The fat-takers cross the oceans
From its beginnings more than five centuries ago, European colonization has been based on an unsustainable exploitation of resources.
From its beginnings more than five centuries ago, European colonization has been based on an unsustainable exploitation of resources.
At the time of Seneca, rhetoric was perhaps the main skill of a man of culture: the capability of debating was valued and practiced.
If I’m asked about the role economics plays in the environment and sustainability, my answer would be ‘what kind of economics are you talking about’?
It’s much easier to teach students how to shift curves, solve equations, and run regressions, than to carefully observe economic life and think deeply and critically about it. Students also tend to feel comfortable – and even feel powerful – when told “here, we are handing you the exact tools and models you need to use to understand how the economy works.”
Mainstream economics offers no solutions to climate chaos; ecological economics envisions a path forward.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.