Herman E. Daly: Steady-State Economics

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PLOWBOY: Is this belief what you mean when you refer to growthmania?

DALY: Growthmania is more than believing in infinite growth ... it's the situation that occurs when that growth becomes so important that no one can even conceive of its ever costing more than it's worth. But we're worse off than that. We've got hypergrowthmania.

PLOWBOY: Hypergrowthmania?

DALY: Yes, we take all the costs of growth and add these to our Gross National Product as benefits! Have you ever noticed that nothing is ever subtracted from the GNP? That's because we count our expenses as income! And the logic of that path may eventually lead us to terminal hypergrowthmania.

PLOWBOY: TERMINAL hypergrowthmania?!!

DALY: Terminal hypergrowthmania—and here I hope I'm exaggerating—will come when we increase the death rate so more funeral expenses can be added to our GNP!

PLOWBOY: That sounds pretty grim.

If we burned all of the world's fossil fuels as rapidly as we could, we'd end up getting the energy equivalent of only about two weeks of sunlight.

DALY: True, but it's the logical, inevitable result of ignoring the finite nature of our environment, of assuming that the physical world should be adjusted to accommodate infinite growth . . . instead of recognizing our real biophysical limits and adjusting ourselves and our economy to function within those boundaries.

PLOWBOY: What are the basic limits that you're referring to?

DALY: You can determine them by simply asking yourself how humans live. The answer, of course, is that our lives are ultimately dependent on sunshine! There's a fixed solar flux that comes to the earth, and we "feed" on that energy. That's one basic fundamental constraint. Of course, right now we are also living off the sunshine of Paleozoic summers trapped in fossil fuels. But that's an impermanent subsidy. It's capital instead of income.

There're other restrictions—such as our mineral resources, for instance-but even more basic than those are the universal unbreakable laws of matter-energy: namely, the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

PLOWBOY: Could you give us a "refresher" explanation of those "energy rules"?

DALY: Of course. The first law states that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed . . . that everything has to come from somewhere and go to somewhere. Our world is both a source for inputs of matter-energy and the sink for outputs of matter-energy.

The second law deals with entropy—which, simply put, is the degree of waste or disorder in the use of energy—and says that, in a closed system, entropy always increases. That is. we are constantly converting useful low-entropy potential into high-entropy waste.

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