Steady-State Economics QUOTES

1 " Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage. "

― Herman E. Daly , Steady-State Economics

3 " Only in the last 200 years have we become dependent on nonrenewable minerals. Modern industry runs on the scarcest of the available forms of low entropy. Traditional technology (windmills, waterwheels, etc.) runs on the more abundant solar source. How ironic, therefore, to be told by technological optimists that modern technology is freeing man from dependence on resources (Barnett and Morse, 1963, p. 11). The very opposite is true. "

― Herman E. Daly , Steady-State Economics

5 " Ise went on to suggest a general principle of resource pricing: that nonrenewable resources be priced at the cost of the nearest renewable substitute. Therefore, virgin timber should cost at least as much per board foot as replanted timber; petroleum should be priced at its Btu equivalent of sugar or wood alcohol, assuming they are the closest renewable alternatives. In the absence of any renewable substitutes, the price would merely reflect the purely ethical judgment of how fast the resources should be used up—that is, the importance of the wants of future people relative to the wants of present people. Renewable resources are assumed to be exploited on a sustained-yield basis and to be priced accordingly. "

― Herman E. Daly , Steady-State Economics

7 " The terrestrial stock consists of two kinds of resources: those renewable on a human time scale and those renewable only over geologic time and which, for human purposes, must be treated as nonrenewable. Terrestrial low-entropy stocks may also be classified into energy and material. Both sources, the terrestrial and the solar, are limited. Terrestrial nonrenewables are limited in total amount available. Terrestrial renewables are also limited in total amount available and, if exploited to exhaustion, become just like nonrenewables. If exploited on a sustained-yield basis, then they are limited in rate of use, though practically unlimited in terms of the total amount eventually harvestable over time. Likewise, the solar source is practically unlimited in total amount but strictly limited in its rate and pattern of arrival to earth. Thus both sources of low entropy are limited. "

― Herman E. Daly , Steady-State Economics