Limits to Growth at 50 years: Brief history and present implications – Charles Hall 2021-03-31

Time: Mar 31, 2021 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

SUMMARY:

–          We all know that GDP – cash flow in the commercial economy – should not guide public policy.

o   Scientists know it, sociologists know it and the people who created the system of national accounts which has evolved into the Gross Domestic Product metric knew it.  The system they created was to support a rational system of taxation and they stated explicitly and emphatically that these national accounts should not be used as the basis for public policy formation or to gauge the health of the economy or society.

o   Money is simple while social well-being and the health of the environment and our resource base is more complex to represent and uses different measures.

o   Charlie Hall, however,  developed a critical energy resource metric to help navigate through the biophysical challenges which are lined up to the horizon .  EROI – Energy returned on energy invested, which effectively tells us how easy it is to get energy, is a big step forward in tackling these issues because of the perspective it lends and because it makes a clear break with monetized national policy.

–          EROI is a critical national policy metric and Biophysical Economics was developed to replace dollars as the system we use to represent the interaction between human society and the natural world.

Brief Bio:

Charles A.S. Hall received his Ph.D. in Systems Ecology under Howard Odum at UNC in 1970.  He was professor at Cornell University, Univ. Montana and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.   He is author or editor of 14 books and 300 scholarly articles.He is best known for his development of the concept of EROI, or energy return on investment, and a new field, BioPhysical Economics.