The economy depends on the environment. Economics can seem to forget that point.

Published: November 10, 2022 8.42am EST

Jon D. Erickson Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy, University of Vermont.

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Herman Daly had a flair for stating the obvious. When an economy creates more costs than benefits, he called it “uneconomic growth.” But you won’t find that conclusion in economics textbooks. Even suggesting that economic growth could cost more than it’s worth can be seen as economic heresy.

The renegade economist, known as the father of ecological economics and a leading architect of sustainable development, died on Oct. 28, 2022, at the age of 84. He spent his career questioning an economics disconnected from an environmental footing and moral compass. In an age of climate chaos and economic crisis, his ideas that inspired a movement to live within our means are increasingly essential.

The seeds of an ecological economist.

Herman Daly grew up in Beaumont, Texas, ground zero of the early 20th century oil boom. He witnessed the unprecedented growth and prosperity of the “gusher age” set against the poverty and deprivation that lingered after the Great Depression.

To Daly, as many young men then and since believed, economic growth was the solution to the world’s problems, especially in developing countries. To study economics in college and export the northern model to the global south was seen as a righteous path.

But Daly was a voracious reader, a side effect of having polio as a boy and missing out on the Texas football craze. Outside the confines of assigned textbooks, he found a history of economic thought steeped in rich philosophical debates on the function and purpose of the economy.

Unlike the precision of a market equilibrium sketched on the classroom blackboard, the real-world economy was messy and political, designed by those in power to choose winners and losers. He believed that economists should at least ask: Growth for whom, for what purpose and for how long?

Daly’s biggest realization came through reading marine biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” and seeing her call to “come to terms with nature … to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.” By then, he was working on a Ph.D. in Latin American development at Vanderbilt University and was already quite skeptical of the hyperindividualism baked into economic models. In Carson’s writing, the conflict between a growing economy and a fragile environment was blindingly clear.

After a fateful class with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Daly’s conversion was complete. Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian-born economist, dismissed the free market fairy tale of a pendulum swinging back and forth, effortlessly seeking a natural state of equilibrium. He argued that the economy was more like an hourglass, a one-way process converting valuable resources into useless waste.

Daly became convinced that economics should no longer prioritize the efficiency of this one-way process but instead focus on the “optimal” scale of an economy that the Earth can sustain. Just shy of his 30th birthday in 1968, while working as a visiting professor in the poverty-stricken Ceará region of northeastern Brazil, Daly published “On Economics as a Life Science.”

His sketches and tables of the economy as a metabolic process, entirely dependent on the biosphere as source for sustenance and sink for waste, were the road map for a revolution in economics.

Economics of a full world.

Daly spent the rest of his career drawing boxes in circles. In what he called the “pre-analytical vision,” the economy – the box – was viewed as the “wholly owned subsidiary” of the environment, the circle.

When the economy is small relative to the containing environment, a focus on the efficiency of a growing system has merit. But Daly argued that in a “full world,” with an economy that outgrows its sustaining environment, the system is in danger of collapse.

While a professor at Louisiana State University in the 1970s, at the height of the U.S. environmental movement, Daly brought the box-in-circle framing to its logical conclusion in “Steady-State Economics.” Daly reasoned that growth and exploitation are prioritized in the competitive, pioneer stage of a young ecosystem. But with age comes a new focus on durability and cooperation. His steady-state model shifted the goal away from blind expansion of the economy and toward purposeful improvement of the human condition.

The international development community took notice. Following the United Nations’ 1987 publication of “Our Common Future,” which framed the goals of a “sustainable” development, Daly saw a window for development policy reform. He left the safety of tenure at LSU to join a rogue group of environmental scientists at the World Bank.

For the better part of six years, they worked to upend the reigning economic logic that treated “the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.” He often butted heads with senior leadership, most famously with Larry Summers, the bank’s chief economist at the time, who publicly waved off Daly’s question of whether the size of a growing economy relative to a fixed ecosystem was of any importance. The future U.S. treasury secretary’s reply was short and dismissive: “That’s not the right way to look at it.”

But by the end of his tenure there, Daly and colleagues had successfully incorporated new environmental impact standards into all development loans and projects. And the international sustainability agenda they helped shape is now baked into the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals of 193 countries, “a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity.”

Herman Daly and Kate Raworth, creator of Doughnut Economics, discuss pandemic-resistant economies.

In 1994, Daly returned to academia at the University of Maryland, and his life’s work was recognized the world over in the years to follow, including by Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, the Netherlands’ Heineken Prize for Environmental Science, Norway’s Sophie Prize, Italy’s Medal of the Presidency, Japan’s Blue Planet Prize and even Adbuster’s person of the year.

Today, the imprint of his career can be found far and wide, including measures of the Genuine Progress Indicator of an economy, new Doughnut Economicsframing of social floors within environmental ceilings, worldwide degree programs in ecological economics and a vibrant degrowth movement focused on a just transition to a right-sized economy.

I knew Herman Daly for two decades as a co-author, mentor and teacher. He always made time for me and my students, most recently writing the foreword to my upcoming book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” I will be forever grateful for his inspiration and courage to, as he put it, “ask the naive, honest questions” and then not be “satisfied until I get the answers.”

First published on The Conversation.

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Kiran Tota-Maharaj  Reader in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Aston University
September 1, 2022

Clean freshwater is critical for sustaining human life. However, 1.1 billion people lack access to it worldwide. Desalination represents an increasingly popular way of addressing this.

Desalination is the process of extracting salt from saline water to make it drinkable. There are two main types of desalination.

In the first – called thermal desalination – heat is used. This produces water vapour that condenses on pipes into fresh water. This process remains dominant across the Middle East, where nearly half of the world’s desalinated water is produced.

The second process is membrane desalination, commonly referred to as reverse osmosis. This process is used in 60% of plants worldwide. Saline water is forced under high pressure through a semi-permeable membrane whose pores are too small for the salt molecules to pass through.

 

Where is desalination used?

Desalination is used to extend drinkable water supplies beyond what is naturally available. Water-scarce regions are therefore particularly reliant on the technology. Desalination provides the United Arab Emirates with 42% of its water needs.

Because of the minimal cost of pumping, desalination is most economical in large coastal locations. However, our changing climate is contributing to increasing water shortages in typically mild regions, necessitating the expansion of desalination plants further inland and from brackish water. China, the US, and South America are all expanding their desalination capacity.

While desalination may be a technology capable of countering global water shortages, there are issues regarding its cost and efficiency.

Why does desalination remain so expensive?

Large amounts of energy are required to drive the process. This is particularly true for thermal desalination, where energy costs represent up to half of a plant’s entire production cost.

The reverse osmosis process generally has a lower energy requirement. However, treating highly saline water remains energy intensive. This is because higher salinity means more pressure is needed to force the water through the membrane.

Heavily polluted water sources must also be treated before desalination, requiring costly infrastructure such as sedimentation tanks and filtration systems. Treatment prevents the accumulation of debris on membrane surfaces that may impede the reverse osmosis process.

Treatment costs will grow as reliance on desalination increases and the process is applied to polluted and inland brackish water sources. Facing an increasingly dry climate, California now has 23 desalination plants that turn brackish water into drinking water.

Producing one litre of drinking water also creates 1.6 litres of brine, a highly saline waste product that can damage the environment. Brine deposits on the sea floor can lead to the destruction of sea ecosystems, while brine discharge reduces the oxygen content of seawater.

The safe disposal of brine is expensive. Most of the brine that is produced is pumped back into the sea, subject to environmental quality standards. If brine discharge does not meet these standards, then it requires further treatment.

Brine can be treated in evaporation ponds or diluted with a separate water source before being discharged. The prohibitive cost of brine treatment remains a significant barrier to the wider application of desalination.

Can desalination become cheaper?

Reducing the energy intensity of the process may deliver considerable cost reductions. Technologies such as forward osmosis, which allow desalination to occur at lower temperatures and pressures, are in development.

While promising, these technologies remain in their infancy. The market is small and there are few commercial installations. Technological evolution takes time, and further developmentwill be required to ensure these processes can produce drinkable water on a commercial scale.

Developing more durable membranes will also reduce the cost of desalination. Using different materials, Japanese manufacturershave constructed membranes that successfully reject salt particles at low operating pressures. This both reduces the cost of replacing membranes and the energy requirement of the process.

Desalination could also be powered by cheaper sources of renewable energy. Solar-thermal technologies can generate direct heat, which can then be used to evaporate seawater. The Metito solar desalination plant under construction in Saudi Arabia will initially have the capacity to produce 30,000 cubic metres of drinking water per day.

However, solar desalination technology is littered with complexities. Solar energy supply is inconsistent and energy storage technology remains expensive, impeding its wider application. Therefore, most solar desalination projects are too small to produce drinking water for commercial use.

Novel solutions for brine management must also be further explored.

Brine can be recycled within the desalination process. The use of waste brine in the manufacture of sodium hypochlorite, a chemical disinfectant that can substitute chlorine, is a promising development.

Research has shown that on-site sodium hypochlorite production can save Caribbean desalination plants more than £300,000 per year.

Desalination facilities can further exploit waste brine through processes such as electrolysis, where brine is decomposed into simpler substances through electric currents. Future studies should investigate the potential of using the byproducts of this electrolysis, hydrogen and salts, for energy production.

Despite growing water insecurity worldwide, desalination technology remains too expensive for widespread use. Efforts have been made to reduce its cost, with many showing promise. However, technological evolution takes time and it will be decades before costs fall to a level that facilitates the wider expansion of desalination.

First published on The Conversation.

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Putin’s claim to rid Ukraine of Nazis is especially absurd given its history

Jeffrey Veidlinger, University of Michigan

Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a “denazification” of the country.

In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to “protect people” who had been “subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine’s new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin’s authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.

As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.

Ukraine’s Jewish leadership

First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom “Servant of the People,” from which his party’s name was derived.

The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family” was barely noted during the election. “Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it,” he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky’s election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.

For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”

The pogroms against Jews

Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.

During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.

Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.

Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.

A pluralistic state

Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.

One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups – Russians, Jews, and Poles – broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.

The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.

From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland’s borders.

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At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.

In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.

Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.

Jeffrey Veidlinger, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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