Sustainability And The New Economics

Download or read book Sustainability and the New Economics written by Stephen J. Williams and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multidisciplinary book provides new insights and hope for sustainable prosperity given recent developments in economics – but only if swift and strong actions consistent with Earth’s biophysical limits and principles of justice are universally taken. It is one thing to put limits on resource throughput and waste generation to conform with the ecosphere’s biocapacity. It is another thing to efficiently allocate a sustainable rate of resource throughput and ensure it is equitably distributed in the form of final goods and services. While the separate but interdependent decisions regarding throughput, distribution, and allocation are the essence of ecological economics, dealing with them in a world that needs to cure its growth addiction requires a realistic understanding of macroeconomics and the fiscal capacity of currency-issuing central governments. Sustainable prosperity demands that we harness this understanding to carefully regulate the rate of resource throughput and manipulate macroeconomic outcomes to facilitate human flourishing. The book begins by outlining humanity’s current predicament of gross ecological overshoot and laments the half-century of missed opportunities since The Limits to Growth (1972). What was once economic growth has become, in many high-income countries, uneconomic growth (additional costs exceeding additional benefits), which is no longer advancing wellbeing. Meanwhile, low-income nations need a dose of efficient and equitable growth to escape poverty while protecting their environments and the global commons. The book argues for a synthesis of our increasing knowledge of the ecosphere’s limited carrying capacity and the power of governments to harness, transform, and distribute resources for the common good. Central to this synthesis must be a correct understanding of the difference between financial constraints and real resource constraints. While the latter apply to everyone, the former do not apply to currency-issuing central governments, which have much more capacity for corrective action than mainstream thinking perceives. The book joins the growing chorus of authoritative voices calling for a complete overhaul of the dominant economic system. We conclude with policy recommendations based on a new economics that, if implemented, would come close to guaranteeing a sustainable and prosperous future. Upon reading this book, at least one thing should be crystal clear: business as usual is not a viable option.

Download or read book The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption written by G. Seyfang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh look at sustainable consumption, exploring how grassroots community action can spread ideas in society. It presents a 'New Economics' approach based on alternative measures of wealth and value, examining how these are put into practice through local organic food systems, low-impact eco-housing, and complementary currencies.

Download or read book New Economies for Sustainability written by Luise Li Langergaard and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The edited volume New Economies for Sustainability: Limits and Potentials for Possible Futures brings together a range of alternative views on economy and organization to illustrate different perspectives on how to work towards more sustainable solutions to production, consumptions and economic organization more generally. The book brings chapters from the most renowned scholars in the field, who bring their perspectives on how alternative schools theorize politics, society, organization, nature and ethics in their attempts to develop theories with a strong focus on sustainability. The book aims to contribute with a platform for gathering and collecting these theories in a pluralist economic framework, which can provide a strong alternative voice to mainstream economic theories in sustainability debates.

Download or read book The New Environmental Economics written by Eloi Laurent and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too often, economics disassociates humans from nature, the economy from the biosphere that contains it, and sustainability from fairness. When economists do engage with environmental issues, they typically reduce their analysis to a science of efficiency that leaves aside issues of distributional analysis and justice. The aim of this lucid textbook is to provide a framework that prioritizes human well-being within the limits of the biosphere, and to rethink economic analysis and policy in the light of not just efficiency but equity. Leading economist Éloi Laurent systematically ties together sustainability and justice issues in covering a wide range of topics, from biodiversity and ecosystems, energy and climate change, environmental health and environmental justice, to new indicators of well-being and sustainability beyond GDP and growth, social-ecological transition, and sustainable urban systems. This book equips readers with ideas and tools from various disciplines alongside economics, such as history, political science, and philosophy, and invites them to apply those insights in order to understand and eventually tackle pressing twenty-first-century challenges. It will be an invaluable resource for students of environmental economics and policy, and sustainable development.

Download or read book Beyond Growth written by Herman E. Daly and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Daly is turning economics inside out by putting the earth and its diminishing natural resources at the center of the field . . . a kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics." --Utne Reader "Considered by most to be the dean of ecological economics, Herman E. Daly elegantly topples many shibboleths in Beyond Growth. Daly challenges the conventional notion that growth is always good, and he bucks environmentalist orthodoxy, arguing that the current focus on 'sustainable development' is misguided and that the phrase itself has become meaningless." --Mother Jones "In Beyond Growth, . . . [Daly] derides the concept of 'sustainable growth' as an oxymoron. . . . Calling Mr. Daly 'an unsung hero,' Robert Goodland, the World Bank's top environmental adviser, says, 'He has been a voice crying in the wilderness.'" --G. Pascal Zachary, The Wall Street Journal "A new book by that most far-seeing and heretical of economists, Herman Daly. For 25 years now, Daly has been thinking through a new economics that accounts for the wealth of nature, the value of community and the necessity for morality." --Donella H. Meadows, Los Angeles Times "For clarity of vision and ecological wisdom Herman Daly has no peer among contemporary economists. . . . Beyond Growth is essential reading." --David W. Orr, Oberlin College "There is no more basic ethical question than the one Herman Daly is asking." --Hal Kahn, The San Jose Mercury News "Daly's critiques of economic orthodoxy . . . deliver a powerful and much-needed jolt to conventional thinking." --Karen Pennar, Business Week Named one of a hundred "visionaries who could change your life" by the Utne Reader,Herman Daly is the recipient of many awards, including a Grawemeyer Award, the Heineken Prize for environmental science, and the "Alternative Nobel Prize," the Right Livelihood Award. He is professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, and coauthor with John Cobb, Jr., of For the Common Good.

Download or read book Sustainability Economics written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a concise introduction to an emerging field within economics. Drawing on numerous disciplines, including environmental science, environmental and ecological economics and optimal growth theory, sustainability remains a hazy and complex subject. The author set out with two objectives: one, to bring some order into the proliferating measures, models and management of sustainability; and two, to facilitate access to a complex inter-disciplinary subject area. The book points to practical ways of assessing and enhancing the long-term environmental and economic sustainability of our economies. The result is a fully international study that should bridge the gap between disciplines and prove to be an essential guide to anyone interested in one of the most important concepts in the social sciences.

Download or read book The New Economics written by Steve Keen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the wall of Wittenberg church. He argued that the Church’s internally consistent but absurd doctrines had pickled into a dogmatic structure of untruth. It was time for a Reformation. Half a millennium later, Steve Keen argues that economics needs its own Reformation. In Debunking Economics, he eviscerated an intellectual church – neoclassical economics – that systematically ignores its own empirical untruths and logical fallacies, and yet is still mysteriously worshipped by its scholarly high priests. In this book, he presents his Reformation: a New Economics, which tackles serious issues that today's economic priesthood ignores, such as money, energy and ecological sustainability. It gives us hope that we can save our economies from collapse and the planet from ecological catastrophe. Performing this task with his usual panache and wit, Steve Keen’s new book is unmissable to anyone who has noticed that the economics Emperor is naked and would like him to put on some clothes.