Intelligent Growth: A Vision for a New Low-Energy Economy

Continuing with standard economic growth will not halt the unfolding environmental crisis. But employing “tradable energy quotas” to ration the use of fossil fuels just might.

Stephan Harding, coordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College, explains why standard economic growth is not the answer, and why personal Tradable Energy Quotas are.
[…]But how to move the global economy from growth to steady state? For many years I thought that this issue was insoluble, for at least two reasons. Firstly, it would clearly be impossible to decide upon and monitor steady state exploitation rates for every single resource needed by society. Secondly, any nation that had made a unilateral decision to implement a steady state economy would immediately be wiped out by competitors that hadn’t.

So are there any feasible means for making the shift happen? After spending time with David Fleming, who recently taught here at Schumacher College, I’m now beginning to think that it can be done. The answer is for a national government — any government in the rich world would do — to adopt David’s ingenious concept of Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), which is essentially a system for rationing our use of fossil fuels, currently our major source of energy.

AlterNet