Truly scientific economic theory would consider in detail the exosomatic aspects, including the ecological ones, of human activity, while medical science deals with the endosomatic physical aspects of the human organism.

In Democracy Versus Sustainability, Boris Frankel provides a detailed analysis of how various mainstream and alternative parties, business groups, social movements, policymakers, and others are engaged in a struggle to shape emerging post-carbon societies. Will these post-carbon societies be new forms of capitalism with classes and social relations similar to existing ones but based on green growth modernisation? Or will we see the creation of post-carbon democracies that are post-capitalist and take diverse eco-socialist, post-growth and other forms? Given the current political impasse, will these socio-political changes occur within parliamentary institutions or be established in opposition to existing practices of representative democracy? There is a profound lack of awareness about the coming struggle over national and individual material footprints. Any significant but necessary changes to the way material resources are currently used will alter political and socio-economic alignments of both democratic and anti-democratic parties and movements across the political spectrum. Moreover, these struggles are likely to change global geo-political relations, and affect current levels and forms of extraction, production, trade, consumption, and employment. We face volatile and unpredictable times. These and many other issues are discussed with reference to a wide range of political movements, policy proposals and debates over cultural and political economic practices. It is the conflict between various institutional practices and conceptions of ‘democracy’ and ‘environmental sustainability’ that will help shape future levels of equality or social justice across the world. CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 From Carbon Capitalism to Post-Carbon Democracies 26 Intellectuals, Networks, Culture: Shaping Future Post-Carbon Societies 60 The Political Struggle Over National and Per Capita Material Footprints 95 Degrowth: Direct Democracy in a Political Economic Vacuum 134 Searching for a Mode of Politics to Break the Impasse 173 Alternatives to Welfare States: Beyond 'Dependent Beggars and Wage Slaves' 211 Conclusion 252 Notes 265 Index 285

Three phases of 20th-century economic theory are described: (1) positing two basic factors of production (i.e. for wage-labour and for capital possessions); (2) positing an additional, culture-dependent factor leveraging the productivity of labour; Amartya’s work and that of Robert Solow belong to this phase; (3) taking account also of environmental factors. A chronological sampling of statements by Amartya is cited, mainly from: “An Aspect of Indian Agriculture” (1962), Resources, Values and Development (1984), Sustainable Human Development: Concepts and Priorities (1994, influenced by Solow), the Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress and “The Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Revisited: Reflections and Overview” (2009), and An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013). An emphatic pro-GDP-growth statement made by Amartya in 2006 to the International Society of Ecological Economics is also included. A combination of four reasons why he has not taken ecological economics more to heart is suggested: (1) he has wanted to take it for granted that (as Keynes had put it in 1929) the future would offer “far more wealth ... and possibilities of personal life than the past has ever offered”, and has been unwilling to risk his popularity by proposing that the affluent moderate their rates of per capita consumption; (2) because of his concern about relieving current poverty, he has been afraid that to dwell on concerns in behalf of the unborn would aggravate the exclusive concern of the affluent for their own progeny; (3) as a theorist he wants to avoid dealing in detail with uncertainties; (4) he has therefore hoped that macro-ecological problems wouldn’t be as bad as predicted. Some reasons are described for believing that ecological economics and an ecological sensibility are important: When it is clear that the future will be very different from the past, extrapolations (as in “take-off” theory) from data about the past are of little use for predicting the future; notwithstanding many great uncertainties as to detail, there is a palpable risk that the well-being or even the survival of humankind for the next few centuries is endangered by the current rates, unprecedented in the history of humankind, of several kinds of environmental degradation; to gamble blindly for higher stakes than humankind can afford to lose is crazy unless the cost of not gambling would be similar. This essay has five appendices: (1) a supplementary sketch of Amartya as an economist (apart from ecological economics); a sketch of 21st-century environmental degradation, distinguishing between depletion of non-renewable mineral resources, renewable natural resources being used up faster than the Earth renews them, ecologically destructive dislocations of natural materials, pollution (a matter of natural “sinks” becoming “overloaded”), climate change (related to global warming), a very fast rate of extinctions of biological species (especially of big creatures), and yet a flourishing of “super-bacteria” and more virulent viruses; (3) an account of Solow’s argument against limits-to-growth theory and of an analogous argument made by Friedrich Engels; (4) an explanation of the difference between “strong-sustainability” and “weak-sustainability” reckonings (e.g. as made, in regard to India by Partha Dasgupta, Kenneth Arrow et al.); (5) a relevant text by Amartya published in 2014.

SO Funtowicz European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Systems, Informatics and Safety IT-21020 Ispra (VA) silvio.funtowicz@jrc.it ... J. Martinez-Alier and G. Munda Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona Dept. of Economics and Economic History Edifici B ES-08193 ...

This is a collected volume with non-academic essays I've written over the years. The book is freely available at indefenseofdegrowth.com, donations welcome!

In contrast with the production of goods and services by firms, where the production costs are minimized under appropriate behavioral assumptions, consumer- producers have as objective the maximization of consumption expenditure, i.e., production costs of their outputs. According to Kenneth Boulding, were the impact upon the limited resources available on planet Earth taken into account, consumption expenditure should be something to be minimized. Thus, either we abandon consumer theory, as we know it, or we keep it as a reasonable description of reality. Then we should evaluate the long run consequences of such behavior in a larger context, which, as the consequence of larger population with increasing per capita consumption, comprises the overburdening of natural resources. When we decompose the time horizon of cultural evolution into shorter periods of adjustment, we may distinguish several types of institutional determination of how societies take decisions, as a group and indiv...

In recent years a number of writers have argued that the impending " peaking " of world oil production heralds a new era of resource wars, environmental destruction, terminal economic decline, and even a massive " die off " of the human population. The debate over peak oil has primarily been conducted in empirical terms, focusing on rates of oil production and consumption, declining discoveries of new oil reserves, and the limited alternatives to fossil fuels. This paper, in contrast, examines the theoretical discourses and historical contexts within which peak oil theorists have developed their analyses, and assesses possibilities for transformative social change in an era of energy scarcity. The debate over peak oil, as I argue, can best be viewed in the context of an ongoing schism between neoclassical economics and a school of ecological economics stretching back two hundred years. Arguments concerning peak oil gain a new degree of theoretical consistency when placed in this context, but it remains the case that most writers on peak oil and most ecological economists have failed to study resource scarcity and the thermodynamics of production in relation to the realities of class struggle and the historically specific nature of capitalism. They are thus unable adequately to address the question of how to transcend, in a period of impending energy scarcity, the social and economic disruptions caused by the contradictions of capitalism. The failure of ecological economists and writers on peak oil to directly critique the capitalist system and to envision solutions to an energy crisis outside the ideological framework of capital imposes limits to the value of their otherwise very important work. This paper seeks to go beyond those limits by making the case for developing a materialist and ecological theory of energy in the class struggle.

This book discusses the growing political contest between conservative and reform-orientated defenders of capitalist societies on the one side, and the policies and imagined futures advanced by green and socialist critics on the other. All are subjected to detailed scrutiny. Is ‘green growth’ innovation able to resolve deep-seated global inequality and other socio-political and environmental problems? Can new technology sustain capitalist production and high consumption by decoupling economic growth from the limits of nature? How feasible or utopian are ‘post-work’ or post-capitalist societies based on full automation and a universal basic income? What are the political economic strengths and weaknesses of green post-growth or degrowth proposals? These and other crucial issues are analysed by the author in a challenging and thought-provoking book covering an extensive range of policy reports, social theories, environmental proposals and political practices across the world. Boris Frankel is a social theorist, political economist and cultural critic. He is Honorary Principal Fellow in the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne.