Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
For the United States and Japan, a = 0.12. For the United States b = 3.4, and for
Japan b = 2.7. It corresponds to Y = K
0.36
L
0.08
U
0.56
(i.e., useful work performed by
energy sources could explain as much as 56 % of actual GDP growth experienced
during the 20th century, while growth of capital stock would account for 36 and
8 % would come from the increase in labour capabilities).
It is too early to tell if this new way to account for the long-term economic growth,
just now being opened from an ecological economics standpoint, will consolidate and
gain acceptance among the majority of mainstream economists and economic his-
torians. For the moment, even admitting the increasing relevance of environmental
global concerns, mainstream developing economists and economic historians con-
tinue to consider primary energy as only another input or intermediate good that can
always be substituted in the market. All of this explains why there is a growing
suspicion among ecological economists and environmental historians that ignoring
the environmental impacts of economic growth comes from the same analytical
foundation that has forgotten the role played by natural resources in human economy
and ecology, and both seem to be tightly related to the persistent inability by main-
stream economists to fully explain how economic growth actually works.
2.3 From Economic History to Social Metabolism
and Beyond
The rise of ecological economics is enabling economic and environmental histo-
rians alike to share and, at the same time, enhance their respective long-term
understanding of economic growth by placing it in a broader perspective of
biophysical interactions between human economies and natural systems in the
biosphere. This socio-metabolic approach has been summarized by the Institute of
Social Ecology in Vienna as follows:
The central theme underlying this research is
the notion that most, if not all, global sustainability issues have to do with the fact
that about two-thirds, if not three-quarters of the world population are currently in
the midst of a rapid transition from agrarian society to the industrial regime. This
transition is fundamentally changing societal organization, economic structures,
patterns of resource use and so on, thereby probing the limitations of the planet
Earth in many ways, among others by using up exhaustible resources, altering
global biogeochemical cycles, depleting diversity and degrading Earth
“
'
s ecosys-
.
16
A new set of questions, methods and accounts arise from this, focus on the
main socio-ecological transitions experienced in the interplay between nature and
societies:
tems
”
1. Was there a
'
characteristic metabolic pro
le
'
of agrarian societies? Was such a
metabolic pro
le connected to, and dependent on, certain land-use patterns?
16
Fischer-Kowalski et al. (
2007
).
