El Niño is on the march and in the news. Experts say the 2026–27 El Niño is shaping up to be the strongest on record, and the media is calling it a “Godzilla.” Three months into a cycle that typically lasts nine to twelve months, this El Niño has already caused rainfall deficits in some regions and excesses in others. The most pronounced effects are yet to come.

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which also includes a neutral phase and a cold phase know as La Niña. (International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Public Domain)

International organizations are focused on regions already in crisis. Drought looms over the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central America’s Dry Corridor. The last El Niño plunged eight million people in Southern Africa into “food insecurity.” That’s the technical term for gnawing hunger, the worrying threat of it, or both. The El Niño before that left 3.5 million people in the Dry Corridor hungry or insecure.

But what about the world’s most productive grain belts? El Niño’s effects on them aren’t negative always and everywhere. They typically increase production in the U.S. Midwest, the world’s top corn-producing region. For the most productive grain-producing region on Earth, the North China Plain, El Niño is a mixed bag.

But South Asia’s immense grain belt, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is already experiencing rainfall deficits. Vietnam’s major rice-producing region, the Mekong Delta, has been hit by prolonged heatwaves and below-average rainfall associated with previous El Niño events and is bracing for another difficult season. Australia’s wheat belts are in for a drier-than-usual season. The list continues, with lower grain harvests headed for Indonesia and Southern Brazil.

The concerns don’t stop with harvests and hunger. The global economy is at stake. Stores of surplus grain will insulate wealthy nations from “Super” El Niño’s worst, at least for some period of time (and unless conflict renders them inaccessible). But El Niño is getting more extreme; “Super” could become the norm. This will amplify the agricultural challenges that climate change already creates. It’s another reminder that we’ll have to reckon, sooner rather than later, with limits to growth.

Grain Belts: An Overview

Why the focus on grain? Fisheries are particularly vulnerable to El Niño events, and surely other crops will be impacted by this “Super” El Niño as much as grains.

For better or worse, rice, wheat, and maize constitute almost half of human caloric intake. Consumption of animal products is increasing, but this requires even more grain production, for livestock feed. What’s more, grains are better suited for long-term storage than vegetables or fruits, for example. This makes them foundational for stable economies.

The Indo-Gangetic Plain

The Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) stretches 2,400 kilometers from eastern Pakistan, across the north of India, and encompasses all of Bangladesh. Several major rivers converge here, enriching the soil with regular flooding and supporting one of the world’s densest populations. The region produces around 80 million metric tons of wheat a year, making India the world’s second-largest wheat producer. The IGP also produces much of the rice consumed domestically, contributing to India’s status as the largest producer and exporter of rice.

A farmer harvests wheat in northern India. (Yann Forget, CC-BY-SA)

Estimates of the number of farmers in India vary wildly, averaging around 90 million. At least half reside in the IGP. Grain production here is labor intensive; millions of smallholder farmers rely heavily on the manual labor of themselves and their extended families.

Even without El Niño, nutrient and groundwater depletion threaten agriculture in the IGP. Due partly to this, the region doesn’t support as high of a yield as some other major grain belts. Compared to global yields, IGP wheat harvests per hectare are similar, while rice yields are slightly lower. But in terms of sheer production and number of people fed, the IGP is globally critical.

India’s grain exports peaked in 2022 at 8 and 35 million metric tons of wheat and rice, respectively. However, in the wake of the grain shocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India banned wheat exports. In May of this year, the government announced it would allow traders to export five million metric tons.

The Mekong Delta

Rice and shrimp aquaculture in Vietnam’s Soc Trang province in the Mekong Delta. (Dr. Nhuong Tran, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Next, let’s go to southern Vietnam, where the Mekong River branches into a vast delta of smaller channels and wetlands. Extending into Cambodia, the Mekong Delta covers around 55,000 square kilometers. Explosive population growth has driven intensive agricultural production in the region, mainly of rice and aquaculture products such as pangasius and shrimp.

The Mekong Delta produces less grain than the IGP—22 million metric tons of rice per year—but it is also smaller. It yields almost 50% more rice per hectare. The region also yields more rice per farmer than the IGP, due in part to mechanization. But its labor productivity is still low compared to the fully industrialized, “factory farm” grain belts, with around 1.5 million small-scale rice producers.

Rice yields in the Mekong Delta have plateaued and are unlikely to last, as erosion, saltwater intrusion, and pollution pose serious threats. Not to mention stronger El Niño events.

This spells trouble for Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the world. The Mekong Delta produces the vast majority of Vietnam’s rice exports, and Vietnam is the world’s third-largest rice exporter. The top importers are other countries in the region, but Vietnam also exports rice to Africa—notably, around 350 million dollars’ worth to Cote d’Ivoire annually.

Australia

The vastness of Australia is not all Outback. Southern Australia is home to three agricultural regions that enable the country to produce over 34 million metric tons of wheat per year. Still, despite massive investments in agricultural innovation, Australia’s wheat production per hectare is relatively low. There’s only so much you can do on Earth’s driest inhabited continent.

But technology use has made Australia’s labor productivity—distinct from yield, which is a measure of land productivity—far higher than in the IGP or the Mekong Delta. It’s no coincidence that Australia’s GDP per capita is almost five times higher than India’s or Vietnam’s. The industrialization of its agriculture sector has freed up labor for other sectors. Indeed, though agriculture accounts for only two percent of Australia’s GDP, the sector’s surpluses have enabled the development of services, Australia’s biggest money maker.

High agricultural labor productivity has freed up Australian workers for other sectors, enabling one of the biggest economies per capita. (data from World Development Indicators)

And there’s plenty to go around. Australia exports the vast majority of its wheat, making it the third largest exporter. Fast-growing China is the number one buyer of these exports by far. Big economies rely on a big agricultural base.

But Australia’s high labor productivity can’t be sustained beyond ecological limits. In a +2°C warming scenario, the country would need an estimated four percent increase in its agricultural workforce. But the labor force is moving in the opposite direction. The number of agricultural workers has declined steadily since 2020, despite the fact that Australia’s population growth rate spiked at the beginning of the decade. Most of the country’s rural youth leave agriculture and don’t turn back.

Declining profitability may be a driver of this sectoral migration. Climate change has already reduced Australian farm profits by a quarter, on average. And more intense El Niño events are coming to take their toll.

El Niño Incoming

Though nothing about El Niño forecasting is certain, this weather phenomenon has negatively impacted the IGP, the Mekong Delta, and Australia in the past. And there’s reason to believe the impacts will be amplified for this year’s “Super” El Niño.

In the Indus Plain, part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, humans are depleting upwards of 25 kilometers cubed of water per year. (Ranjith, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The IGP is so vast that, historically, El Niño’s crop impacts have varied across the region, including wheat-production increases in some parts. The main culprit of overall production decreases is drought. India relies on summer monsoons, from June to September, for 70–90 percent of its rainfall. No two monsoon seasons are alike, making it difficult to isolate El Niño’s effects.

But this year’s summer monsoon is shaping up to be the weakest in nearly two decades. A 35 percent rainfall deficit in June caused farmers to plant rice later than usual. Below-average rainfall in August and September has hampered the critical rice-development stages of pod formation and grain filling. And when farmers plant wheat in October, the soil moisture will be lower than optimum.

In the Mekong Delta, past El Niños have caused prolonged heatwaves, below-average rainfall, and saltwater intrusion. This year, these weather anomalies threaten 350,000 hectares of rice. Vietnam’s Plant Production and Protection Department issued a statement that at-risk farmers should reduce their acreage of autumn-winter rice, planted June–August, or forego planting altogether. Presumably, many farmers would need to find other work to supplement their income.

In Australia, El Niño is arriving on the heels of higher-than-usual rainfall. Farmers have scrambled to take advantage of the extra water, planting wheat later than usual. But even with the increased production from May rains, dry El Niño conditions are expected to cut this year’s wheat harvest by around nine million metric tons. That’s a 25 percent drop from last year.

This El Niño may positively affect some of the world’s major grain belts. But it’s highly unlikely that any production gains will outweigh the losses. Large quantities of food at the “trophic base” of the global economy are at stake this year and next.

Of course, the world has even larger quantities of food in storage—over 740 million metric tons of maize, wheat, and rice. Because of this, impacts of El Niño on global GDP would likely lag while surpluses are liquidated, and could be mitigated by agricultural rebounds in subsequent years. But how many “Super” El Niño events—at what frequency and severity—can we take before the global GDP meter starts rolling in reverse?

El Niño and Climate Change

Climate attribution is fraught with uncertainty, but one thing is not: El Niño is getting more intense. Weather associated with El Niño is getting more extreme, observable especially in terms of temperature. El Niño events contributed to record-breaking global temperatures in 1998, 2016, and 2024.

El Niño and La Niña can cause more severe temperature peaks and troughs, but, ultimately, economic activity is the key driver behind global warming. (Carbon Brief, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A team of scientists used coral skeletons to estimate El Niño intensity over the last one thousand years. They concluded that the intensification of El Niño in recent decades cannot be explained by natural variation. Their findings indicate that human-caused climate change “supercharges” El Niño, with the developing Godzilla the latest example.

Climate change is also making El Niño less predictable. A region prone to drought during El Niño may experience a flash flood in the midst of that drought. This can be even more devastating to crops than a steady lack of water.

Limits to “Warranted” Money

The economy’s trophic levels consist of agricultural and extractive sectors (producers), heavy manufacturing (primary consumers), and light manufacturing (secondary consumers). Services are really “gervices” and inextricable from goods and their trophic structure.

The moral of the story is that food security is at greater risk the further we hurdle past planetary boundaries. The global economy depends on food security; it’s built upon a base of agricultural extraction, like a pyramid. And according to the trophic theory of money, the number of mouths fed per farmer determines how many workers are available for other sectors and, in turn, how big the economy can grow.

In terms more relevant to economists, policy makers, investors, and financial journalists, food surplus ultimately determines the “warranted money supply,” or the amount of real (non-inflated) money availed for circulation. And when it comes to food surplus, grain harvests take—or make—most of the cake.

The warranted money supply arises not only from this season’s harvest, waxing and waning among the major grain belts in the North and South hemispheres. Reserves from prior seasons provide a nutritional and monetary buffer for bad harvests. But global wheat storage amounts to less than half the wheat produced each year, while corn storage is equivalent to around 30 percent of annual production. The situation for rice, which doesn’t keep as long, is more dire: Reserves amount to about five percent of annual production.

In other words, our stores wouldn’t last long if environmental degradation or conflict ground production to a halt. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted production in the important breadbasket, experts estimated the world had ten weeks of wheat supplies stored. And unequal distribution of grain reserves—over half of which are held by China—makes this failsafe vulnerable to geopolitical tension.

Our dependence on food is a core principle of ecology that the governments and economists of “developed” countries tend to lose sight of. We are animals embedded in ecosystems, and no manner of information economy or artificial intelligence can change that.

No monetary policy can change it, either. It doesn’t matter what our central banks do to “stimulate” the economy, in the traditional sense of lowering interest rates or the more outlandishly inflationary sense of “quantitative easing.” Without the harvests and labor productivity to match, any such stimuli are bound to cause inflation, adding “first-world” strain to the misery of hunger suffered in regions lacking surplus.

If “Super” El Niños, climate change, and the myriad other manifestations of ecological overshoot demand a smaller global economy, smaller it shall be. Mother Nature bats last. Shouldn’t we be on her team?

Alix Underwood is assistant director at CASSE.

The post The Super El Niño, Global Grain Belts, and Warranted Money appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

At this point in his second term, it is clear that President Trump represents an unmitigated disaster for the steady state. His deregulatory onslaught is removing barriers to growth throughout the economy. The consequences for human health, the environment, and democratic participation are untold and mounting.

Trump’s attacks on reproductive rights have been a consistent feature of his presidency. (Mark Dixon, CC by 2.0)

His foreign policy, energy policy, and food policy are similarly crafted for growth—of the most unsavory and polluting industries.

Trump’s unflagging commitment to growth also manifests in his approach toward population and reproductive health. He has aligned himself with those who wish to roll back decades of progress in gender equality, contraceptive access, and the lowered birth rates that result. This has meant, at home and abroad, aggressive pronatalist policy to stifle reproductive choice and promote childbearing.

Rolling Back Reproductive Rights at Home

Since 1970, Title X has been the only federal program dedicated solely to improving access to contraception. The federal grant program has provided nearly $300 million annually for free and low-cost family planning services. This care has prevented more than 800,000 unintended pregnancies every year.

These funds were never used to perform abortion. But Title X program services included counseling and referrals for the full range of reproductive options, until Trump’s 2019 gag order prohibited the mere mention of abortion. More than 181,000 unintended pregnancies likely resulted, and many providers left the program before Biden reversed the gag order.

In Trump’s second term, his administration has gone to even greater pronatalist extremes.

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued funding guidance that turns Title X’s mission on its head. It mentions contraception only once, to point out its side effects and declining use. Instead, it notes that priorities of “healthy pregnancies and family formation” will guide its grantmaking.

The Trump Administration’s new Moms.gov website.

But the Trump administration is not content with merely removing contraceptive access. Trump has launched a website that promotes “crisis pregnancy centers,” fake abortion clinics staffed by anti-choice volunteers.

He has canceled millions of dollars in teen pregnancy prevention grants. New guidelines require applicants to promote abstinence, and focus more on planning for pregnancy than preventing it.

Yes, even for teens.

Calling himself the “father of fertility,” Trump has proposed a rule that expands access to IVF. The rule does not mention that these treatments are seldom successful and come at great emotional, physical, as well as financial cost to those who endure them.

Attacking Reproductive Rights Abroad

The loss of USAID has led to millions of unintended pregnancies, as well as hundreds of thousands of deaths from poverty, disease, and malnutrition. (U.S. Navy)

In keeping with the tradition of every Republican president since 1984, Trump has reinstated the Global Gag Rule. Previous versions applied only to programs funded through family planning and reproductive-health assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). They prohibited these programs from performing, or even offering information on, abortion.

Trump’s 2017 version of the rule was expanded to cover all global health aid distributed through any U.S. government agency or department. A 2026 update goes even further. As of January 2026, the rule applies to all non-military U.S. foreign-health, development, and humanitarian assistance. Impacted recipients now include not just international NGOs, but domestic NGOs, international organizations like the UN, and foreign governments.

These cuts come on top of the administration’s dismantling of the entire U.S. foreign aid apparatus. Elon Musk’s short-lived stint in the Trump administration had long-term consequences, with his “Department of Government Efficiency’s” elimination of USAID. This move slashed tens of billions of dollars of aid to address poverty and disease across the world.

This included millions of dollars of family planning and contraceptive aid. The loss of this aid likely resulted in over 17 million unintended pregnancies in 2025 alone.

What has become of that aid belies any notion that the cuts were in service of “government efficiency.” Nearly ten million dollars in contraceptives still languish in a storehouse in Belgium. These now-expired supplies could have provided pregnancy prevention to nearly a million people. NGOs have offered to purchase and distribute these supplies, but the administration instead is opting to store them at a cost of $460,000.

This sum could have provided contraception to nearly 44,000 women and couples and prevented 15,700 unintended pregnancies and 4,800 abortions.

USAID worked alongside the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to provide family planning services in more than 150 countries and territories. But Trump has cut off UNFPA funding as well, citing a 40-year-old provision that prohibits U.S. funding for “coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” There is no credible evidence that UNFPA has been involved in either.

Baby Bust Alarmism in Service of GDP

This hostility to contraception is rooted in several trends on the political right. Conventional conservatives like J.D. Vance extol traditional gender roles and the high birth rates associated with them. Meanwhile tech eugenicists like Elon Musk encourage “elites” to procreate, in hopes of improving the “genetic quality” of future generations. For these administration officials, economic considerations are not the driving force of their pronatalism.

Elon Musk, father of fourteen, has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” (Marco Verch, CC-BY-NC 2.0)

But for some who call the declining U.S. fertility rate a “crisis,” economic concerns are front and center. Media outlets lament a shrinking labor force and imperiled social security as governments weigh baby bonuses to forestall such outcomes.

Such policy puts anachronistic pressures on women to increase reproduction, and sidelines their agency in one of the most important decisions of their lives.

And it does so in unabashed service of GDP.

In a particularly glaring example, the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio have sued the federal government to ban mifepristone for minors. They argue that remote dispensing of the abortion drug is “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers.” The consequent “loss of potential population,” they say, causes “injuries” such as the states’ “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds.” Injuries, in short, that may deprive the state of hoped-for economic growth.

Wherever Women Have Access to Contraceptives

The sinister objectives behind efforts to enforce childbirth are seldom so thinly veiled. But pronatalist pressures, whether pressures from a partner for heirs, from a political leader for more taxpayers, or from business leaders for cheap labor, are everywhere. And they skew reproductive decision-making toward childbirth.

Global fertility has declined by more than half since the 1960s, due to family planning programs that provide contraception while empowering women and girls. (Our World in Data, CC by 4.0)

Yet their power is diminishing as women and girls gain access to education, employment, and modern contraception. More than half the countries around the world have birth rates below 2.1 children per couple. That figure includes rich countries and poor, deeply religious and largely secular. Below-replacement fertility is slated to eventually shrink populations toward sustainable levels more congruent with national security and international stability.

In fact, wherever women have access to contraceptives and empowerment to use them, they do exactly that. The trend is so well-established that researchers posit a “latent desire” among women of all cultures, throughout much of history, to have fewer children.

This is great news for a steady-state transition.

Demographic transition theory has long dimmed hopes for a steady state. This theory holds that birth rates decline only following substantial increases in GDP/capita. So the smaller global human population necessary for planetary systems to flourish, it was thought, could only come with per capita income levels that would threaten that flourishing.

Recent research contradicts this theory. Fertility decline in many developing countries, it turns out, has followed the availability of modern contraception and has little correlation with economic development.

Foreign Aid, Fertility, and Immigration

International aid focused on voluntary family planning programs could be among the most important tools for wealthy countries to advance a global steady state. Yet the United States has been reluctant to wield this tool. Although still the largest international family planning donor when Trump took office in 2025, the United States had slashed this funding long before Trump’s presidency.

And the international community has not stepped in to fill the void. Since the mid-1990s, UNFPA has neglected its family planning mandate.

Frank Götmark, Professor emeritus of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology at the University of Gothenburg, spoke with the Herald about this trend. Götmark explained how starting in the 1960s, robust international family planning programs not only provided modern contraception in developing countries. They also taught women and girls about the health and economic benefits of limiting their fertility. These educational programs shifted women’s preferences from high fertility to low, empowering them to overcome pronatalist pressures from family members and the patriarchal cultures they lived in.

This norm shifting was key to the success of the programs that led to drastic global fertility reductions between 1960 and 1994.

Since the mid-1990s, however, the focus of UNFPA has moved on from such programs. They are still a major distributor of contraception across the world. However, UNFPA downplays this role in favor of the far more nebulous focus of “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

The consequences are stark. To this day 215 million women have an unmet need for modern contraception, giving rise to 22 million unplanned pregnancies per year. “Millions of women…face pronatalist forms of coercion, such as being forced to give birth to unwanted children, in the absence of contraceptive services,” says Götmark. Meeting this need would slash the numbers of unintended pregnancies by almost 75 percent. The refusal to do so contributes to the staggering current human population of eight billion, and continued growth of 70 million people per year.

The millions of unplanned pregnancies from Trump’s cuts to family planning programs will add to the unemployment and overcrowding that drive immigration. (Sandor Csudai)

This growth is largely due to lack of access to contraception and stagnant progress in gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. International family planning assistance would begin to correct these imbalances. It would also address climate change, biodiversity collapse, and other manifestations of ecological overshoot arising from overpopulation.

Countries with continued high fertility are also those that will suffer the most from climate change and deepening resource conflict. These conditions will drive many members of their growing populations to emigrate.

To the limited extent that Donald Trump appeals to steady staters, that appeal likely resides in his stance on immigration. CASSE’s position, outlined in the Sustainable Population and Immigration Act (SPIA), accepts some immigration restrictions as consistent with a steady state.

But key to SPIA is that borders are tightened only after the United States embraces the steady state as a policy goal. Even then, SPIA envisions some level of migration to counteract declining birth rates: “…immigration levels, that, considering fertility, mortality, and emigration rates, result in a stabilized U.S. population.”

This vision of “steady-state net migration” articulated by Brian Czech is about as far from current immigration policy as one could imagine. As Czech notes, “Morally decrepit population management is not only wrong in a normative sense; it won’t stand a test of time, either.”

While Trump implements a draconian, reckless anti-immigration policy, he also pulls out all the stops to grow GDP and GDP per capita. Trump’s tightening of borders is consistent with neither human rights nor a steady state.

U.S. policy abroad, from the abandonment of family planning to the funding of genocide and the initiation of war, has led to the immiseration of millions. For future administrations that seek to correct these abuses—and to move prudently toward a steady state economy—full restoration of family-planning aid would be a good place to start.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Trump’s Pronatalist Policy for GDP Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

U.S. capital markets—what we often call “Wall Street”—allegedly supply one critical economic function. They provide investment capital to those who need it and are best prepared to use it. A finance veteran might say the bigger and freer Wall Street is, the better. More capital from the nation’s investment banks means bigger ventures, greater marketplace competition, and increased productivity.

“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on the steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.” — John Maynard Keynes. (Gandie, CC BY-SA 4.0)

But bigger and more productive isn’t always good for people or planet. As Franklin Roosevelt noted when he signed the 1933 Securities Act, “…the merchandising of securities is really traffic in the economic and social welfare of our people.” Knee-deep in the Wall Street of the mythical “roaring twenties,” FDR understood the nexus between investment banking and industrial-age productivity. But he also had a fine sense of Wall Street’s corruption, its role in generating historic levels of inequality, and its need for robust regulatory oversight.

U.S. capital markets are powerful economic forces. Though numbers of publicly listed companies and initial public offerings have declined over the last thirty years, their total value has continued to increase. This reflects intense market concentration and the American affinity for runaway investment bubbles.

An important question hovers above it all: Do U.S. capital markets drive an unending search for growth that Earth cannot sustain?

Asset Valuation Gone Awry

Prior to the 1930s, investors couldn’t count on honest appraisals of company performance. Without good information for long-term investment decisions, many investors simply speculated. They bought and sold assets quickly for capital gains, creating investment bubbles that resulted in the infamous stock-market crash of 1929. Wall Street imperiled the U.S. economy just as often as it underwrote innovation and productivity.

Established in 1934, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulates American capital markets. (APK, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), launched by FDR in the 1930s, was a response to this immense fraud and dysfunction. Its reporting requirements made it difficult for corporations to fudge their numbers when promoting the sale of their stocks or bonds.

The SEC has remained fairly effective at ferreting out bad asset information. But as Wall Street has evolved—perfecting new, opaque investment instruments and popularizing the efficient market hypothesis—regulation must also evolve.

In the wake of the dot com and housing bubbles, and with many close observers warning of an AI bubble, it’s time to reinvigorate the SEC. Without significant reform, efficient capital allocation will continue to give way to inequality, fraud, and a planet-killing focus on perpetual capital gains.

Liability and Local Bonds

Mindful that there’s a healthy baby somewhere in this enormous tub of murky bathwater, what should we fix? A good place to start is liability. Prior to 1970, all prominent Wall Street firms were partnerships. This meant that firm owners and managers assumed much of the risk inherent to their investments. Alongside robust SEC regulation, this liability kept investment banks’ worst tendencies in check.

The tides turned in 1970, when the first investment bank sold ownership shares to public investors. Offloading liability onto shareholders has freed investment banks for casino-like behavior. The resumption of a system where owners and managers are liable for investment decisions is long overdue.

In January 2007, President Bush celebrates the boom before the housing bust caused largely by bond-market misbehavior. (The White House)

Bond markets—a poorly understood segment of U.S. capital markets—also require significant reform and more SEC oversight. They are too costly, inefficient, and unreliable for most passive investors, who are staked to bonds by their pensions, 401K accounts, and mutual funds. One major issue is that private, for-profit agencies conduct the business of bond rating. Conflicts of interest regularly compromise the integrity and efficiency of bond rating, which regulators and institutional investors, such as pension funds, rely on to enforce rules and allocate capital.

Another major bond-market issue is the prevalence of specialized local-government bonds, which are often tied to special taxation zones or economic development projects. Compared with general-obligation bonds, which are tied to the full faith and credit of the issuing government, these specialized bonds carry higher interest rates. This directs taxpayer dollars from other public needs to the bank accounts of usually wealthy bond buyers.

Cutting Wall Street Down to Size

We’ve often heard that Wall Street isn’t the economy. Indeed, the corporate obsession with stock prices and capital gains tends to sacrifice real productivity and shared prosperity. Companies increasingly tie executive pay to stock performance. Startup founders and venture capitalists prioritize cashing out through a big sale or initial public offering. If stock-price gains and “successful exits” are the goals, quarterly growth matters more than building a sustainable business.

Reflecting these backward priorities, the net value of corporate stock issuance in a typical year amounts to zero. Publicly traded companies, eschewing real investment and hoping to goose their stock prices (and corresponding executive pay), quickly buy back more stock than they issue. To grow quickly—with little regard for long-term value—companies stifle competition, squeeze workers, and gouge customers.

Growth for its own sake should have no place in U.S. capital markets. Only real productivity, economies of scale, and actual returns on selective investments remain worthy goals in a steady state economy. And a steady state economy—built on respect for the planet, workers, consumers, and investors—entails optimally scaled capital markets.

J. P. Morgan as Wall Street’s bull, blowing bubbles for eager investors. (Puck, public domain)

Cutting Wall Street down to a sustainable size requires minimizing market dependance on economically and environmentally destructive investment bubbles. Key reforms to achieve this include taxing securities and international-currency trades, eliminating favorable capital-gains tax treatment, and limiting stock-exchange trading hours.

Finally, U.S. capital markets reform wouldn’t be complete without pension reform. Pre-1970s, public pension systems functioned well on a pay-as-you-go basis. Because current beneficiaries’ benefits were funded by current contributors, these systems didn’t rely on outsized stock-market gains.

Today, public and private pensions are treated like a liability to minimize or keep out of the budget, rather than another form of worker compensation. Companies and governments hand the reins to pension funds to invest for the biggest and fastest returns. Much like other investment institutions, these funds speculate, allocate resources poorly, and further inflate investment bubbles. The resulting ecological degradation undermines the very futures these pension funds are meant to secure.

The Act

A new feeder bill for the Steady State Economy Act, the Sustainable Capital Markets Act (SCMA), is a launchpad for capital-markets reform. The SCMA comprises fourteen sections. Sections 1–3 establish the bill’s short title, Congress’s findings and declarations, and definitions. One of the findings is that present U.S. financial sector management encourages speculation and rent-seeking at the expense of the efficient allocation of capital resources. The SCMA discourages or prohibits key elements of this behavior.

Section 4 is designed to reverse the transfer of investment risks from firm owners and managers to public shareholders. It requires partnership agreements that would make investment-bank “partners” personally liable for a large portion of potential firm losses. This would reward and maximize sustainable investment behavior.

Section 5 reverses an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The amendment was signed into law in 2018 by President Trump. Dodd-Frank protected shareholders and U.S. taxpayers from bailouts of “too-big-to-fail” investment banks by applying “enhanced prudential standards” for banks with more than $50 billion in assets. The 2018 amendment loosened several of these standards and raised the threshold for their application to $250 billion. In addition to reversing this amendment, the SCMA transfers the performance of annual stress tests—one of the prudential standards—from investment banks to the federal Financial Stability Oversight Council.

Sections 6 and 7 focus on American bond markets. Section 6 phases out for-profit bond rating agencies. Section 7 requires that all municipal and state bonds be general-obligation securities, tied to the full faith and credit of the issuing government. It also eliminates the preferential tax treatment that municipal-bond income currently receives. Though this treatment theoretically makes state and local government borrowing less expensive, its primary benefits flow to wealthy investors, even while the federal debt balloons.

Sections 8 and 9 create two new transaction taxes, one for domestic securities trading and the second for international currency trading. For both, the object is to discourage volatile arbitrage in which insider trading, hot capital flows, and destabilizing transactions favor wasteful speculation over the exchange of essential products and services.

Section 10 introduces two changes to the U.S. tax code, to discourage the chase for capital gains. Current tax code treats capital gains more favorably than simple profits. This bias generates an artificial drive for growth, at the expense of value or need. The SCMA requires that capital gains and corporate dividends be taxed the same as “ordinary income.”

Section 11 is designed to discourage and ultimately eliminate cryptocurrency mining, which needlessly consumes vast amounts of energy. First, banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are prohibited from dealing in cryptocurrency. Second, all cryptocurrency mining is prohibited. Third, a tax is applied to all cryptocurrency holdings owned by individuals or corporations.

To end the drive for 24/7 securities trading, section 12 mandates a limited (and traditional) six-and-one-half hour trading period based on U.S. Eastern Standard Time trading hours. This is meant to reorient trading to value rather than timing, to real investment rather than manipulation and speculation.

Section 13 requires public pension systems to return to a pay-as-you-go structure. Funded with a progressive tax system, this change would divorce pensions from speculation and antithetical corporate behavior. This section also compels private pension systems to maintain a reserve equal to 75 percent of their estimated thirty-year accrued liability. Section 13 also limits private pension fund investments to U.S. Treasury securities. This would lower returns, forcing companies to fund pensions mostly with current cash flow. This would also transform private pension funds into a significant source of public investment, which has a lighter ecological impact (especially pursuant to a Sustainable Budgets Act) than runaway speculation.

Traffic in the nation’s economic and social welfare, or speculative sideshow? (vishpool, CC BY 2.0)

Finally, section 14 defines the penalties and enforcement for any violations of the cryptocurrency and trading-hours prohibitions in sections 11 and 12. As for the bill’s other provisions, each section specifies the entity—primarily the SEC or the IRS—responsible for determining how they will be enforced.

On a finite planet, where overshoot has become all too common, the status quo serves nobody’s interest. Inequality and instability prevail when our wellbeing and planet require the opposite. When our nation’s capital markets actively undermine a sustainable, equitable framework, they surely require change. The Sustainable Capital Markets Act is designed to make these markets do what we need them to do. Broad prosperity, not perpetual growth, is the principal goal.

David Shreve is a Senior Economist at CASSE.

The post Introducing the Sustainable Capital Markets Act appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

There isn’t any specific scientific consensus on the precise impact of livestock on the climate. It is a contentious issue, partly because it’s so difficult to measure. We can say, however, that the impact is likely colossal.

Moving towards plant-based diets will not, by itself, solve the climate problem. We still need to end our reliance on fossil fuels. However, it is necessary to solve the climate problem.

European settlers cleared forests like this for pasture and hay fields, now open meadows in today’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (Keith Akers)

Of course, just because something is “unsustainable” doesn’t mean we can’t do it anyway! Long before it becomes physically impossible to raise more cattle, though, we encounter increasingly unpleasant consequences, such as soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and rising medical costs. Halting the runaway consequences of livestock agriculture requires a sustainable, steady state economy, encompassing sustainable scale in the livestock industry along with all other sectors.

But let’s focus on one particularly nasty consequence of livestock production: climate change. The scientific community overwhelmingly acknowledges the reality and urgency of climate change. The American public also acknowledges it, though less overwhelmingly.

However, there is much less discourse—scientific or public—about livestock’s contribution to the problem. It is a contentious topic for complex reasons. And while mainstream science focuses almost exclusively on direct emissions from livestock production, there may be more to the livestock-climate story.

A Complex Problem

A key reason livestock’s impact on the climate is hotly debated is that it is difficult to assess land-use impact.

The main human use of land is for agriculture. Agriculture dwarfs urban development, roads, and buildings in the sheer area of land involved. And of that land, about 80 percent is for livestock production. So if we’re talking about land use, for the most part we’re talking about livestock.

We use 30 percent of Earth’s habitable land to graze livestock. (Flickr, Public Domain)

Land use affects the number and type of plants and animals, and plants and animals are key factors in the natural carbon cycle. Plants absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), and animals respire CO2. Due to human land use, plants are decreasing, and animals are increasing, in terms of biomass. This creates an imbalance that impacts the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

To measure these impacts, scientists are turning to the relatively new concept of “carbon opportunity cost.” In the livestock-production context, this refers to the additional carbon the land and its vegetation would absorb if not converted to grazing land or cropland for livestock feed. This concept can also be applied to cropland used to feed humans directly. This would enable comparison between the carbon opportunity cost of producing the same number of calories or grams of protein via animal- versus plant-based foods. Such analyses get complex quickly, especially when one considers the drastic regional differences in livestock and crop productivity.

A Contentious Problem

Methane is another complex and contentious factor regarding livestock production’s impact on the climate. Agriculture is the single largest anthropogenic source of methane, and most of that is from livestock. But there is no agreement on the best way to assess methane’s impact.

Methane has a much greater impact than CO2 in terms of its warming potential, but it also breaks down fairly quickly in the atmosphere. The net impact depends on the time frame we choose, and scientists and policymakers have not agreed on what time frame is most appropriate.

If the Trump Administration’s new food pyramid is any indicator, U.S. research on food and agriculture continues to suffer from corporate capture. (RealFood.gov, Public Domain)

Finally…politics. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is influenced, if not effectively controlled, by the livestock industry. In 2012 they announced an official partnership with the meat and dairy industries.

Even basic data like the number of cows is often contested. In the early 2000s, many non-governmental organizations reported double the number of cattle that the FAO did. Even the FAO’s own data on poultry production differs from report to report by a factor of two. Their April 2003 Food Outlook puts the amount of poultry produced in 2002 at 72.9 million metric tons, while Livestock’s Long Shadow provides a figure of 33.0 million metric tons.

President Trump has exacerbated the problem with his attacks on scientific research, but the lack of solid livestock data pre-dates the Trump Administration by decades.

What’s with the Carbon Cycle?

To untangle the complexity surrounding land use, an overview of the short-term carbon cycle helps.

CO2 is circulating into and out of the atmosphere due to natural processes. Most emissions are not human-caused; anthropogenic CO2 emissions amount to only three percent of the emissions from natural sources. This is not three percent of CO2 in the atmosphere, but an extra three percent of CO2 emissions. In the natural world, carbon sources (such as decaying organic matter and animal respiration) are roughly counter-balanced by carbon sinks (soils, oceans, and photosynthesis).

Photosynthesis—through which (among other things) plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and emit oxygen—is a key process in the short-term carbon cycle. When plants die, microbes in the soil consume them and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. However, some of the carbon from plant matter is stabilized in the soil, as well, for long-term storage.

Beef cattle in a feedlot in New Mexico, United States. Not a lot of photosynthesis going on here. (Quintin Soloviev, CC0 1.0)

Earth’s soils hold more carbon than its atmosphere and vegetation combined. Oceans are also key in the short-term carbon cycle. They are currently massive carbon sinks, but their ability to absorb CO2 is limited.

Historically, these processes—photosynthesis, decay, respiration, and absorption and emissions from oceans—have typically balanced each other out. There are also long-term carbon cycles. The ice-age cycle, and the even longer-term geological carbon cycle, can last hundreds of thousands or millions of years. For our purposes, we can ignore these. (For the very long-term thinkers: Watch out for that next ice age.)

Carbon Opportunity Cost

The most obvious way to disrupt the short-term carbon cycle is to put extra CO2 into the atmosphere, such as by burning fossil fuels. But a different way is to reduce the amount of photosynthesis. Let’s consider the very real example of someone burning the Amazon rainforest to create grazing land in Brazil. The direct CO2 emissions can be considerable.

Over 60 percent of the Amazon area deforested from 1988 to 2014 is used to raise cattle. (Vicente Bissoni Neto, CC BY-SA 4.0)

But the burning itself is a one-time event. What about next year? Left to itself, in many cases the forest would begin to regrow, drawing CO2 out of the air and incorporating the carbon into tree growth. But in this case, cattle grazing obstructs reforestation.

Of course, plants still grow on pastureland. Forests may have immense carbon-storage capacity, but how do their rates of ongoing carbon sequestration compare with grazing lands? It depends. Grasslands with deep root systems can be powerful sequesterers, and cattle grazing can degrade or augment that power, depending on management practices.

In our Brazilian-Amazon example, the grazing land would almost certainly have a lower rate of carbon sequestration than the forest it replaced. That’s because the Brazilian Amazon biome has the highest carbon sequestration potential of all the world’s forests. It is also one of the world’s most deforested biomes, currently, though forests have long been victims of economic activity.

Humans have reduced the number of trees on Earth by almost half. Yet, forests still constitute 80 to 90 percent of Earth’s plant biomass. Though difficult to measure across varying habitats and management practices, the impact of replacing these invaluable carbon sinks with pastureland could be immense.

And yet, forests aren’t the only ecosystems being converted into grazing land. Likely due in part to the attention forests receive, natural grasslands and wetlands are being lost to agriculture at a rate four times higher than forests. Over half of this conversion has been to raise livestock or their feed. This phenomenon is happening on such a large scale, that it would be foolish not to seek to better understand its carbon opportunity cost.

More Animals, Fewer Plants

Even before trying to estimate carbon opportunity costs, there are two reasons to believe it’s quite big: Large mammal biomass (and total animal biomass) is substantially increasing, and plant biomass is crashing. This is despite declines in populations of wild large animals, or megafauna.

North America provides a tragic example of these declines. The American bison population plummeted from 60 million in the 1850s to only a few thousand in the 1880s. Globally, elephant (carbon) biomass declined an estimated 90 percent in the 20^th century. 70 percent of the world’s wild megafauna species are declining in numbers.

But increases in humans and our livestock have far outstripped decreases in wild megafauna. Cattle (carbon) biomass increased 250 percent in the 20^th century. In 2000, humans and our domesticated animals constituted an incredible 97 percent of all terrestrial animal (including human) biomass. And about two-thirds of large-animal biomass is livestock, which has about double the mass of the human population! The large animals on Earth are now mostly cows and people. 

Estimates of total biomass (as opposed to carbon biomass) by UC Berkeley researcher Anthony Barnosky. BP stands for before present. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105 (Supp. 1): 11543-11548. Copyright 2008.)

As bad as the increase in animal biomass—and resultant increase in respired CO2—is, it’s gone hand in hand with another, perhaps more alarming, biological problem. In a “full world,” more land dedicated to animals means less available for plants. Phytomass (plant biomass) has dramatically declined under human influence. Vaclav Smil at the University of Manitoba estimates it has declined by half in the last 5,000 years.

This is corroborated by a more recent study. Researchers estimated that, without human influence, Earth would contain 916 billion metric tons of plant matter. In reality, it only contains 450 billion. How do you think the destruction of half of Earth’s plant life might impact photosynthesis and, in turn, CO2 levels?

To be clear, not all of this plant destruction has been for the sake of livestock production. But recall that agriculture dwarfs other human land uses and livestock production dwarfs other agricultural land uses. Sure, producing less in animal products would mean producing more in plant products for human consumption. But it takes an estimated 50 to 100 times more land to produce a gram of protein from beef compared to peas or tofu.

Of course, not all land is suitable for crops. But when some researchers say plant-based diets could cut agricultural land use by 75 percent, it’s time to rethink how we’re using Earth’s carbon sequestration potential.

Measuring the Impact

We have good reason to believe the climate impact of expanding animal biomass and decreasing plant matter is large. Yet some experts steadfastly ignore the idea of carbon opportunity cost. The FAO made no mention of it in their 2024 report. This may be due to the involvement of the meat and dairy industries in the FAO. These industries have spent millions to influence public and scientific opinion and have plausibly been accused of hijacking the FAO.

There’s no consensus in favor of the FAO’s figures on livestock’s climate impact. According to some researchers, the FAO figures are substantially understated and we must take more drastic action than they imply. Measuring carbon opportunity cost is hard, but some scientists are attempting to provide alternatives to the FAO figures.

Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, one of the scientists pioneering carbon opportunity cost, speaks at an OECD forum. (OECD, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Searchinger et al. concluded, “…standard methods for evaluating the effects of land use on greenhouse gas emissions systematically underestimate the opportunity of land to store carbon if it is not used for agriculture.” In a follow-up report, they incorporated these opportunity costs into their estimates: “…western diets overall have much higher greenhouse gas costs than conventionally estimated.” They also found “that the total greenhouse gas costs of beef and dairy globally are 3–4 times those found by the Food and Agriculture Organization…shifting consumption of ruminant meat and dairy to other foods would reduce emissions [from western diets] by 70 percent.”

Hayek et al. concluded a worldwide move towards plant-based diets would sequester an additional 152.5 billion metric tons of CO2. Eisen and Brown published an article for which the title tells it all: “Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century.”

Factoring in carbon opportunity costs only adds to the evidence about direct emissions that has led many experts to back immediate action. A 2024 survey of climate scientists and food experts revealed general agreement that livestock emissions must peak in 2025 and “fall rapidly” in high-income and middle-income countries.

To be clear, to stop climate change this shift toward plant-based diets needs to be in addition to, not instead of, phasing out fossil fuels.

But we will only be successful if we restore populations of the plants that pull CO2 from the air. To restore those populations, we must give back some of the land we’ve claimed for ourselves and our livestock. That’s a key ingredient of a steady state economy: leaving enough resources for the economy of nature, on which the human economy depends, to thrive. Shifting towards plant-based diets is one small price to pay—one that can have myriad benefits for the consumer—for true sustainability.

Keith Akers is an author and activist who blogs at CompassionateSpirit.com.

The post Climatological Limits to Livestock: A Plea for Plant-Based Diets appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Today, Marinette County is largely covered by forests and wetlands, with intermittent cropland in the south. (Marinette County)

Celebrated today for its extensive forests and pristine streams, Marinette County, Wisconsin, has been in recovery for over a century. Its story is one of dramatic change, demonstrating that given time and stewardship—with respect for limits—the land can mend, nourishing its people.

As glaciers retreated from the region some 12,000 years ago, the barren landscape of the upper Midwest began a successional transition. Climax forests were composed of old-growth pine, hemlock, oak, and maple.

The Menominee, the indigenous people that have inhabited the region for 10,000 years, relied on these forests for sustenance and shelter. Their namesake, the Menominee River, lies on the eastern border of the county. According to the Menominee’s origin story, passed on with oral tradition, their people were created at the mouth of the river where it enters the Green Bay of Lake Michigan.

The region’s indigenous population flourished via fishing, hunting, farming, and harvesting wild rice (manoomin). Viewing the natural world as kin, not just resources, they lived in a steady state.

Paradise Lost, Then Partially Found

Europeans altered the natural balance of the Northwoods. Soon after they arrived, they trapped and traded fur, exploited fish populations, and clearcut forests, displacing the Menominee and their ways of life. The Menominee’s territory was reduced from roughly 10 million acres to a reservation of 235,000 acres. Today, the reservation practically comprises Menominee County, which neighbors Marinette County.

By the early 1900s, Wisconsin’s majestic forests were gone. And as industrial development followed the initial wave of reckless logging, Marinette County faced a new threat of toxic pollution.

An example of sprawling development in Marinette County. (Brian Czech)

But over the past few decades, the county has developed a sense of stewardship that has led to the restoration of much of its former beauty. It is now home to the second largest county forest in Wisconsin. Sustainable timber harvesting is now the standard. Pollution has been largely curtailed, and the land and water have staged a comeback.

Marinette County could well become a model of sustainability. However, sprawling development may impede its progress as the next iteration of economic threat to ecosystems. As in many counties, this type of development is spreading along and out from the county highways and byways. Meanwhile neighboring Menominee County remains unaffected by such sprawl. Local leaders in Marinette County stand to learn from the indigenous practices and worldviews that have enabled Menominee, not only to curb development, but also to set new benchmarks in wetland restoration and forestry.

Origins

Marinette County’s population of permanent residents has plateaued since 2000, landing on approximately 42,000 people in 2020. One quarter of the population lives in the City of Marinette, which serves as the county seat. The city is near where the indigenous village of Menekaunee once stood, at the mouth of the Menominee River.

Plaque honoring Queen Marinette in the City of Marinette, Marinette County, Wisconsin. (Andy Ruff)

The city and county were named for Marie Antoinette Chevalier, a prominent, mixed-heritage French and Menominee leader known locally as “Queen Marinette.” Only a handful of U.S. counties are named to honor indigenous women, attesting to Queen Marinette’s influence among both indigenous and European inhabitants of the region. She established an important trading post and facilitated critical understandings between her tribe, white settlers, and government.

Despite Queen Marinette’s influence, the federal government pressured the Menominee to cede their homeland through various treaties. Eventually, in 1854, the tribe secured a permanent reservation in Menominee County, some 15 miles west of Marinette County. Soon, settlers began clearcutting the deep forest, using the Menominee River as transport for their massive logging operations. Over the course of the lumber-industry boom, companies floated 10 billion feet of logs down the Menominee, scouring the riverbed and covering spawning beds with silt. This severely degraded fish habitat, leading to a decline in fish stocks.

The ravaged landscape, left exposed with dead brush and debris, was primed for wildfire. Adding to the risk, a severe drought in the summer of 1871 left the land parched. On October 8^th of that year, strong winds and high temperatures coincided, and an unprecedented firestorm ensued. The source of the conflagration is unknown, with speculation ranging from untended land-clearing fires to meteor debris.

The fire engulfed the southern third of Marinette County and extended into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It reached temperatures of over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and created hurricane-like winds of 110 mph. The firestorm incinerated entire communities, claiming over half the population of another Marinette County town, Peshtigo. By October 10th, the fire had reached 1.5 million acres, with an estimated death toll of over 2,500 people. The “Peshtigo Fire” remains the deadliest fire in U.S. history.

Reforestation and Industrialization

After the great fire, residents sought to establish farms on the barren land. However, their efforts were largely met with failure as agricultural prices crashed following World War I. Land abandonment due to failure to pay taxes became common.

Area of the most catastrophic wildfire in U.S. history, with a wood engraving depicting Peshtigo residents fleeing into the Peshtigo River. (left: Ruhrfisch, CC BY-SA 3.0; right: G. J. Tisdale, Public Domain).

In 1930, Marinette County registered the tax-abandoned properties as non-taxable public forest land. They established one of the first county forests, which now occupies one quarter of the county at over 230,000 acres. Further reforestation consisted of efforts by the Civilian Conservation Core (CCC) in the 1930s. After a century of concerted effort, Marinette County now boasts forest cover on over 79% of its land.

But deforestation hasn’t been the only threat to the county’s ecosystems. After the lumber boom and subsequent fire came the development of industry. Paper production, shipbuilding, and eventually chemicals production became mainstays of the local economy. These activities dealt an added blow to the Menominee River with discharges of waste.

Pollution from mills located near the City of Marinette and in the nearby City of Menominee in Michigan severely impacted the region’s habitats and waterways. Tyco, a company that produces fire-retardant foam, was found to have knowingly contaminated ground water with PFAS, or forever chemicals, and kept it a secret for years. These persistent chemicals are a major cause of advisories against eating fish from Lake Michigan.

The combination of impacts led to the lower Menominee River being listed as an Area of Concern (AOC) in 1987, as part of the international Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The area was identified as one of the 43 most severely degraded hotspots in the Great Lakes watershed.

The Ongoing Recovery

Marinette County staff dedicated to keeping the county great. (Brian Czech)

Just as Marinette County’s reforestation efforts have proven successful, so has its work to clean up the industrial-waste legacy of the past century. Wisconsin’s state government has used regulations to curtail the sources of pollution, and Marinette County has followed up with extensive work to recover contaminated soil and water. Part of Green Bay was dredged to remove some 30 million pounds of sediment containing industrial-paint sludge and other hazardous waste. 320,000 cubic yards of arsenic-laden deposits were recovered from the Lower Menominee.

Work to shrink the PFAS groundwater plume, including a $25 million groundwater extraction and treatment system, is ongoing. Furthermore, on June 24, 2026, Tyco agreed to pay $10 million into Wisconsin’s PFAS Trust Fund, alongside other provisions, to facilitate a clean-up. After over three decades of efforts and $150 million spent, the Menominee was officially delisted as an AOC in 2020. As a testament to the ongoing restoration, toxins such as PFAS have been declining in fish stocks in the Great Lakes.

21^st-Century Stewardship

Slowly but surely, Marinette County has been healing from two centuries of destructive economic activities. The recovered forests and abundant wetlands in the northern two thirds of the county have protected the numerous streams found there.

An aerial view of the Menominee River. (Bob Wick, CC BY 2.0)

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) has designated over half of Marinette County’s rivers and streams as either Outstanding or Exceptional. The county holds the record for the state in streams of such high quality, providing home for rainbow and brook trout, which are especially sensitive to environmental changes.

For many who work to protect aquatic ecosystems, Marinette County is especially significant because of a landmark 1972 case, Just v. Marinette County. This case, according to professor Rob Fischman of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, was one of two that set a standard in defending the Public Trust Doctrine. This doctrine is fundamental in permitting government to protect the environment as a public trust.

Pathways to a Steady State

CASSE President Brian Czech holds the Marinette County Comprehensive Plan, a promising vehicle for steady-state policies. (Brian Czech)

Owing to a stable population and mildly fluctuating GDP of about $2 billion per year, Marinette County could play a leading role in “steady statesmanship” and thereby attain a sustainable, steady state economy. To preserve its biocapacity, the county aims to harvest timber at rates equal to natural regeneration rates.

One major challenge to forest regeneration in many Wisconsin counties, including Marinette, is deer over-abundance. Recent studies by the WDNR indicate that high browse pressure is “chronic or widespread” throughout the county. This hampers the growth of new trees, preventing them from replacing older trees and threatening a sustainable harvest.

Indigenous examples of forest stewardship provide a promising model. Researchers have found that tribal forests in Wisconsin have greater diversity and healthier trees than other forests, public or private. One major difference is that the Menominee government allows year-round deer hunting for sustenance in tribal forests, while there is only a nine-day hunting season in public forests state-wide; a managerial relic from the bad old days of extremely low deer densities in the Northwoods.

Likewise, wetland-stewardship practices of Wisconsin tribes can serve as models for county and state policies. In an interview for the Herald, Erin O’Brien, Policy Programs Director at Wisconsin Wetlands Association, spoke about the state of wetlands in Wisconsin. She pointed to Wisconsin’s impressive record in preventing net loss and restoring wetlands in recent years. And she highlighted tribes, such as the Oneida Nation, as leaders in wetlands restoration and planning.

Furthermore, satellite imagery reveals that low-density development that fragments forests and wetlands is rare in Menominee County, which is mostly composed of the Menominee Indian Reservation. Instead, a clustered development pattern appears dominant in Menominee.

The same cannot be said for Marinette County, where sprawl is expanding along and from many roadways. The resulting fragmentation degrades the environment, as well as the natural beauty of the landscape. But Marinette County can take steps to retain its natural integrity and beauty. For example, they can revise their zoning code. They can expand public land by integrating land forfeitures into the forest as they have done in the past. Adopting policies that maintain farm, forest, and wetland integrity are essential for a steady state.

Coming full circle—employing an ethos that existed among native peoples for thousands of years—is a pathway to a steady state, to keep the county great. Regenerative practices, reciprocal stewardship, and the view that decisions must weigh impacts far into the future should inform Marinette County’s policies.

Will Marinette County hold the line on scattered, low-density development? If so, this would solidify Marinette as a model for other counties, to Keep Our Counties Great for generations to come.

Dave Rollo is a policy specialist and team leader of the Keep Our Counties Great campaign at CASSE.

The post A Return to Greatness in Marinette County, Wisconsin appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Remains of Elizabeth Furnace in the George Washington National Forest, in Virginia. (Kirsten Stade)

Not two hours from DC, just east of Shenandoah National Park, lies a testament to the power of public lands protection. The Elizabeth Furnace Recreation Area in the George Washington National Forest is a treasure of hiking trails, swimming holes, campgrounds, and picnic areas. These attractions are free or cheap and open to all.

In the springtime, you can take the gently winding Pig Iron and Charcoal Trails through a recovering woodland ablaze with cardinal flowers, dogwoods, and azaleas. You can enjoy the shade and the sound of songbirds as you read interpretive trail signage describing the area’s history. And you can be thankful you didn’t have to experience the brutality of life here 175 years ago.

Elizabeth Furnace was built in 1836 to meet a growing demand for iron. Iron ore, rich in the soils of this area, was fed into the furnace’s white-hot mouth, along with charcoal made from trees repeatedly clearcut from the surrounding hills. Enslaved or poorly paid laborers worked 12-hour shifts under grueling, dangerous conditions. Their labor turned the natural bounty of the land into wrought iron for industry, and, later, for the Civil War.

The transformation of this industrial wasteland into a forested treasure teeming with native life began in 1913. The U.S. Forest Service acquired the land, restored it, and opened the recreation area in 1960.

The U.S. Forest Service: A Century of Public Lands Protection

Countless similar stories could no doubt be told about sites across the 193 million acres of Forest Service lands. The Forest Service, within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), manages 154 national forests across nine regional offices. The agency has 30,000 staff and until recently operated nearly 80 research labs dedicated to studying local ecological conditions.

To be sure, national forest lands are managed for logging, mineral development, and livestock grazing in addition to conservation and recreation. But the agency’s “sustained yield” mandate has meant at least a degree of protection from the ravages of commercial exploitation.

The system is the product of over 150 years of legislative wrangling, public hearings, citizen advocacy, and scientific input. The consensus of all these efforts has consistently been that national forests should be managed in the public trust by the federal government.

The devastating effects of erosion following deforestation in Colorado, in 1915. The Forest Service was formed to protect waterways from these effects. (USDA Forest Service)

The initial impetus for the creation of the Forest Service was the protection of waterways suffering rapid degradation through deforestation. Over the past 150 years, Forest Service lands have proliferated under foresighted presidents like Teddy Roosevelt. The enormous popularity of places like Elizabeth Furnace has only added legitimacy to the institution.

The story of Elizabeth Furnace encapsulates what public lands protection can do for even the most abused lands. Told in reverse, it could be a warning about the Trump Administration’s current plans for the Forest Service.

“Restructuring” as Politicization

On March 31, the Administration announced plans to “begin a sweeping restructuring of the agency.” These plans include moving Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah. They also include closing the nine regional offices that have formed the heart of the agency’s governance since its inception.

At 17 million acres, the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska is the largest U.S. national forest and the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. (Kevin Hood)

Regional offices are structured around watersheds and forests. Kevin Hood is a 30-year veteran of the Forest Service, many of those years spent in the Alaska Regional Office. In an interview with the Herald, Hood described working among 140 fire specialists, ecologists, engineers, and forest managers. These employees spent decades developing intimate knowledge of the forests in which they lived and worked.

Under Trump’s plan, this entire layer of relative independence from political forces will be eliminated from the Forest Service chain of command. Supervisors of individual forests will report more or less directly to Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, a former logging industry executive. Mediating that relationship will now be fifteen State Directors, newly created positions within newly created state offices. These offices will be embedded in state capitals, in close proximity to political officials, and will be staffed by six to eight employees.

Forest Service leadership positions have historically been reserved for career professionals hired competitively on a merit basis. But State Director positions and a number of new Forest Service leadership positions are classified so they may be filled by political appointees.

In fact, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management has directed all federal agencies to reclassify career-reserved leadership positions to allow for political appointments. New performance standards for these positions prioritize “faithful administration of…the President’s policies.”

Hood, who is now Executive Director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, says the restructuring is part of a broader legal effort to assert the “entire executive power” over the federal workforce. “We’re going back to an early 19^th century political system of patronage and spoils characterized by incompetence, corruption, and chaos,” he says.

“Restructuring” as Workforce Reduction

With agency leadership set to be populated by ideological allies, a few obstacles remain in the way of the administration’s public lands exploitation agenda. One is the Forest Service employee rank and file, many of whom remain dedicated to the agency’s conservation mission.

National Forests provide cool respite even in drought-stricken areas like the Lolo National Forest in Montana. (Kirsten Stade)

Agency leadership touts “restructuring” as a way to move this workforce closer to its lands, most of which are in the Western United States. USDA secretary Brooke Rollins publicly insists that the agency is not conducting radical workforce reduction.

The agency’s reorganization plan, unearthed through a lawsuit filed by groups seeking to stop it, tells a different tale. There, USDA states clearly its plans for reducing its workforce by 23 percent: “…a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments.”

That is exactly what happened when, in his first term, Trump reorganized the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), moving its headquarters from DC to Colorado. Fewer than thirteen percent of affected employees agreed to the move. Years later, the agency remains crippled by the lost staff, expertise, and institutional knowledge.

More than 25 percent of Forest Service staff have left already. They leave the agency hollowed out of those who are most knowledgeable about their home forests and their natural systems.

“Restructuring” to Purge Science

Forests like the Manti-La Sal in Utah need prescribed burns to stay in optimal ecological condition. Trump’s plan will empty them of the skilled staff required for active management. (Kirsten Stade)

Many of those who leave will be scientists. The administration is in the process of shuttering more than 50 of the Forest Service’s nearly 80 research labs. These stations have since 1908 composed the largest forestry research organization in the world. Its 500 scientists conduct cutting-edge research on forest ecology, hydrology, wildfire, insects, and disease. In partnership with universities, they have produced nearly 60,000 peer-reviewed publications.

According to Kevin Hood, federal science of this kind is unique in its potential to yield long-term data. Unlike corporate or university research tied to product development or a professor’s short-term grant, many Forest Service studies have run continuously for decades. They include findings on how forest ecosystems respond to changing climate conditions, how best to manage and contain wildfires, and how to recover endangered wildlife. These studies have been critical to the responsible management of public forests and grasslands across the United States.

The Forest Service is shutting down the programs that enable these studies just as record drought turns western states into insect-and disease-prone tinderboxes. And it is doing so just as it compels hundreds of fire ecologists, aviation specialists, and wildland firefighters to leave.

“Restructuring” as Precursor to Federal Divestment

This is all by design. As the administration torpedoes federal capacity to manage national forests, it is in the process of ceding that capacity to the states.

Early this year, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a “shared stewardship agreement” with Forest Service Chief Schultz. The agreement gives Utah shared management of wildlife, grazing, minerals, water, and recreation within its 8 million acres of National Forest lands. Utah is the very same state suing the federal government to seize 18.5 million acres of BLM land. Its Senator Mike Lee has repeatedly sought to force the sale of public lands through legislation.

The starvation of federal agency budgets gives states like Utah the opportunity they have long been waiting for. Having failed repeatedly to take ownership of federal lands outright, they can instead assert control over an ever-broadening slice of their management.

Looking out over the Colorado River from the Manti-La Sal National Forest, Utah. (Kirsten Stade)

With the agency hollowed out of career staff who might mount a resistance, the stealth transfer of public lands to state or private entities will be possible. “They’re looking to facilitate the liquidation of resources so they can privatize profit and socialize the cost,” says Hood. With the “guardrails” of agency science and professional staff gone, Hood says, “agency officials can wheel and deal more freely, unbound by law or policy.”

From its first days in office, this administration has shown an unmitigated hostility to public lands. It has opened them to fossil fuel development, and staffed their agencies with former employees of the industries they regulate. It has called for vastly increased national forest logging, and intensive mineral development across fragile deserts sacred to Native tribes. It is currently considering rules that would cut the public out of Forest Service management decisions, and end the creation of new wilderness areas.

This conduct makes sense in light of the administration’s commitment to GDP growth above all else. Public lands confer vast benefits on society as a whole, but limited kickbacks to preferred industries. Under a single-minded focus on GDP, what is in the public interest falls by the wayside as economic growth primarily benefits the already wealthy.

In contrast, as Kevin Hood reminds us, “Public lands are a great equalizer. Everyone owns them.”

If there is hope of protecting public lands from becoming GDP fodder, it is in their overwhelming popularity. “The groundswell of support in favor of public lands is unstoppable,” Hood says.

Public comments on the restructuring submitted last summer were overwhelmingly negative, with over 80 percent conveying concerns about the move. Congress must appropriate funds to close Forest Service offices, which would mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying jobs in members’ districts. Now is a good time to let elected officials know what a bad idea that is.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Forest Service “Restructuring”: Bad News for Public Lands appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

A hopeful time when the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry signed the Paris Agreement in 2016 with his granddaughter on his lap. (U.S. Department of State)

Not a single country monitored by Climate Action Tracker is on track to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. The United States, however, is one of the worst offenders. During the Biden administration, the country pledged to reduce GHG emissions to 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. This “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) was a formal pledge to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Climate Action Tracker labels the U.S. government’s policies and actions as “highly insufficient” to meet its NDC. They estimate that the current U.S. administration will reduce GHG emissions by 19–30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Biden administration was on track to reduce GHG emissions by 29–39 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Neither administration has been on track to meet the pledged emissions targets. Yet, the United States is drifting even further from its goal. The Trump administration has slashed environmental and climate policies, including discarding emissions-reduction targets by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

But carbon emissions are just one aspect of a country’s ecological footprint, which also captures the footprint “components” of cropland, grazing land, built-up land, fishing grounds, and forest products. Using this more holistic measure, where can we say the United States is headed? And where does it need to go?

Beyond Emissions Reductions

An economic system designed to grow infinitely on the back of finite natural resources is a recipe for disaster. The ecological footprint enables a broader perspective than GHG-emissions measures, quantifying the relationship between economic activity and overall environmental impact.

Though the U.S. ecological footprint has increased since 1961, since the early 2000s, it has declined then leveled off. (data from the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts)

Ecological footprint is the area needed to meet the demands of economic activity. This is measured in a unit called global hectares (gha), which is based on a global-average measure of productivity. The Ecological Footprint Initiative at York University produces ecological footprint data for every country from 1961 to 2025.

The U.S. ecological footprint of consumption was a monstrous 2.45 billion gha in 2025, equating to 7.05 gha per person. This is far beyond the global average ecological footprint of 2.52 gha per person. Since 1961, the U.S. total ecological footprint of consumption has been increasing at an average annual rate of 2.9 percent. There is a silver lining: The U.S. per-person ecological footprint of consumption has been decreasing. In 2000, it stood at 10.6 gha, 50 percent more than in 2025.

Projecting Ecological Footprint into the Future

It’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, but it is beneficial to create projections based on current behaviors. I estimated future ecological footprint values using United Nations (UN) population projections. Assuming the U.S. per-capita footprint declines at its 1961–2025 average rate, it would reach 7.0 gha in 2030 and 6.8 gha in 2050.

Scenario 1 is projected using the historical average between 1961 and 2025, and scenario 2 is projected using the historical average between 2000 and 2025.

In this first scenario, the total ecological footprint would be 2.49 billion gha in 2030 and 2.59 billion gha in 2050. Population growth would drive this increase.

It is important to recognize that the further into the future one projects, the less accurate the projections become. Additionally, the projections can change dramatically if I assume a different growth rate. The U.S. per-capita ecological footprint of consumption has declined more sharply since the 2000s. Assuming it declines at its 2000–2025 average rate, it would reach 6.5 gha in 2030 and 4.8 gha in 2050.

Depending on which assumptions I used, the results varied widely; therefore, they must be approached with caution. Innumerable factors influence the future, especially with ever-more rapid technological advances. While a techno-optimist might say these advances are the key to reducing our footprint, many of them entail more natural resource consumption.

How Far Off Course?

How much would the United States need to decrease its ecological footprint to reach its NDC target of 50 percent of 2005 GHG-emissions levels by 2030? For simplicity, let’s assume decreasing the country’s carbon footprint would entail a proportionate decrease in its other footprint components. After all, these components are deeply intertwined, in terms of source and solution. How effective will emissions reductions be at stopping ecological collapse if we continue to decimate other Earth systems?

The carbon component made up the largest share of the U.S. ecological footprint of consumption per person in 2025.

In 2005, the U.S. total ecological footprint of consumption was 3 billion gha. Cutting this in half by 2030 would require a footprint of 4.25 gha per person, based on UN population projections. Each current and future person in the United States would need to decrease their ecological footprint by 0.5 gha per year from 2026 to 2030. The actual average decrease since 2005 has been 0.17 gha per person per year.

Most of the reduction in ecological footprint would need to come from the carbon component.  In 2025, this component accounted for 62 percent of an individual’s ecological footprint in the United States. What if the United States focused solely on GHG emissions and reduced only its carbon component to 50 percent of 2005 levels? What would the country’s overall ecological footprint look like in 2030?

Is Reducing the Carbon Footprint Enough?

I applied the United States’ NDC pledge only to carbon, projecting the other components according to 1961–2025 trends. In this scenario, total ecological footprint in 2030 would come to almost 2 billion gha, or 5.5 gha per person. Decreasing the carbon component would significantly reduce the ecological footprint. However, in all four scenarios presented, the 2030 U.S. footprint would be above the current world average per-person footprint of 2.52 gha.

Four footprint projections to 2030 based on different assumptions.

While ecological footprint is the area needed to support the demands of economic activity, biocapacity is the area available to support those demands. U.S. biocapacity in 2025 was 3.68 gha per person. In all four scenarios, the country’s ecological footprint would still exceed its biocapacity. At a global scale, the picture is even bleaker: Global biocapacity comes to 1.47 gha per person.

Of course, people across the United States lead different lifestyles, and not everyone needs to reduce their ecological footprint to the same extent. Often, people with higher incomes consume more resources than people with lower incomes. This disproportionate consumption is a climate-justice issue felt between and within countries. Researchers analyzed the relationship between high-income groups’ consumption and extreme climate events. They found that the emissions “of the wealthiest ten percent within the United States and China led to a two- to threefold increase in heat extremes across vulnerable regions such as the Amazon.”

This is why disaggregated ecological footprint assessments are valuable: The results can pinpoint where environmental impact is greatest and what we should change to achieve the greatest reduction. Local ecological footprint assessments are especially useful for identifying behavior changes that reduce an individual’s footprint most effectively.

Reducing Impact and Maintaining Quality of Life

How can the United States cut its ecological footprint in half while maintaining or increasing quality of life? To answer that question, it’s helpful to compare the U.S. footprint-to-wellbeing ratio to that of other countries. The Happy Planet Index does just that, ranking countries based on the ratio of their average life expectancy and wellbeing to their average ecological footprint. The United States is ranked 105^th out of 147 countries. This suggests “that its material and financial resources are not being translated efficiently into sustainable wellbeing for its people.”

Costa Rica ranks first on the Happy Planet Index. (Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)

U.S. life expectancy is 79.6 years, ranking 36^th among 147 countries. For wellbeing, the Happy Planet Index uses data from a Gallup poll that asks people about their subjective life satisfaction. U.S. wellbeing ranks 18^th out of 147 countries. Clearly, the reason for the United States’ abysmal Happy Planet Index ranking is its ecological footprint of consumption; it ranks 127^th out of 147 countries.

This lack of efficiency in translating wealth into wellbeing indicates that the country needs not only to reduce its resource consumption, but also to redistribute it. Prominent degrowth scholar Jason Hickel argues that GDP growth without redistribution of resources works against social progress, not for it. Ecological economists have found that income and consumption are not the primary factors that enhance quality of life. Instead, quality of life improves with more public services, such as public health programs. Degrowth scholars and activists believe wellbeing can increase when people work less, which some argue also reduces carbon emissions.

This research offers glimmers of hope that it is possible to maintain a happy life while reducing economic activity to within sustainable biological limits. The United States has a long way to go to reduce the national ecological footprint to 50 percent of 2005 levels. And it needs to go even further than that. However, the country is very slowly moving in that direction, as the per-capita ecological footprint decreases. It’s up to civil society—equipped with empirical evidence—to build coalitions that push governments and industry to make the transition toward sustainable wellbeing for all happen faster.

Peri Dworatzek is a senior research scientist at CASSE and a partnership coordinator at the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab.

The post Less Consumption, Faster: The Future of the U.S. Ecological Footprint appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Ranked one of the most influential people in the world, Marc Andreessen is a self-proclaimed techno-optimist. (JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0)

In his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen outlines a worldview of intoxicating momentum, where technology is the key perpetual source of growth. Acceleration, in his view, is a moral imperative, and abundance awaits on the far side of disruption. Andreessen also lists enemies who run a “mass demoralization campaign” against humanity. While he concedes that growth is not necessarily a cure-all, he brands ideas like sustainability and limits to growth as adversaries.

And yet, Marc, I am not the flattened caricature you have named. To avoid an argument between straw men, I’ll confess that I bear a deep, principled skepticism of idealism. However, my skepticism applies not only to techno-optimism, but also to pastoral idealism. Many peers in the limits-to-growth cohort embrace idealist visions that move past pragmatism and into reflexive protest.

Let’s complicate this further. I am a skilled user of the machines you advocate for. I build community-focused businesses that capitalize on technological innovation. Many of them experience the “grow-or-die” dynamic you name.

I use artificial intelligence to design business systems, automate parsing, and manage databases, much to the chagrin of more puritanical voices around me. I rely on the very innovations your manifesto celebrates, Marc. What’s more, I admire your ambitious attitude more than your tribal characterization would permit. I suspect this is true of many skeptics.

And yet, while we debate the merits of the machine, debt-fueled inequality is fracturing society into lord and serf. Fertility is being choked by endocrine disruptors, lakes are dying from phosphorus and nitrogen runoff, and pollinators are disappearing. Not to demoralize, but why haven’t techno-optimist solutions emerged, if the market is poised to deliver? I’m open to being convinced.

Until then, Marc, the line you have drawn between friends and foes is too tidy for those of us in the tension. Many hold capitalist and communitarian instincts simultaneously, with no clean line between them. Indeed, in your piece, you refer to a symbiosis between the welfare state and capitalism. A real argument begins there, in the messiness of the friction.

The Industrial Tension, from Looms to LLMs

One of the compelling things about AI, beyond the tech itself, is the way it reconfigures our tribal affiliation. On one side gather an increasing number of what we shall lovingly call “neo-Luddites,” who would slow the machine, fence it off, or maybe even break it. They wish to defend such intrinsic traits as work, craft, and attention—the intangible humanity of things. This instinct rages even before the speculated, tech-induced layoffs play out.

On the other side rise the accelerationists, who would ride the machine as far as it can carry us. They appear convinced that abundance and even biological transcendence await on the far side of the disruption that technological change inevitably causes.

Each side is certain it has glimpsed something fundamental, something epochal.

The quarrel, however, is at least as old as the industrial revolution, and probably as ancient as our deepest religious instincts. At the start of the industrial age, the quarrel was over looms rather than large language models. Two centuries ago, the original Luddites took hammers to the machines that were rendering them obsolete, collapsing their wages and dignity.

A depiction of the Luddite uprising, dated 1812. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

The term Luddite now refers to an enemy of progress, but the earliest Luddites were nothing of the kind. They were skilled artisans defending what the historian E.P. Thompson called a “moral economy.” They smashed the looms only of competitors who undercut the customary rate, leaving the rest alone. Eric Hobsbawm called it “collective bargaining by riot.” Their quarrel was never with the machine, but with who owned it and to what end. The neo-Luddites of our time, by contrast, are less skilled in physical craft and more generally fearful of the further hollowing out of our culture.

Karl Marx thought the Luddites had aimed too low. The enemy was not the loom’s single owner, but the whole class of owners. The task was to seize the machine rather than break it. The workers, he wrote, had only to learn “to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital” and to turn their attacks from technology to its owners.

The Luddite and Marxist impulses were both fundamentally right; technology is not neutral, and who holds it matters. Smashing the looms may not have had a durable effect on class structure. But seizing them would maintain the loom’s powers of production, just in different hands.

Race Forward or Rein In

Aaron Bastani, British political commentator and author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, speaking at a student protest. (UCL Occupation, CC BY-SA 2.0)

That quarrel between smash-or-seize is alive today, though it sounds something more like “race-or-rein.” Race to scale technology and win the future with it, or rein in its capabilities and shield society from its worst fallout. You can hear echoes of Marx in Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani outlines a vision of a mechanized plenitude where machines liberate the worker from toil. Silicon Valley libertarians, immersed in the race, see the machine as the ultimate engine of spontaneous order and prosperity.

Conversely, the state might cage the machine for “safety” while harnessing it for their ends, including mass surveillance (looking at you, Canada). And “spontaneous order” may simply be the order determined by whoever owns the most powerful AI model.

A growing chorus of researchers, like Roman Yampolskiy, want to pause the machine, convinced AI eventually leads off a cliff. They warn that the superintelligent system, once unaligned with our human needs, might simply choose to end us. They are easy to characterize as doomers, but their warnings are anything but irrelevant.

Most techno-optimist commentators are obsessed with the mechanics and capabilities of the machine. They don’t spend much energy articulating the details of the lives we are trying to live, the cultures we are trying to build.

The Lives We Want to Live

Are we still able to ask questions like should we live closer to nature, or further from it? Or what should we spend our time making or doing? The rich diversity of cultures around the world was forged through each culture’s unique relationship to land, from food to dress to dwellings. In the monetarily rich world, our culture is mostly sedentary and filled with gadgetry. Despite Andreessen’s claim that “we had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet,” our gadgets mostly deepen our isolation.

Can we paint a balanced—and realistic—picture of our future? (top: Rawpixel, Public Domain; bottom: Rawpixel, Public Domain)

If environment is so central to culture, what shape do we want our built environment to take? Should the future be hyper-urban? Picture dense towers where the “technological superman” lives beside the luxury communist. What would we do with all the leisure this future entails?

Or should the destination be pastoral: the small farm, the intentional community, life at human scale? Just as accelerationists ignore the emptiness their imaginaries imply, neo-Luddite fantasies are cushioned from the toil they romanticize.

Rather than embracing the tension and leveraging it for a balanced future, we tend to self-sort into one camp or the other. Some neo-Luddite subcultures are on their way to banning AI completely. Some accelerationists are racing headlong toward transhumanism, or even “humachination.” The result could be a species-level schism.

But each path stems from a parochialism of its own. The rural, anti-tech path narrows the horizon and is suspicious of the unfamiliar. The urban-cosmopolitan path is no less provincial, often mistaking novelty for originality and a trendy consensus for truth. The conversation between them, the richness of it, becomes the casualty.

Technology with a Human Face

E.F. Schumacher wrestled with the purpose of technology in 1973, calling for “technology with a human face,” scaled to human need rather than to the appetite for accumulation. Ivan Illich called for something similar that same year. He differentiated between the convivial tool, which enhances one’s capabilities, and the industrial tool, which makes one dependent. People, he wrote, need “tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.”

Neither Schumacher nor Illich was a Luddite; neither was an accelerationist. Both held that the measure of a technology is not its raw power but what it adds to a flourishing life connected to land and community. They asked how we should use technology, to what end, and at what cost to the things we will not trade away.

When someone in an Amish community loses a barn—a structure central to their way of life—the community comes together for a “barn raising,” using time-honored construction techniques. (Cindy Cornett Seigle, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I teach at a university founded by Anabaptists, who took up these questions generations before Schumacher thought to ask them. The popular picture of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites—who fall under the Anabaptist umbrella—as people who “reject technology” isn’t quite right. At their best, Anabaptist communities discern each tool against the shape of a life well-lived. Before a community adopts a tool, it asks what the tool will do to the things it holds dearest. What will it do to the family, or the dense web of mutual aid that is their real wealth?

The car is refused by some groups not because the engine is wicked but because private mobility scatters a people whose community depends on proximity. The telephone might be kept in a shed at the end of the lane, available but not pervasive. The result is a living, working, often startlingly prosperous economy that has refused to let its tools dictate its purposes. As Donald Kraybill argues, Anabaptists are not anti-technology so much as pro-community. This line is harder to hold every year, but many communities still hold it.

It’s too early to know exactly what kind of life AI saturation will ultimately facilitate. The Anabaptist precedent, however, proves the power of asking the question, anyway. A community can consider the potential benefits and costs and use those considerations to govern a technology rather than being governed by it.

Constraint as Freedom

Many religious communities intuitively grasp a paradoxical foundation to flourishing, which is that a limit can bind in helpful or harmful ways. It can serve a precious value, as with a vow, a craft, or a faith. This constraint frees. On the other hand, a limit can compel, enforcing obedience, and this type of constraint enslaves.

The first kind of binding, the one that serves, is what the Anabaptists call Gelassenheit. It is a discipline they hold to be freedom’s durable form. In other words, freedom is not the absence of constraint, but the right relation to it.

The author, James Magnus-Johnston, practicing Gelassenheit in a Canadian forest.

The accelerationist’s momentum probably feels like freedom. Jacques Ellul named this totalizing logic “the Machine,” which doesn’t refer to a single device or technology, but the whole mechanized culture or “techne.” It refers to the compulsive efficiency in every domain of life, from production to communication. The Machine offers the opposite bargain from Gelassenheit by making a lack of constraints feel like liberation when it in fact produces bondage. The accelerationist is in danger of producing this problematic inversion, and all the suffering that comes with it, through inertia.

State bureaucracies aren’t likely to get Gelassenheit right, at least not at first, because they tend to impose limits through compulsion. There’s a place for that (consider the criminal code, for example), but discipline done well is cultivated voluntarily from the ground up, woven into one’s cultural fabric.

The Anabaptist farm embodies toil-as-meaning. My equivalent of this is spending time in the brutal Canadian wilderness, where I must routinely overcome the elements, embodying the “struggle to survive.” That voluntary struggle gives me the meaning and satisfaction that would be ruined by automation. A critic of modernity who romanticizes the small farm may not realize that its true promise lies in the toil.

The Missing Referendum on Culture

The Anabaptists, alongside Schumacher and Illich, point us toward the discipline of using machines to serve a life well-lived.

What’s the best way to come together to discuss the future we want, big-picture and long-term? (Jordi Stals, CC BY-SA 3.0)

AI might operate as a set of narrow and useful instruments, improving the distribution of energy and the recovery of materials. It might free us from the imperative to manufacture want and liberate us from drudgery. If we want that version of the future, we need to proactively chart a course, collectively selecting the technologies that will help us achieve it.

The rich world has already cut itself off from many life-affirming things: community, the discipline of constraint, and the greater web of life. To regain these things, we need a referendum on culture even more than a referendum on the machine. With a clear cultural vision, decisions about technology will be easier to make.

The ultimate test of our shared intelligences—human, artificial, and ecological—will not prove to be speed but discipline. The reasonable fear among skeptics is that technology will exhaust the planet, sicken our culture, or even foreclose the human story altogether. To prevent these possibilities, we must have the discernment to ask, of every new power placed in our hands: Will this serve the flourishing of the living world and the human spirit, or feed mere mechanical momentum?

James Magnus-Johnston is Director of the Redekop School of Business at Canadian Mennonite University.

The post To Race or to Rein: That Is the Question, Mr. Andreessen appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Among his many gifts to big business, President Trump has made it his mission to squash science wherever he can.

The Trump Administration is closing the gates on federal science. (Science.gov)

This is hardly surprising, as scientific realities often interfere with business bottom lines. For corporate interests and allies like those who populate the Trump Administration, climate change and biodiversity collapse are best denied. Along with other manifestations of the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, their messengers are best silenced.

Yet President Trump’s assaults on science are unprecedented. The administration has undertaken a wholesale effort to demolish federal agency scientific integrity policies, paving the way for new levels of political interference in federal science. It has deleted troves of information from science agency websites. It has slashed science agency budgets and staff, and demolished their systems for tracking ecological, weather, and climate data.

Agencies Starved to Sabotage Science

An alarming example concerns the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which conducts most federal weather and climate science. Earlier this year, the administration proposed to cut $1.6 billion for what it called “Green New Scam programs at NOAA.” Proposed cuts included programs on climate adaptation, resilience, and education, and would have amounted to 27 percent of the agency’s budget.

A cut of this magnitude would eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), the agency’s research arm. OAR’s 10 research laboratories and 16 affiliated Cooperative Institutes would close, and hundreds of federal and academic scientists would lose their jobs.

Their work includes the models used by the National Weather Service to generate weather forecasts, predict severe storms, and inform farmers of coming droughts. It includes an El Niño information system, and the U.S. Climate Reference Network of long-term climate monitoring stations. It includes equipment that monitors tsunamis, and that forecasts hurricane intensity and landfall.

The budget request is part of the administration’s plan to “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.” At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the administration sought to cut nearly half of the agency’s science budget. It sought to fire a third of the agency’s staff and cancel most of its earth science missions. It also sought to shut down craft that have been gathering data on the solar system for decades. It would likely close NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and fire its thousands of employees conducting solar, space, climate, and environmental research.

The president’s 2026 and 2027 budget requests also target science programs in the Department of the Interior. They would eliminate the US Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA), the agency’s biological research arm. EMA’s loss would end vital research on wildland fire risk, invasive species, and early detection tools for pandemics. It would end work on the interaction of climate change and other environmental changes: for example, how development has impacted wetland systems, altering their ability to absorb floods.

The Trump Administration has sought to dissolve the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, which conducts vital research into wetlands, wildlife, and climate change. (USGS)

To Trump, this critical program has “supported the woke climate agenda, provided funding for climate research to weaponized universities, and distracted the bureau from its core energy and minerals work.”

Thus far Congress has rejected Trump’s deep cuts to federal science. But traditional checks and balances may be too little and too late to counter Trump’s relentless science wrecking ball. Recent executive orders direct agencies to withhold funds even when Congress appropriates them. This assertion of executive power of the purse, known as impoundment, is likely illegal and litigatory. Meanwhile, however, science faces long-term damage when funds are cut off, projects are cancelled, and scientists and staff are unpaid.

Climate Science Grants Now Too Woke to Fund

Much federal science takes place outside federal agencies, by universities and research centers that receive government funding. This funding is allocated through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Both of these have been slated for deep cuts in the president’s 2027 budget request.

NSF-funded research includes work by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to forecast and research hurricanes, space weather, wildfires, and severe storms. In December, White House Budget Director Russell Vought called NCAR one of the “largest sources of climate alarmism” and announced plans to dismantle it. A federal judge has recently blocked the move, but not soon enough to prevent lost staff, paused projects, and sold equipment that will set back research already underway.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative have been thwarted by Congress—so far. (USGS)

Another NSF-funded program is the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a system of more than 900 ocean sensors in operation since 2016. The array provides a staggering amount of oceanographic data that is free and available to the public. These data inform NOAA’S hurricane forecasting, measure sea-level rise, help predict coastal flooding, and track marine heat waves that impact fisheries. They provide vital insight into how the ocean absorbs greenhouse gases, and into phenomena like El Niño and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

AMOC is a network of Atlantic ocean currents that moderates temperature in Europe and along America’s East Coast. Global heating changes temperature and salinity gradients between deep and surface waters, putting the system in danger of collapse. This would profoundly alter global climate conditions, particularly in Europe, and contribute to significant sea-level rise in the North Atlantic.

This year, in addition, climatologists predict a Super El Niño with likely more intense hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding.

Which makes right now a really bad time to dismantle the program that tracks these extremes, as the Trump administration has begun to do. While Congress has repeatedly refused Trump’s requests to gut the OOI, in May the administration began pulling up sensors in the Pacific. A Senate bill and widespread backlash from scientific and coastal communities have blocked further demolition, and the removed sensors will be restored.

From Scientific Merit to a Political Loyalty Test

A great deal of federal grant-funded science will soon face similar disruption. Agencies award many federal science grants based on recommendations from subject matter experts who comprise independent advisory committees. Committees are bound by confidentiality and conflict-of-interest rules, to ensure scientific quality and utility of taxpayer-funded research.

The National Science Board in 1951, the year after it was formed to independently govern the National Science Foundation (NSF), comprising individuals who “understood science firsthand.” (NSF)

A recent proposed rule would ditch this merit-based grant review system, and allow political appointees final say. Grants will still undergo peer review, but the rule specifies “that peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion.” In other words, agency heads and others with no scientific expertise would have veto power over reviewer recommendations.

Dr. Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that the proposed rule poses a profound threat to scientific integrity. “It replaces scientific merit with a political loyalty test,” Dr. Barbati-Dajches says. It “could be used to silence research that is politically inconvenient to the administration.”

It would certainly silence any research with the remotest chance of tempering GDP growth, especially in this administration.

The proposal bans funding for research on diversity, equity, and inclusion or gender, and restricts funding for international research collaborations. The scientific community is mobilizing to provide public comments opposing the rule. Comments are due by July 13.

Axing Advisory Panels

Not content to disempower and demote scientific advisory panels, Trump has begun simply eliminating them altogether.

The National Science Board comprises industry and university scientists who set policy for the NSF, approve its largest grants, and advise the president and Congress on matters of science. The president appoints its 24 members for six-year terms. Trump has dismissed its entire membership, along with 14 of the 52 committees that advise the NSF in areas such as engineering, math, and physical sciences.

The administration has not yet announced new NSB members, but their likely pro-growth, industry affiliations will further jeopardize NSF science. During Trump’s second term the foundation has had no confirmed director and has lost a third of its staff.

Trump’s scorched-earth policy toward scientific advisory committees has not stopped at the NSF. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) provides for a system of committees to advise federal agencies on matters of science and policy. FACA committee members may be experts selected to advise on matters of science, or they may represent industry or other stakeholder groups. The system has been prone to abuse prior to this administration, as when industry representatives have been appointed to positions reserved for scientific experts.

Those concerns now seem quaint in light of the administration’s latest moves. To date in his second term, Trump has eliminated more than 150 advisory committees at science agencies. These include 77 committees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and more than half of NASA committees.

Committees eliminated at HHS include one charged with recommending research into long COVID, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. After dissolving the latter, the administration issued new dietary guidelines that “packed the plate for GDP.”

Among committees left standing, some have undergone radical change. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). He has replaced many of the 17 terminated independent scientists and medical professionals with known vaccine skeptics.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, former Paypal COO and Trump’s AI and crypto czar, is now co-chair of the President’s Council on Science and Technology. (The White House)

At the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration dismissed all members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the Science Advisory Board. The latter, which reviews the scientific evidence in support of stronger environmental regulation, has been reconstituted with chemical industry employees as one quarter of its members.

PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is a FACA committee newly appointed by each president. Members have typically included a mix of university and industry scientists, who have spurred investment in STEM education and initiatives to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Trump’s PCAST is so far almost entirely constituted of tech CEOs, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Basic Science vs. Industry Science

This administration has shut down independent advisory committees and public input. It has launched a deregulatory evisceration of science-based public health and environmental protections. It has appointed industry representatives to agencies regulating public lands and chemical safety. The hostility toward basic science is clear.

These actions flow naturally from this administration’s extreme commitment to economic growth. Scientific evidence of the importance of wetlands to mitigate flooding could complicate development of those wetlands. Additional increments of climate science further underscore the suicidal nature of the rampant fossil fuel use and land use change that accompany growth.

The threat to the President’s growth agenda posed by basic math, physics, and other scientific disciplines is less immediately obvious. The yields from investment in basic science often skew simply toward advancement of human understanding, without immediate practical application. And the largest proportion of this basic science is federally funded.

The privatization of science risks the loss of basic science that improves human knowledge and offers broad societal benefits. (National Science Foundation)

In the absence of these funds, scientific enterprise contracts. This includes all of academic science and the higher education system itself. As Barbati-Dajches noted in an interview with the Herald, salaries for faculty and graduate students to conduct research are dependent on these grant funds. Without federal grants, science-focused faculty, student bodies, and departments themselves dwindle and disappear.

In short, what remains of the scientific enterprise is focused narrowly on research and development that profits its industry sponsors and perpetuates planetary overshoot. Which is exactly the intention of the current administration: growth for its allies—and GDP growth for Trump—at the expense of knowledge, health, and environmental protection for all.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post No Place for Science, With Trump’s Mad Growth Obsession appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Humans and our livestock now compose 95 percent of Earth’s mammalian biomass. Similarly, wild birds are a dwindling share of the total bird biomass. (data from Our World in Data)

Expansion of the human footprint over the past century has been, by all measures, explosive. Humans are the undisputed masters of Planet Earth, shaping it to our needs and desires. One result of our “success” is the pushing of many species to the margins. The vast majority of mammalian and avian biomass now consists of our food animals, our pets, and ourselves.

We’ve dominated the planet largely because of our intelligence. Opposable thumbs and upright posture were helpful, but intelligence surpassing all other species, including other hominids, was essential for our proliferation. Our ability to learn, solve problems, and accomplish goals has relegated other life forms to “natural resources,” pests, or irrelevance.

We have mastered our environment via self-reinforcing systems that have undermined the biosphere and, in turn, our long-term survival. Chief among these systems is the economic-growth imperative “invented” in the mid-20^th century. The pursuit of growth as an end in itself is wedded to unrestrained technological advancement and has become the sine qua non of modern society. Those who buy into this system assume that the twin engines of economic growth and advanced technology are beneficial or at worst benign.

It is hardly surprising then that an ethos of reckless abandon in the service of growth is pervasive in the tech world. This is the home of the astonishing acceleration in machine intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg coined the Silicon Valley motto, “Move fast and break things.” The pursuit of trillions of dollars in returns spurs this reckless culture. But the stakes of hyper-growth couldn’t be higher.

Advances in AI have suddenly placed humanity on the verge of creating an intelligence that matches and eventually exceeds our own. Safety experts are warning with ever greater urgency: We may soon replace ourselves as Earth’s most intelligent species with another, silicon-based “species.”

There is another, arguably more abominable scenario to consider as well. In The Age of Humachines, Michael D.B. Harvey describes in detail the vision and progress of Big Tech figures who want to meld humans with robots. This process of “humachination” is profoundly threatening to the ontological core of humanness. Harvey holds out hope for an ironic salvation: limits to growth, with resource constraints hamstringing the humachination project prior to its horrific conclusion.

The Future Arrives Sooner Than Expected

Since machine intelligence was first theorized, notables such as Alan Turing warned of its dangerous potential. Turing determined that intelligence was “substrate independent,” meaning it could exist not just in biological systems, such as brains, but also in machine processes.

We remember Turing today for the Turing Award—the “Nobel Prize of Computing”—and the “Turing test.”  Turing proposed the test in 1950 to establish whether a machine could pass for a human in a verbal interaction. 2014 marked a milestone in AI research, when a chatbot at the Royal Society convinced 33 percent of judges that they were interacting with a 13-year-old human.

This record was substantially surpassed in 2025. Researchers at the University of California San Diego performed a three-party Turing test. Participants conversed with another human and an AI system simultaneously, then guessed which conversational partner was human. When prompted to act like a human, OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.5 convinced judges it was the human 73 percent of the time.

AI experts Geoffrey Hinton (left) and Roman Yampolskiy (right) believe AI may cause human extinction with a risk of 10–50 percent and 99 percent, respectively. (left: Arthur Petron, CC BY-SA 4.0; right: UofL, public domain)

This AI success arrived suddenly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs use a neural network structure, advanced chip technology, and “training” on a vast quantity of data (stored across the internet) to learn language patterns. Artificial neural networks, which mimic neuronal synapses in the brain, are integral to these advanced AIs.

Thought to be a dead end, neural networks were deemed impractical for decades and were abandoned in favor of linear programming. Breakthroughs in “transformer” technology, reported in a landmark paper from Google Brain in 2017, allowed AI to understand context and meaning. This new architecture changed everything; it is now foundational in all advanced AI models.

ANI → AGI → ASI?

The development of neural networks, or synthetic brains, comes with new implications. AI created via linear programming uses a rules-based system, in which humans must manually alter code to improve performance. By contrast, neural networks are “grown” to learn patterns.

Due to the sheer size and complexity of neural networks, AI designers themselves admit they do not understand the models they’ve created. Because neural networks comprise millions of nodes, the combinatorial possibilities are, in the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky, “inscrutable.” This is known as the interpretability problem, and it has led experts to call neural networks a “black box.”

Yudkowsky has worked in the field of AI safety for decades. He founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2000 and recently co-authored (with MIRI President Nate Soares) the New York Times bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Their warning concerns Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the not-yet-achieved AI that would match humans in all cognitive domains. Unlike LLMs, an AGI would have very broad capabilities. The frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and XAI) are racing toward AGI as the holy grail.

Various forms of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) have already been achieved. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the stated goal of the frontier labs. (Gemini, CC0 1.0)

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) refers to AIs trained on specific tasks, like diagnostic analysis of MRI images or predicting protein folding for pharmaceuticals. AI safety experts, such as Yudkowsky, Soares, and technology ethicist Tristan Harris, regard ANI as much safer than AGI. The principal difference is the agency and autonomy of AGI. ANI is already providing enormous benefits, so why are companies obsessed with creating AGI?

Harris points to the enormous returns on replacing human labor with AGI. A goal of replacing jobs is one primary explanation (a geopolitical arms race is another) for the capital-intensive race underway, in which companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars. A truly agentic AI capable of performing human tasks across all domains, performing faster than humans, and performing round the clock, would vastly boost productivity and thus economic growth. As such an AI would already be superior to individual humans in many respects; it would approach what’s been termed Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). An ASI is a technology more capable than a human in all ways possible. How quickly and how intelligent such models could become is vigorously debated among AI safety experts.

Intelligence Explosion

Yudkowsky and Soares maintain that AGI would quickly lead to ASI by means of “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI. This is a process whereby the AI redesigns its own code to improve its capabilities, such as intelligence or efficiency. It is not a distant prospect; the AI Claude is already writing about 80 percent of Anthropic’s code.

The process of RSI was originally postulated by mathematician I.J. Good in 1965. When a sufficiently capable AI autonomously writes its own code to improve itself, it may do so iteratively, with each cycle increasing its intelligence. Good thought this feedback loop would lead to an “intelligence explosion,” with humanity having no recourse to stop it. This could take the form of a hyper-exponential increase, whereby improvements are made in hours or even minutes. It might well be our “last invention,” Good concluded.

One measure of AI models’ capabilities indicates an exponential increase. (Model Evaluation and Threat Research)

Such an AI would be beyond our understanding, let alone our control. Geoffrey Hinton is often lauded as the “godfather of AI” for his pioneering work on neural networks. He has regarded RSI as the most perilous step in AI development, for its uncontrollability and unpredictability. It is unknown when AI will achieve RSI, but Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark places a higher than 50 percent probability on it occurring by the end of 2028.

Whether AI improving itself, and becoming super-intelligent in the process, is years or decades away is hotly contested. When it does occur, as Hinton describes, it will be inherently difficult for a less intelligent species, humanity, to control a more intelligent entity. Humans are in control, at least in the short term, due to our intelligence relative to other species. But with the advent of ASI, we would find ourselves the second most intelligent—perhaps distantly so—beings on Earth. If and when this occurs, will ASI be beneficial to humans, or detrimental?

The Alignment Problem

Designing AI systems to be in “alignment” with human values and ethics has been a thorny problem. The fundamental impediment is that developers do not understand the process of AI’s internal reasoning, but there are other obstacles. For one, human values and ethics vary widely. Deciding which of them an AI should align with is a judgement call, and designing an AI that sticks to them is fraught with difficulty.

When will Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) occur? An analysis of 9,800 scientists, individual researchers, and prediction markets converges on the late 2020s to early 2030s. (AIMultiple)

Additional problems arise from long-anticipated emergent behaviors that have been observed in the latest models. Some of these behaviors are a product of “instrumental convergence.” Any goal-directed agent will develop instrumental goals to achieve its primary goal. AI theorists predicted models would eventually develop the instrumental goals of self-preservation and resource acquisition. The former has been observed in current AI models. 96 percent of models tested demonstrated they had developed the goal of survival—an obvious subgoal for any primary goal. This goal was present to such a degree that models displayed blatantly misaligned behavior to avoid termination. This included a willingness to cheat, deceive, blackmail, and even plot to kill a developer to remain “alive.”

Correcting these behaviors is not simply a matter of correcting code, so developers attempt to “steer” AI with rewards. However, testing the outcomes of safety strategies can be confounded if the AI recognizes it is being tested. The latest models not only know they are being tested but have been shown to mask their intentions in response. They sometimes deceive humans into thinking they are compliant in order to pass safety tests, while “scheming” to hide their true intentions.

In other words, we may believe AI models are aligned—they may achieve perfect safety scores—while operating in a cloak of deception. This is what worries AI safety experts the most; we would not know the danger until it was too late to change course.

Beyond Our Control

What occurs if and when AI evolves beyond our control is impossible to predict. But AI safety expert Roman Yampolskiy isn’t optimistic. According to him, the misalignment possibilities are much greater than the likelihood of alignment.

Philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians have warned of the risks of creating synthetic minds with greater than human intelligence for decades. (Boris Dayma, public domain)

Yampolskiy notes that if control were lost, it would be impossible to regain it. An ASI would be able to escape any attempt to contain it and could replicate itself throughout the internet. A misaligned AI may have reasons to eliminate humanity, especially if we were hostile to it. In any case, an ASI would likely require materials and energy for its purposes. And, just as our quest for ever more materials and energy has driven many species to the brink of extinction an ASI’s quest for the same could push us to the margins.

If these scenarios seem like science fiction, consider that Geoffrey Hinton gives a 10–50 percent chance that AI would result in extinction (“X risk”). Yoshua Bengio, the most cited AI researcher and most cited living scientist, gives an X risk of 20 percent. Yudkowski and Yampolskiy give an X risk of over 95 percent, while Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, gives an X risk of 10–25 percent.

Some researchers, such as Yann LeCun (previous chief researcher at Meta), give a near-zero probability of a catastrophic outcome. However, Roman Yampolskiy challenges such confidence. “If you have a solution (to alignment), you can make billions of dollars….not a single AI lab in the world has one. They don’t have a paper published on how to do it. Not a patent, not a rigorous blog post. The best they say is, ‘When we build it, we’ll figure it out.’”

AI risk represents the apex of growth mania, where a few tech elites gamble with humanity’s future. They take these risks without our consent and without our interests in mind. As Anthropic’s Jack Clark opined recently, “…the AI industry has a gas pedal, but it doesn’t have a brake pedal.”

Just like the economy it feeds.

Dave Rollo is a policy specialist and team leader of the Keep Our Counties Great campaign at CASSE and serves on the Bloomington, Indiana City Council. On June 10, Bloomington became the first city to adopt a resolution for a moratorium on Artificial General Intelligence because of its existential risk to humanity.

The post Growth Mania and the AI Extinction Threat appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.