Articles: Green Economics
Chrysler – Criminal Lunatics?
I was reading a popular news magazine last week and two stories followed each other directly. They described events in two neighbouring continents, North and South America. Yet they might have been describing events on two remotely separated planets.
The first story was about an Italian car-industry expert who has, in the past few years, restored the Chrysler motor company to profitability. … Read more
Another review of 1988 Edition of ‘Economics for a Round Earth’.
By Diana Massam, Secretary, Environmental Communicators’ Orgnanisation (UK)
In ‘Economics for a Round Earth’, Charles Pierce challenges previously accepted economic ideals and methods of management, as fundamentally flawed and outdated. He proposes drastic changes, but stresses that these can only be achieved as a series of progressive trends. … Read more
Copenhagen – a Predictable Failure
The predictable failure of the Copenhagen conference to produce an agreement on international action to slow or stop global warming, supports what I argued in an earlier post – global warming cannot be stopped. There is too much momentum behind the human component of its cause, and we lack the economic and political systems, and the international institutions, to get effective international action. … Read more
Stopping Global Warming – Better Communication Needed
In Australia the federal government is trying to implement an Emissions Trading Scheme to combat global warming. Opponents of this scheme argue that it will cost jobs.
Surely the whole point of trying to slow and stop global warming is that if such warming continues unchecked, it will cost millions of jobs, and lives, worldwide, because of the destructive effects of changing climates and rising sea levels. … Read more
Will the big stimulus work?
Governments are like a doctor who is confronted by a patient suffering from a severe cold. So the doctor says, ‘Right, everyone, let’s cough and sneeze all over him, that’ll cure him!’
Continue reading
The Decline and Rise of Nations
I was asked recently if I thought that American dominance of the world was over, if America would decline like other great powers before it, and what nation would take its place.
I replied that the old idea of a nation becoming ‘great’ and ‘wealthy’ by hugely increasing its consumption and getting control of other nations to keep its own consumption growing, had always been part of human history, but would be quite inappropriate for the future. … Read more
Global Warming – A Red Herring?
The Australian Government has recently announced revised, reduced targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There has been some objection to this but it should not really be surprising.
Governments around the world have shown that they just don’t get it. … Read more
Oil Price Goes Down – Whoopee
Oil price goes down – whoopee
The price of crude oil dropped dramatically last year. This was not unexpected – supply and demand of this resource are finely balanced, so that any political or economic disturbance can cause large fluctuations. … Read more
Global Warming – Is it too late?
There are four main opinions on the subject of global warming:
1) It’s not happening.
OR
2) It’s happening but has causes other than anthropogenic increases in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content, for instance the precession of the nodes of the earth’s orbit and cyclical variations in the sun’s radiation.
Train Wreck and Renewal
In setting forth the ideas in the book ‘Economics for a Round Earth’ I did not expect that they would rapidly be taken up as policy and that the global economy would thus be set on a radically different, sustainable path, in time to avoid pain. … Read more