Complex equations made startlingly simple

Equations leading to climate change are complex and yet, in fact startlingly simple.

 Daly's book,
explains 'Steady
State Economics'.

The capitalist system to which the developed world adheres is energy intensive with most of its dynamism being derived from the combustion of fossil fuels.

To avoid the complexities and confusion of climate change, or at least begin to mitigate the contributing dynamics, we need to reduce, constrain and seriously limit our use of fossil fuels and that means slowing trade at all levels within the capitalist system.

An interim step to enable the world community to embrace a new lifestyle, one changing the emphasis from one of profit to a focus on people, would be the introduction of a four-hour trading day.

Complex and impossible many would argue, but no more so, however, than the development of the profit motivated capitalist system that has arisen over about three centuries.

There is one strikingly important difference for what exists took many generations to assemble and in doing so consumed most of the world’s finite resources, upon which the modern world desperately depends, and left many people emotionally and physically disabled, and resulted frequently in divided and disrupted communities.

Critically, we don’t have three centuries to resolve this dilemma for by 2050 life on earth will become rather rickety when we will be hard pressed to trade for even four hours a day, let alone eight or even longer, as is the desire of many.

How this will evolve is beyond my comprehension, but until we can we can understand how to live fulfilling lives without living in the shadow of a monetary mantra, then a rather grimy conclusion is likely.

The four-hour work day is simply an interim step, but it takes us closer to what Herman Daly discusses in his 1977 book “Steady State Economics”, that discusses simply having what we need, and not what we want.

“Sustainability is a slippery word with meanings as different as those who use the term and for some it is about sustaining profit, whatever the cost, while for others it is about moderating the cost, ignoring our wants and ensuring our needs are sustained.

Sustainability, at least for the moment, seems to be about deconstructing the present greed and profit driven creed of an unbalanced capitalist system and replacing it with a more people-centric process that sensitively combines the best of what has lifted humanity from the morass of the distant past and the strengths of what is a softer, gentler and a more socialist-like way of governance for our society.

Work should be about answering needs and not the accumulation of wants – a dynamic that is much less energy dependent.

'We will not act to save the planet" - Herman Daly

Herman Daly is not confident humanity will act to save the planet.



Herman Daly.

Although he doubted we would come to our senses sufficiently to preserve conditions favourable to man, Daly does believe, however, there will be a shift in the composition of economic activity, ensuring it will become less damaging to values that are currently not priced in the marketplace.

Daly (born 1938) is an American ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of the University of Maryland, College Park, in the United States.

He was a senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank and helped develop guidelines for sustainable development and played a key role in the establishment of theories of a Steady State Economy.

Writing in the newly published “2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years” by Jorgen Randers, Daly, in a piece entitled “The End of Uneconomic Growth” and reflecting the forty years had passed since the “The Limits to Growth” had been published said:

Jorgen Randers
 new book.

“Well, it is now forty years later and economic growth is still the number-one policy goal of practically all nations; that is undeniable. Growth economists say that the “neo-Malthusians” were simply wrong, and that we should keep on growing as before. But I think economic growth has already ended that the growth that continues is now uneconomic; it costs more than it is worth at the margin and makes us poorer rather than richer. We still call it economic growth, or simply “growth” in the confused belief that growth must always be economic. I contend that we have reached the economic limit to growth, but we don’t know it, and desperately hide the fact by faulty national accounting, because growth is our idol and to stop worshipping it is anathema.”