Tag Archives: ecological economics

According to the Global Tipping Points Report published by the University of Exeter and other partners, “The world has entered a new reality. Global warming will soon exceed 1.5°C. where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people.” Most tragically, “warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions who depend on them.”

This is a betrayal of a generation, and the product of systemic political failure. A failure to recognise the climate crisis for what it is – an urgent crisis with serious, long-lasting consequences for the most vulnerable. A failure of politicians to understand the implications of what a warming climate truly means for those who will live, and are living to suffer it. Where surpassing Earth System Tipping Points poses “a potentially catastrophic, irreversible outcome for humanity.”

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding by politicians and conventional economists as to why we are currently facing the problems we are facing. The economy is a social construct, which means you cannot have an economy without a society, and you can’t have a society without a home: our planet. The economy is not external to our environment; you cannot have an economy without a society nor an environment. However, our current dominant economic paradigm, neoclassical economics, which is advising our policymaking, is based on complete fiction. For example, it puts forward a circular flow diagram, which states that all you have is households and businesses, and as long as there is a flow of capital and labour between them both, growth can continue forever. But this is pure fantasy. Where do you extract resources from? Where does the waste that households produce go? Our environment – but yet it is nowhere to be found in this diagram.

Economics is in desperate need of an update, and in the wake of the first tipping point being passed, the time is now for us to call on our party for a new economic vision for our country. We cannot continue to desperately chase fairytales of endless growth without looking at the costs of our increasing consumption on the environment. If you accept that the economy is a social construct within our environment, then you also accept that we must live within planetary boundaries and limits. However, because our current economics does not recognise the environment as the fundamental basis for our society or economy, these limits are being far exceeded.