Bo Stråth

The conversations’ topic is the overexploitation of the energy that nature provides. The propellor of this overexploitation is our understanding of the economy as driven by growth through value added in a transaction chain with our present monetary price system as the gauge. Quilligan argues for an alternative value system steered by nature’s replenishment and resilience. The price does not have money but energy value in his order. The current price for a liter of petrol driving a combustible engine is valued in money as a currency with a shifting market value. It must have a value in joules of sunlight embodied within the fossil fuel, Quilligan argues. The price must be derived from biophysical calculation. Earth’s carrying capacity is a key term in his reasoning.’

Mariana Mazzucato’s proposal for a new embedding of capitalism is inspired by the Kennedy administration’s Apollo project for landing a man on the moon. The contrast proposal is an anarcho-capitalist’s Mars project. She departs from the postulation that...

When the environmental and resource exhaustion problems from the beginning of the 1970s could no longer be swept under the carpet, and the Fordist labour productivity ceased to increase, the pie stopped growing. Wages and profits, consumer prices and production...