Sustainable Growth

A conversation with Isaac Stone Fish, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for U.S. – China Relations and Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.

China is drowning in it. The whole world has too much of it. History suggests: This won’t end well.

Estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are reassuringly trivial, at 0.5-1% of global land area. For individual countries however, the challenges vary greatly, reflecting dramatic differences in population density.

A comment on Goher-Ur-Rehman Mir and Servaas Storm’s Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production Based vs Consumption-Based Evidence on Decoupling

We are grateful to Michael Grubb, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Igor Bashmakov, and Richard Wood for their interesting, empirically rich and structurally insightful commentary on our paper on the production-based and the consumption-based Carbon Kuznets Curve (CKC).

We assess the Carbon-Kuznets-Curve hypothesis using internationally consistent and comparable production-based versus consumption-based CO2 emissions data for 40 countries (and 35 industries) during 1995-2007 from the World Input Output Database (WIOD).

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

Our shared concern – 20 years after Rio, yet poor progress towards wellbeing

All cultural narratives, worldviews, religious doctrines, political ideologies, and academic paradigms are ‘social constructs.’

Globalization has improved the living standards of hundreds of millions of people – but growing resource scarcity means it risks becoming a victim of its own success.

Many models of economic growth exclude materials from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate.

The present paradox, as ecological economist Bill Rees is fond of putting it, is simple yet profoundly troubling: “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.”