The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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- The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
- Economic growth, industrial metabolism, and exosomatic consumption imply a permanent ly growing consumption of natural resources
- In its
| Leff 21 Leff, Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life, Enrique, Professor of Political Ecology at UNAM, pgs 210-211 - IShone
Limits to Growth gave way to the proposal for “zero growth,” and for a “steady-state economy” and “Blueprint for survival.” The precursors of new ecological economics unveiled the ineluctable relation between the economic process and the degradation of Nature. Tis, in turn, led to acknowledging the need to internalize ecological costs and to deploy distributive counter-measures to the ecological unbalance generated by market mechanisms. In his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) disclosed the fundamental connection between economic growth and the natural limits set by the second law of thermodynamics. the production process generated by the economic rationality that inhabits the machinery of the industrial revolution is defined by an impulse to grow or die, unlike living beings, who are born, develop and die, and human populations, which can establish policies to stabilize their growth. Economic growth, industrial metabolism, and exosomatic consumption imply a permanently growing consumption of natural resources (matter and energy), which not only runs up against the limits of the planet’s provision, productivity, and renewal of E. Leff resources, but becomes degraded in the process of production and consumption, following the entropy law. Four decades after the eye-opening book Silent Spring by Rachel Carlson (1962) that divulged the effects of DDT, ecological destruction has increased dramatically, accentuating global warming caused by greenhouse gases, and by the inescapable laws of thermodynamics, which have set in motion the planet’s entropic degradation. the remedies generated by scientific and technological innovation are difficult to integrate into a sustainable economic system. the paradigms and policies that since then have been generated within the emergent geopolitics of “sustainable development” are showing to be short-lived, because they are not sustainable (Park et al. 2008); they are not rooted in the thermodynamic, ecological, symbolic, and cultural conditions of life. In its globalizing drive, the economic world order that is supported by the discourse of “sustainable development” has obscured the fundamental problem of the environmental crisis. Rather than internalizing the ecological conditions for sustainability, the geopolitics of “sustainable development” ended up commoditizing Nature and over-economizing the world. “Mechanisms for clean development” were put in place, alongside economic instruments for environmental management that established private property rights over the monetary value of environmental goods and services (Brand/Görg 2008). Natural commons (water, air, the sea, and the atmosphere) have been progressively privatized, while new market devices have been created for trading pollution rights (carbon bonuses) and giving a price to the ecological balance of the planet (carbon ofsetting). Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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