An Economics Even I Can Understand

Huge snips from a great Greenpeace article on economics:

The year 2009 will witness a tsunami of economic appeals to fix, as disgraced Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put it, the 'flaw' in their thinking. Most will get it wrong.

Indeed, a few got rich but the meek inherit an Earth featuring child slavery, sweatshops, a billion starving people, toxic garbage heaps, dead rivers, exhausted aquifers, disappearing forests, depleted energy stores, lopped-off mountain tops, acid seas, melting glaciers, and an atmosphere heating up like a flambé.

Meanwhile, a rigorous sub-culture of scientists and economists have been working to free economics from its eighteenth century quagmire by reconciling human enterprise with the laws of physics, biology, and ecology.

Nor is the internet a celestial realm where ideas are exchanged for 'free'. Computers require copper, silicon, oil, toxic chemicals, massive energy for server networks, and garbage heaps for techno-trash. In every industrialised nation, energy and material consumption is increasing, not decreasing. Technology is not energy. It costs energy.

"Since economics is about the production and transfer of physical things or services that require energy," says Hall, "it is a biophysical science, not a social science."

Robert Costanza, Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, will launch two periodicals this year: an annual academic anthology, The Year in Ecological Economics, and a bimonthly magazine, Solutions, for technical and popular articles about ecology and economics. "To repair our economic system," explains editor Ida Kubiszewski, we must realise that "the mounting environmental and social problems we face are systemic. Articles in Solutions will employ whole-systems thinking."

To honestly achieve a "sustainable" economy, humanity must step through a paradigm shift, as profound as the transition in the sixteenth century when Copernicus showed that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. Likewise, ecology teaches us that humanity is not the centre of life on the planet. Just as the Pope's henchmen refused to look through Galileo's telescope, some economists avoid looking out the window to see what keeps humanity alive: photosynthesis, precious materials, and concentrated energy.