Excerpts from an interview with ecological economist Herman Daly

From Adbusters – excerpts:

‘Relying on growth in this way might be fine if the global economy existed in a void, but it does not. Rather, the economy is a subsystem of the finite biosphere that supports it. When the economy’s expansion encroaches too much on its surrounding ecosystem, we will begin to sacrifice natural capital (such as fish, minerals and fossil fuels) that is worth more than the manufactured capital (such as roads, factories and appliances) added by the growth. We will then have what I call uneconomic growth, producing “bads” faster than goods – making us poorer, not richer. Once we pass the optimal scale, growth becomes stupid in the short run and impossible to maintain in the long run. Evidence suggests that the US may have already entered the uneconomic growth phase…

‘Simply ask the question: What would the US look like if we had one-half of our current energy consumption? I think there are two ways to kind of get a handle on that. The first is to go back in US history to such a time when we did live off of one-half of the current levels of energy consumption. That would put us somewhere around 1960. And gee, life in 1960 wasn’t bad. There were all sorts of good things – you were a long way from freezing in the dark, and life was quite good, materially good, and so forth.

‘Another way of thinking about it is to take the same year and look for another country with half the energy consumption per capita, like France, and life in France is pretty good. So society could cut energy consumption in half and, if it was done diligently, it wouldn’t be a big deal in terms of how it would affect people’s welfare…

‘Another thing students can build on is that economics does recognize a distinction between market versus public goods. Market goods are rival and excludable. My shirt is rival and excludable because it’s my property and if I wear it, you can’t wear it. Students can raise issues with how the whole set of goods that are non-rival are dealt with. Is the best way to deal with non-rival goods going around and making them more artificially excludable? Maybe they should be free? Where is the benefit from making knowledge artificially scarce? Many non-rival goods such as knowledge can be used sustainably in that we can all use a given piece of information as much as we want without using it up.’

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