Category — Economics

2008 was a good year for investment in renewable energy technologies.  Over $150 billion was invested, much of it directly funding the construction of new projects worldwide, according to a report from New Energy Finance, the people who crunch the numbers of the UN’s Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative.  Considering the economic climate, the numbers are both encouraging and surprising.

Solar energy continues to be the fastest growing sector, but the most encouraging stat is that worldwide investment in renewable enregy  quadrupled between 2004 and 2008.  Check out the link above for more highlights from the report, or download it here.

I’ve mentioned Herman Daly and some of his ideas here before; he’s by far the most interesting and outspoken Economist I know of.  Here’s a link to a great interview he did with Developing Ideas Digest, where he’s very critical of the existing Economic institutions in Academia and discusses topics from free trade to the World Bank to the fundamental questions of Economics and how traditional Economists have failed to truly answer them.  It’s a great read for anyone with an interest in this kind of stuff, and important information for anyone who’s not!

Mother Jones has an interesting article on how our current ideas about making food production sustainable need revamping.  Well-known approaches, such as organic farming and buying locally, are not enough to create a food production chain that is sustainable in all the ways required:

“When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you’re done.

But that’s not the reality. Many of the familiar models don’t work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)”

One of the ideas discussed in the article is vertical farming, which uses (potentially) tall buildings,  soil-free farming practices and recycled water to grow crops of high yield and quality.  This idea has always appealed to me; as our population grows, using up more and more land for farming is obviously not a sustainable approach.  Why not take lessons from the economics of dense urban real estate and build our farms up?  The technology exists, the yields are comparable to existing industrialized farming, and these facilities can be created much closer to urban centres than traditional (and industrial) farms, lowering the costs and energy requirements of transporting food to where consumption is highest.  Vertical farming does have drawbacks (high cost of urban real estate, among others), and any attempt at truly sustainable food production will need to incorporate many different solutions, but it’s an example of using technology to improve the system we’re already working with.

The article also stresses the importance of government spending choices (particularly with respect to farming subsidies) and personal consumption habits in any attempt to modernize our food supply chain.   Reducing our use of animals products is still the easiest and fastest way to lower the energy and land requirements for farming, and governments have plenty of power to improve the situation by changing the criteria for farm funding and by investing in the right technologies.  All told, it’s an interesting and eye-opening read for anyone who gives a damn about where their food comes from and how the hell we’re going to feed a growing population without razing all the rainforests for farmland.

Well-known  Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling gave his annual State of the World assessment on New Year’s eve, and as usual, it’s filled with interesting insights into how our world will look in the coming year.  This year’s discussion was understandably more economy-heavy than usual, but makes for an interesting read.

Groundbreaking Economist Herman Daly has an article in Adbusters that explains the current global financial situation pretty well:

“The turmoil affecting the world economy unleashed by the US sub-prime debt crisis isn’t really a crisis of “liquidity” as it is often called. A liquidity crisis would imply that the economy was in trouble because businesses could no longer obtain credit and loans to finance their investments. In fact, the crisis is the result of the overgrowth of financial assets relative to growth of real wealth— basically the opposite of too little liquidity. We need to take a step back and explore some of the fundamentals that growth-obsessed economists and commentators tend to neglect.”

Daly is well-known for his willingness to question the utility of a growth-obsessed economy, and championing the concept of a steady-state economy (things I’ve harped about before on this blog).  Also check out this piece (PDF) Daly wrote for the UK Sustainable Development Comission for an interesting discussion about how the US growth economy has become uneconomic, and some more information about the possibility of a steady-state economy.