Charles Hall in New Scientist -Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil

One of my favourite academics who address the importance of natural sciences to economic issues is the loud-voiced Charles Hall. He managed to get the undiluted message of the limits to growth published right there in the New Scientist. His article is really worth a good look.

"The world today faces enormous problems related to population and resources. These ideas were discussed intelligently and, for the most part, accurately in many papers from the middle of the last century, but then they largely disappeared from scientific and public discussion, in part because of an inaccurate understanding of both what those earlier papers said and the validity of many of their predictions. Most environmental science textbooks focus far more on the adverse impacts of fossil fuels than on the implications
of our overwhelming economic and even nutritional dependence on them. The failure today to bring the potential reality and implications of peak oil, indeed of peak everything, into scientific discourse and teaching is a grave threat to industrial society.

(...)

No substitutes for oil have been developed on anything like the scale required, and most are very poor net energy performers. Despite considerable potential, renewable sources (other than hydropower or traditional wood) currently provide less than 1 percent of the energy used in both the U.S. and the world, and the annual increase in the use of most fossil fuels is generally much greater than the total production (let alone increase) in electricity from wind turbines and photovoltaics. Our new sources of “green” energy are simply increasing along with (rather than displacing) all of the traditional ones. If we are to resolve these issues, including the important one of climate change, in any meaningful way, we need to make them again central to education at all levels of our universities, and to debate and even stand up to those who negate their importance, for we have few great intellectual leaders on these issues today. We must teach economics from a biophysical as well as a social perspective. Only then do we have any chance of understanding or solving these problems."

Charles Hall Speaking at ASPO VII in Barcelona, October 2008