Tag Archives: circular economy

winter clothes and jackets 101

Leave a reply

I occasionally read fashion blogs not because I am interested in fashion, but because I find clothes the most boring thing in the world and yet I occasionally need to project an appearance that others find acceptable in a professional (e.g., my employer is relying on me to sell something and therefore willing to pay me) or social (e.g., not embarrass my wife in public) situation. Anyway, this article goes through a long discussion on how to layer to stay warm. I have to say though, I find it a bit gross to have a synthetic shirt next to my skin with a bunch of stuff on top, and I am mildly allergic to wool. I love cotton, but apparently that is not the way to stay warm. There is talk of mittens, which I agree are warm, but I have never figured out how to use a key to unlock or lock a door while wearing a mitten. Maybe everybody else has moved on to other technologies and I am the only one still using keys. And finally, I’d like to hear more about socks and keeping my feet warm. I find that no matter how warm the rest of my body is, my toes are still the first thing to get cold.

The purpose of fashion blogs, of course, is to make us want to buy new stuff even when we often have perfectly functional old stuff lying around. Materials and fossil fuels get mined, the new stuff gets manufactured and moved around, people work in stores and call centers, and the old stuff gets disposed of. All of this gives some people work to do and keeps money moving around, but how much value is created? Warm hands have value, and buying my first pair of mittens therefore creates value where none existed before. Buying my fifth pair of mittens in the latest color or style would add zero value for me personally, but perhaps it brings joy to some.

Is “green growth” possible?

1 Reply

Green growth is the holy grail where human wellbeing is able to grow exponentially over the long term without depleting natural resources including the natural environment’s ability to assimilate our wastes. I won’t claim to understand all the words in this abstract, but the author is basically coming up with a big fat NO.

Is green growth possible and even desirable in a spaceship economy?

There seems to be a consensus among many growth and resource economists that perpetual growth can be ensured if it gets increasingly resource-efficient and if growth focuses on creating values, a result derived by models using production functions that allow asymptotically complete decoupling of the economy from its resource base by substituting natural resources through physical and knowledge capital. This growth process can be called green growth. The following paper attempts to show, within the framework of an semi-endogenous growth model using a linear-exponential production function (Linex function) with bounded resource efficiency, that the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth. As the population grows, per capita income decreases, and the economy’s capital base decays. In addition, an ecological displacement effect resulting from the biophysical embeddedness of the economy further exacerbates the result. Physical capital pushes back the natural spaces necessary to regenerate natural services and resources and can, therefore, not be accumulated endlessly. A comparison with standard resource models shows that this displacement effect also limits growth for models with production functions with low elasticities of substitution. Finally, the analysis of transitory dynamics addresses aspects of intergenerational equality in a limited biosphere.

I’ll take a crack at interpreting this. The human economy cannot be fully separate from the natural environment because it will always result in some physical displacement, even if pollution could be eliminated. Well, what if all human enterprise were built on stilts well above the earth? All food would also be grown on these stilts, all materials recovered and cycled endlessly. This would shade out natural ecosystems, but you could use giant space mirrors to beam in sunlight that would otherwise have uselessly bypassed the earth (which is all but a vanishingly tiny fraction of sunlight). Now, you might say why not just go live in orbit? But the advantage of my scheme is that you can just take an elevator down to the earth, and the entire earth is a park for your enjoyment. What about tigers, you say? Well, we will just invite those rolling bubble things from Jurassic Park.