Beyond growth: well-being economics and environmental protection
2011 February 22
There is a reason that in nature things do not grow indefinitely.
Yet the entire canon of mainstream contemporary economics seems to believe that economics exists independently of the laws of biology, chemistry and physics.
For every doubling in the global economy, as it is currently measured, we use the equivalent in resources of all of the previous doublings combined.
In a unique study published in the science journal Nature in September 2009, a group of 29 leading international scientists identified nine processes in the biosphere for which they considered it necessary to define "planetary boundaries". Of the nine boundaries, 3 had already been transgressed: climate change, interference in the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss. Clearly, anyone who thinks the Earth can take another doubling of the global economy is, as economist Kenneth Boulding famously stated, "a madman or an economist".
Yet the entire canon of mainstream contemporary economics seems to believe that economics exists independently of the laws of biology, chemistry and physics.
For every doubling in the global economy, as it is currently measured, we use the equivalent in resources of all of the previous doublings combined.
In a unique study published in the science journal Nature in September 2009, a group of 29 leading international scientists identified nine processes in the biosphere for which they considered it necessary to define "planetary boundaries". Of the nine boundaries, 3 had already been transgressed: climate change, interference in the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss. Clearly, anyone who thinks the Earth can take another doubling of the global economy is, as economist Kenneth Boulding famously stated, "a madman or an economist".
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