Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What does this downgrading of likely carbon emissions mean for climate change modelers, climate activists, policy makers, and concerned citizens? According to Ritchie, the implication is clearly not as simple as “don’t worry, fossil fuel depletion will solve climate change for us.”
Growth of production is central to the core ideology of the current economic system, to the idea of “development” and “progress”. It is central to the legitimacy of the people who run the global economy. Without it there is a legitimacy crisis.
Economic theory has failed to incorporate the role of energy in production for two centuries since the Physiocrats. In this video I derive a production function that includes energy in an essential manner. It implies that economic growth has been driven by the increase in the energy throughput capabilities of machinery.
The future of economic growth is one of the decisive challenges of the twenty-first century. Though beginning at different times in different places, during the last two centuries, overall global economic growth has profoundly transformed life of humans and of the rest of nature.
True, economic growth does provide some short-term benefits and gains, and recessions are legitimately painful and destructive. But economic growth is nevertheless the greatest threat to humanity today, and those most devoted to economic growth will, as its consistent performance begins to wane in the future, perhaps be the greatest political threat to ordinary people of the world.
In late 2015 the CSIRO released its Australian National Outlook (ANO) Report (‘the Report’) which outlined 20 future scenarios for Australia, exploring various global and national sustainability challenges…our new paper argues that even the Report’s most ambitious “green growth” scenario is incompatible with long-term sustainability and global justice.
To the question, “What is wrong with the economy?” Trump answers: we have made bad deals…
It is according to the same sort of cultural changes and thus the change in the social roles of our heroes that we might notice the way we, in American, have replaced the explorer, frontiersman, aviator and astronaut with a new hero—one with a decidedly commercial bent.
In the first part of this review, we looked at the climate and energy disruptions that have already begun in the Middle East, as well as the disruptions which we can expect in the next 20 years under a “business as usual” scenario. In this installment we’ll take a closer look at “the perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamics of global crises”.
One of the notable features of Growthism is the way it takes growth to be entirely normal and, at the same time, understands it as the very recent triumph of humanity over the awful conditions it faced for the first two hundred thousand years of its existence as a species.
The notion of “decoupling” energy consumption from economic growth has become vogue in policy circles, but how much evidence is there that it’s really happening?
Of course we all know at some level what a “healthy shopping season” is really healthy for: the economy–that thing, that thing which giveth, it is true, but also taketh away, and is still the only game in town.
