Ecological Limits
New Documentary on The Limits to Growth
A team of researchers from MIT released The Limits to Growth, a book based on their computer modeling of the interactions between economic growth and resource limits, forty years ago to a swell of controversy and conversation. In the years since, much of their modeling has held up, but somehow the issues they raised have disappeared from policy debates. Italian film-maker Enrico Cerasuolo is now working on a film titled Last Call that attempts to show bring The Limits to Growth back into our global discussions about the ecological crises happening around us and how to address them.
Limits to Growth Redux
Twitter went aflutter this week with late-breaking (two years late) news in Smithsonian Magazine that Australian physicist Graham Turner had compared the findings of the landmark Limits to Growth report to actual recorded data from 1972-2000 and the Limits to Growth model held up remarkably well. Turner’s report, titled “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality,” finds that in all five of the key global economic subsystems - population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources - the Limits to Growth standard run scenario (essentially business as usual) looks uncannily similar to the actual data, whereas the other two scenarios - stablizing behavior and policies, and comprehensive use of technology - do not.
Ending the Debate on Keystone
Submitted by Jason Chang on Mon, 02/13/2012 - 2:20pm
Author:
John Fullerton In his February 10th essay, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera asked a simple question: “Can a person support the Keystone XL oil pipeline and still believe that global warming poses a serious threat?”
Growth and Free Trade: Brain-Dead Dogmas Still Kicking Hard
Submitted by Dan Thompson on Mon, 02/06/2012 - 4:30pm
Author:
Herman Daly There are two dogmas that neoclassical economists must never publicly doubt lest they be defrocked by their professional priesthood: first, that growth in GDP is always good and is the solution to most problems; second, that free international trade is mutually beneficial thanks to the growth-promoting principle of comparative advantage. These two cracked pillars “support” nearly all the policy advice given by mainstream economists to governments.
Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A New UN Report
“We simply can't continue as if business as usual was the cheapest solution. It is not."
—European Union Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard
A Systems Approach to Financial Reform
Submitted by Dan Thompson on Mon, 01/23/2012 - 5:29pm
Author:
John Fullerton I spoke last Thursday at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Policy Summit in Baltimore on how our work at Capital Institute might have relevance to the 2012 Congress’s financial reform agenda. These are the hopes I shared for how policy could shape the Future of Finance:
The Biospheric Reality
John Fullerton recently spoke with filmmaker Katie Teague, creator of the soon-to-be-released documentary “Money & Life,” about the enormity of the challenges we face–climate change, environmental degradation, unsustainable wealth inequity–and the foundational shifts in our economics, politics, and even ethics that we must make in order to weather the coming storm.
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Talking about the Future of Manufacturing with Mike Locker
The Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance initiative and the organization behind its creation, the Center for Labor and Community Research, will be the subject of our next Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy. After having been written off as a declining, noncompetitive sector, manufacturing is now rising on the radar screens of policymakers, social justice advocates, and a new breed of environmentalists who see it as both a catalyst for economic revival in America and as offering the solution to many of our ecological and societal ills.
As part of our research for the upcoming field study we stopped by the offices of Locker Associates in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from Zuccotti Park. Mike Locker is a long-time advisor to manufacturing companies and labor on corporate restructuring and buyouts, and has conducted hundreds of feasibility studies for troubled companies and industries over the years.
