Excerpts from "Energy, Growth, and Sustainability: Five Propositions" by Steve Sorrel

[profgoose]

Steve Sorrel, Senior Fellow, Sussex Energy Group, University of Sussex in the UK has recently published a 25 page paper called Energy, Growth and Sustainability which can be downloaded at this link. This post provides some excerpts from the paper, which summarize its findings. Readers are encouraged to read the entire paper.

According to the introduction to the paper:

This paper questions the conventional wisdom underlying climate policy and argues that some long-standing and fundamental questions regarding energy, growth, and sustainability need to be reopened. It does so by advancing the following propositions:

1. The rebound effects from energy efficiency improvements are significant and limit the potential for decoupling energy consumption from economic growth.

2. The contribution of energy to productivity improvements and economic growth has been greatly underestimated.

3. The pursuit of improved efficiency needs to be complemented by an ethic of ‘sufficiency’.

4. Sustainability is incompatible with continued economic growth in rich countries.

5. A zero-growth economy is incompatible with a debt-based monetary system.

These propositions run counter to conventional wisdom and highlight either blind spots or taboo subjects that deserve closer scrutiny. While accepting one proposition reinforces the case for accepting the next, the former is neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter.

Much more at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6386

[phantom power]

1. (5) seems especially interesting relative to recent economic events.

[profgoose]

2. here's a couple more TOD pieces on that--and other--points, if you're interested...

The Future of Capitalism - Profits and Growth: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6374
How to Drive your Elephant - Dealing with Complex Problems: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6317

[lutherj]

3. These are definitely taboo subjects. For the same reason the right and the

privileged classes try to debunk the science of climate change, they will also try to deny peak oil or the limits of any other natural resource that would imply a limit to economic growth.

It seems to me that the real capital in our reigning economic paradigm is not money, but natural resources. In our economic system natural resources are monetized and then seen to be privately owned, by a kind of economic sleight of hand. Money is extremely convenient, but can become a kind of collective hallucination, an abstraction, a token for genuine value. Eventually, all people see is the abstraction. As Oscar Wilde once said, "we have come to know the price of everything, and the value of nothing." The largest sector of our economy simply creates money from money, and this ballooning abstraction sucks all the air out of the room, so to speak, so that working men and women have to work extra hours at more than one job and yet still can't keep up with their bills, let alone put their kids through college.

The only hope for the planet is a radical re-evaluation of what's important, a change in our attitude toward money and material acquisition. It may be that the economic system will first have to collapse of it's own weight before this happens. Luckily, the chances of that don't seem to me all that remote, but it will no doubt be disastrous for many people.