person would be compelled to work a mere 12.5 hours a week for 20 years.
…Among the Technocrats were famed sociologist Thorstein Veblen (who died in 1929), Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and engineer Stuart Chase, “peak oil” geophysicist M. King Hubbert and Vancouver Sun publisher Robert Cormie.
(26 December 2007)
Author Reynolds is right to notice that technocracy is making a comeback – at least some of the ideas of that forgotten movement are gaining prominence. I’ve got to say – technocracy looks pretty good at the moment. -BA
