Steve Sorrel, Senior Fellow, Sussex Energy Group, University of Sussex in the UK has recently published a 25 page paper called Energy, Growth and Sustainability which can be downloaded at this link. This post provides some excerpts from the paper, which summarize its findings. Readers are encouraged to read the entire paper.
According to the introduction to the paper:
This paper questions the conventional wisdom underlying climate policy and argues that some long-standing and fundamental questions regarding energy, growth, and sustainability need to be reopened. It does so by advancing the following propositions:
1. The rebound effects from energy efficiency improvements are significant and limit the potential for decoupling energy consumption from economic growth.
2. The contribution of energy to productivity improvements and economic growth has been greatly underestimated.
3. The pursuit of improved efficiency needs to be complemented by an ethic of ‘sufficiency’.
4. Sustainability is incompatible with continued economic growth in rich countries.
5. A zero-growth economy is incompatible with a debt-based monetary system.
These propositions run counter to conventional wisdom and highlight either blind spots or taboo subjects that deserve closer scrutiny. While accepting one proposition reinforces the case for accepting the next, the former is neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter.
Much more at
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6386