Sustainable Futures
Rebound Effect vs. Jevons Paradox
• The rebound effect: when increases in efficiency
reduce total resource consumption but not in full
proportion to the efficiency improvement.
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For example, when a 20 percent gain 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
The Growth Imperative
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Decoupling
Treadmill of production
Metabolic rift thesis
Second contradiction of capitalism
– The first?
Growing toward Sustainability?
• Environmental Kuznets curve
– Critiques
• Pollution haven hypothesis
• Forest transition theory
• World systems framework
Total Cost Accounting
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Public vs. private goods
Pigovian taxes
Coase theorem
Cost vs. value of things
“Freedom for the pike is death for the
minnows…” (Berlin)
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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
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.
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…
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.”
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” (Sunstein 2004, p. 391).
So discrimination that can be justified with statistics is okay?
Discounting: Tyranny of the Present?
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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
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.
Uneconomic Growth
• Herman Daly’s “factor of ten”
– Gross inequality creates inefficiencies
• What is progress?
• Can money buy happiness?
• Work-spend cycle
Environmental Justice
• History
– Warren County, North Carolina
• Environmental racism appears to be
getting worse.
– Why?
Socioeconomic Development
• “Economic development is the best
contraceptive.”
• Family planning
• Kerala, India
Alternative Measures
• Human Development Index
– Amartya Sen
– Life expectancy, literacy, education, standard
of life
• Happy Planet Index
– Life expectancy, life satisfaction, ecological
footprint