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Sustainable Futures

Sustainable Futures. The rebound effect: when increases in efficiency reduce total resource consumption but not in full proportion to the efficiency improvement. For example, when a 20 percent gain in efficiency leads to reduction in consumption or waste by only 10 percent

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Sustainable Futures

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  1. Sustainable Futures

  2. The rebound effect: when increases in efficiency reduce total resource consumption but not in full proportion to the efficiency improvement. • For example, when a 20 percentgain in efficiency leads to reduction in consumption or waste by only 10 percent • When the effect is more than 100 percent of the efficiency gain it is a Jevons paradox. • The tendency to reinvest efficiency gains in additional consumption Rebound Effect vs. Jevons Paradox

  3. The Growth Imperative • Decoupling • Treadmill of production • Metabolic rift thesis • Second contradiction of capitalism • The first?

  4. Growing toward Sustainability? • Environmental Kuznets curve • Critiques • Pollution haven hypothesis • Forest transition theory • World systems framework

  5. Total Cost Accounting • Public vs. private goods • Pigovian taxes • Coase theorem • Cost vs. value of things

  6. “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows…” (Berlin) • Positive vs. negative freedom • Freedom (+) to… • Freedom (-) from… • Both imply the need for state intervention to some degree. • A “free” market is a constrained market? • Fair trade

  7. Welfare Economics Branch of microeconomics seeking to evaluate well-being * Reduce world to costs and benefits * Assess policies accordingly One analysis calculates that the well-being of citizens in less affluent nations was 1/2,000 of the value of an American citizen.

  8. Then-chief economist for the World Bank Lawrence Summers argued that the lower marginal cost of waste disposal in a poor country compared with the higher marginal cost of waste disposal in a waste-producing affluent country justifies the latter polluting the former. Therefore, the poorest countries of Africa are vastly underpolluted, as they are underutilizing what affluent countries desperately need: waste sinks. The Memo Read Around the World…

  9. In appearing to be nonethical, welfare economic approach ends up being terribly unethical. In a famous essay titled The Rights of Statistical People, Lisa Heinzerling(2000, p. 189) puts this reality in plain sight: “We do not, for example, believe that so long as it is worth $10 million to one person to see another person dead […] [that] it is acceptable for the first person to shoot and kill the second. […] Yet when it comes to regulatory programs that prevent deaths—deaths also due to the actions of other people—it has become commonplace to argue that the people doing the harm should be allowed to act so long as it would cost more for them to stop doing the harm than the harm is worth in monetary terms.”

  10. When we reduce human life to statistical terms we deny people the dignity to be thought of as humans. In assigning a lower value to those of lower socioeconomic status and certain racial minorities (as race and class are correlated) it justifies environmental racism. But that’s okay, as the outcome “would not be the result of a government decision to take racial characteristics into account; in fact it would not be a product of any group-level discrimination on the government’s part” (Sunstein2004, p. 391). So discrimination that can be justified with statistics is okay?

  11. Discounting: Tyranny of the Present? • Discounting: an economic technique to monetize future well-being thus making it comparable with well-being today. • Thanks to discounting, entirely possible to reject a policy option that may knowingly save the human race from extinction hundreds of years from now on the basis that it lowers the well-being of some today. • Trickle-forward reasoning

  12. Hardin conflates-common property and open-access regimes. • Common-property regimes: members of a clearly demarcated group have formal and informal ways of excluding nonmembers from using a resource. • Not to be mistaken to mean everyone’s property • Open-access regimes: long considered in legal doctrine as involving no limits on who is authorized to use a resource.

  13. Uneconomic Growth • Herman Daly’s “factor of ten” • Gross inequality creates inefficiencies • What is progress? • Can money buy happiness? • Work-spend cycle

  14. Environmental Justice • History • Warren County, North Carolina • Environmental racism appears to be getting worse. • Why?

  15. Socioeconomic Development • “Economic development is the best contraceptive.” • Family planning • Kerala, India

  16. Alternative Measures • Human Development Index • AmartyaSen • Life expectancy, literacy, education, standard of life • Happy Planet Index • Life expectancy, life satisfaction, ecological footprint

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