By Anitra Nelson, Brian Coffey, The Conversation
As environmental crises and the urgency to create ecological sustainability escalate, so does the importance of ecological economics. This applied, solutions-based field of studies is concerned with sustainability and development, rather than efficiency and growth.
By Leah Temper, Sam Bliss, Uneven Earth
In their textbook Ecological Economics, Herman Daly and Josh Farley list sustainability and justice as the field’s first two goals. If the GND’s goal is to facilitate, through policy, the transition to a socially equitable low-carbon economy, then ecological economics basically bills itself as the science of the Green New Deal.
By Edward Fulbrook, Local Futures
Annually, millions of students around the world are forced to study textbooks that indoctrinate them into thinking that there is no significant causal connection between our economy and the ecosphere.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Nate Hagens, Resilience.org
Have you ever wondered how dolphins feel about quantitative easing? OK, probably not, but it is important to consider the effects that money and monetary policy have on the real world of energy, society, and the environment. Nate Hagens joins Asher, Rob, and Jason to discuss said dolphins, a never-ending Grateful Dead concert, and the prospects of two mature solar panels giving birth to a little bitty baby solar panel.
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.
By Tim Jackson, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity
It’s probably fitting that Michael Liebreich’s The Secret of Eternal Growth was published so close to Halloween. It’s so full of outlandish bogeymen, it sits perfectly alongside the ghouls and the ghosts of the trick-or-treat season.
By Stephen Williams, Independent Australia
Governments of all stripes base their policies on mainstream economics. Powerful challenges to the mainstream, especially from ecological economics and modern monetary theory, explain why we are in a hole and can’t seem to get out.
By James Bernard Quilligan, P2P Foundation
Let’s begin by asking, is supply and demand truly able to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain, or to ensure that these resources are allocated sufficiently for the population living in that environment?
By Nate Hagens, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
During Nate Hagens’ #WEP2018 keynote, he discussed how all of our lives will be influenced by how we react to the coming era of harder to extract and more costly fossil fuels that will be combined with cleaner but more stochastic energy types.
By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance
Continued exponential economic growth is impossible, but the S-curve of slowing growth followed by a steady state is not the only other alternative. If the goal is maintaining GDP at the highest possible level, then the S-curve is the best case scenario, but in today’s world that isn’t necessarily desirable or even possible.
By Kate Raworth, openDemocracy
The challenge now is to create local to global economies that ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials – from food and housing to healthcare and political voice – while safeguarding Earth’s life-giving systems, from a stable climate and fertile soils to healthy oceans and a protective ozone layer.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Joshua Farley, Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
As our energy sources change, our economy will likely evolve and adapt—perhaps in surprising ways.