climate-change
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Economic giants like US, China have been buying up mining rights for minerals, rare earth metals to manufacture ‘renewable’ energy requiring batteries, turbines and solar panels; expropriating and siphoning natural wealth from the natural resource-rich income-poor South to the resource-poor income-rich North; cheapening earth’s resources by exploiting its monopsony (buying) power over South nations. The
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I want to big up Rachel Carson who began raising flags in 1940s about the false economy of synthetic chemical solutions and monoculture crop, versus sustainable practice. She wrote prolifically about it in 60s and was met with fierce opposition from chemical corporations. In 1960s a number of scholars were challenging world views and their
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‘Unjust transitions and false prophets’At ‘Resisting Green Imperialism: fighting for a socially just transition’ hosted by London Mining Network in November, it was clearer than day from a range of stakeholder voices (indigenous, groups, women weavers, food sovereignty advocates, NGOs, researchers): the current plans for transition to green energy are neither just or ‘green’: they
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Carbon credits and tradable pollution permits are in effect markets for the right to pollute. Carbon markets purport to reduce emissions by setting a physical cap on the volume of emissions for a region e.g EU, divided into tradable permits and allocated to firms to be traded on a secondary market; in theory it incentivises
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Or in modern times ‘the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate’ The observation that increased energy efficiency, paradoxically, tends to lead to increased energy use and extraction of natural resources. In the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decline. The paradox is named after William Jevons
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“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side…” – E.F. Schumacher, 1973, ‘Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered.’
Elevate Economics 