Trump’s rollback of environmental regulations opens the floodgates for agricultural chemicals. (Precision Drone LLC, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Trump’s second-term regulatory rollbacks have already undone decades of progress in protecting public health and the environment. Not surprisingly, the safety of agricultural chemicals is among the casualties of this deregulatory fervor.

The president’s single-minded pursuit of GDP growth has meant ordering the production of more herbicides. It has meant intervening to protect their manufacturers from lawsuits, when those downwind get cancer or lose their crops. It has meant stacking his administration with former chemical industry lobbyists. And it has meant dismantling regulations that were the result of years of painstaking risk analysis.

A few recent examples are alarming in the risk they pose to human health and environmental protection.

Glyphosate: Ramping Up Production of a Probable Carcinogen

In February, the president issued an executive order directing increased production of phosphorus for two purposes. One was for its use in manufacturing war technologies. The other is its use in the herbicide glyphosate.

Glyphosate was developed in the early 1970s by Monsanto, which brought it to market under the brand name Roundup. Its widespread adoption triggered the development of “Roundup Ready” soybean, cotton, corn, and other crops, which have been genetically modified (GM) to withstand the weed killer. By 2006, more than 95 percent of all U.S. soybeans, and almost 70 percent of cotton, were glyphosate-resistant. Since glyphosate could now be sprayed over the top of plants with no damage to crops, it quickly became the most widely used herbicide in the world.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world, particularly across soybean, corn, and cotton crops in the U.S. Midwest and South. (USGS)

A 2026 analysis by Food & Water Watch found high rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in counties where glyphosate is widely used. In 2015, the World Health Organization listed glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. The EPA does not, although it does admit glyphosate likely harms bees, birds, mammals and of course nontarget plants.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, has already paid out $11 billion in claims to those who say they got cancer and other diseases from glyphosate exposure. But the Trump administration is intervening on Bayer’s behalf in a case currently before the Supreme Court, a case that would protect the multinational from lawsuits over its failure to warn consumers of cancer risk.

Glyphosate’s risks are well-known, and are generating an outcry among the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) contingent of the president’s base. MAHA activists, many of them rural, enthusiastically embraced Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to reduce chemical contamination of the environment and food supply.

Yet the chemical’s near-ubiquity in much of the U.S. farm belt makes bucking the trend nearly impossible. Even farmers who wish to do so must buy the genetically modified seeds, or risk obliteration of their crops from herbicide drifting from neighboring farms.

But the biggest reason for glyphosate’s continued popularity, and for its boosters in the current administration, is economics. Several reports, most commissioned by the industry, have documented that glyphosate use has meant billions of dollars worth of agricultural productivity gains.

These gains, however, are concentrated in the first few years of use. After that, weeds evolve resistance to glyphosate and farmers must apply additional chemicals to kill off survivors.

Dicamba: New Approval Discounts Drift Damage

Their first choice is often dicamba. Though in use for decades since its first American agricultural application in 1967, dicamba use has only recently taken off. Dicamba’s volatility and tendency to drift made it less popular until recently, as glyphosate’s declining efficacy has forced farmers to use both.

Herbicide-resistant soybeans are part of a vicious cycle of ever-increasing herbicide use and genetically-modified seeds. (USDA)

Monsanto began selling dicamba-resistant seeds in 2015, and less-volatile formulations of the chemical in 2017. These developments did not prevent a record number of complaints in 2017 of crop damage from dicamba drifting onto fields sown with non-GM seed. Drifting dicamba has damaged millions of acres of crops, orchards, and native vegetation especially throughout the South. Bayer has settled claims of $400 million in damages for lost crops, while conflict between farmers has led to at least one homicide.

What is a devastating risk for farmers, though, is a marketing pitch for Bayer. It has used the threat of drift damage from neighboring farms to sell its dicamba-resistant seeds.

Courts have found that no version of dicamba is safe. Federal courts banned it in 2020, finding that political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had violated the agency’s Scientific Integrity Policy when they registered dicamba despite staff concerns. Another federal court banned it again after the first Trump Administration reapproved it in 2024, finding that the EPA had failed to allow public notice and comment on the approval as required by law.

This past February the Trump Administration once again approved dicamba, with what it claims are “the strongest protections ever.”

Activists are not convinced. The new regs reduce the amount of the chemical that may be applied annually, but allow its use year-round. Summer application, when chemicals are more volatile, brings elevated risks. Dicamba, like many chemicals used in agriculture, is also associated with elevated risk of cancer.

The most recent approval is being challenged in court.

PFAS: Forever Escaping Regulation

So is the Administration’s approval of a new pesticide containing PFAS, the toxic “forever chemicals” that persist and bioaccumulate in humans and the environment.

PFAS—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are widely used in products ranging from nonstick cookware to food packaging to construction materials, electronics, and firefighting foam. In pesticides, they may be active ingredients or they may leach into product from the containers used to store it.

PFAS may also come into contact with crops through the roughly 18 percent of fertilizers containing biosolids. Biosolids are less euphemistically known as sewage sludge. They are the solid wastes left over after sludge from residential (plus often industrial) waste has gone through a wastewater treatment plant. These plants do not remove PFAS, so it remains in biosolids and the fertilizers that use them.

PFAS are ubiquitous in consumer and industrial applications, and hence in water supplies, wildlife, and humans. (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation)

PFAS’ ubiquity in consumer and industrial applications explains their presence in human tissues, where they cause diseases including immune suppression, cancer, liver damage and reproductive and developmental harms.

It also explains their presence in 83 percent of tested rivers, lakes, and streams, and in wildlife in remote areas.

States have begun to regulate PFAS, with 37 states placing limitations on its permitted levels in drinking water. Federal regulations were a long time coming, but the Biden administration for the first time set limits on PFAS in drinking water and proposed standards that would limit their discharge by chemical manufacturers.

True to form, the Trump administration has announced rollbacks to these regulations. The administration has withdrawn PFAS discharge limits, leaving no limit to the amount that chemical manufacturers can discharge into waterways. And while limits on the two most common PFAS chemicals will remain, industry has until 2031 to comply. The administration says it will rescind and reconsider limits on four other PFAS chemicals established by Biden.

EPA has long failed to regulate PFAS in biosolids, which may contaminate 70 million acres of farmlands and pose significant risks to humans, livestock, and wildlife. Several states have banned or limited application of biosolids, but EPA’s efforts have been limited to risk assessments.

Biden’s risk assessment would have drastically limited the use of biosolid fertilizers, but Republicans in Congress last summer killed the process after meeting with a sludge industry trade group. A new Trump risk assessment of biosolid fertilizers, advocates say, sugarcoats the risks.

Captured Agencies Do Industry’s Bidding

Entire regulatory systems are at risk in agencies staffed and influenced by the industries they are supposed to regulate (Farm & Country Insurance, CC BY-NC 4.0)

While somehow coming as a shock to MAHA, Trump’s actions to facilitate chemical industry growth will not surprise most. The top four positions in Trump’s EPA toxics office are held by former industry lobbyists.

Among them is Kyle Kunkler, who now oversees the EPA’s pesticide program and was formerly with the American Soybean Association. Such groups are a major force for chemical agriculture, says Bill Freese, Science Director for the Center for Food Safety. Groups that ostensibly represent farmers have a far more benign public image than the pesticide industry itself. Their relative credibility, Freese noted in an interview with the Herald, is one reason why fighting chemical agriculture has been such an uphill battle.

At the behest of such powerful lobbies, the administration is poised to dismantle the entire chemical risk evaluation system. The Biden EPA’s approach to chemical risk evaluation under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) required a determination of risk for a chemical as a whole, taking into account many possible pathways of exposure. The new system would require evaluation of each of a chemical’s individual uses, ignoring cumulative effects. And it would pre-empt state bans, like those of PFAS.

Trump’s deregulatory whirlwind has also touched down on Biden’s chemical accident prevention rule, with a proposal to weaken it significantly.

Road to Growth Paved with Chemical Deregulation

This dizzying array of chemical deregulatory actions may well lead to GDP growth. AI data centers will be major beneficiaries, as many of their components contain PFAS. In its enthusiasm for this industry, the administration has announced that it will prioritize TSCA review of new chemicals needed for data center construction.

Chemical, wastewater, and agricultural industries will also surely benefit from the lax regulatory climate.

Apologists for chemical-laden agricultural systems will argue that these systems are essential to feed a planet of 8.3 billion and counting. But this narrative “is just gaslighting us to support greater use of chemicals and industrial agriculture,” says Freese. “We overproduce food.”

The purpose of chemical agriculture, Freese says, is not so much agricultural productivity, but reducing labor costs. “It’s about getting people out of the picture and replacing labor with capital.”

Agricultural systems that are compatible with human health and a finite planet will take more than just new combinations of chemicals and genetically-modified plants.

Growing food to feed humans directly, rather than to feed livestock, uses a fraction of the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and land area. (Scienmag, CCO 1.0)

As Freese noted, the vast majority of pesticides, herbicides, and petrochemical fertilizer are used on the corn, soybean, and other commodity crop monocultures that blanket most agricultural land in the US and across the world. For the most part, these are crops that feed livestock, not humans. Far fewer chemicals, and half the land area, would be required if we grew crops primarily for direct human consumption instead of for livestock

A transition to plant-based agriculture would be a giant step toward an agricultural system in line with planetary limits. But it would not be the entire journey. Agricultural systems that cover 40 percent of the planet’s ice-free land area account for an enormous share of the human ecological footprint. The administration’s unrestrained growth agenda cannot lean even more heavily upon these systems without deepening irreversible ecological damage.

An agriculture of the future must certainly be less chemically dependent, and it must embrace more organic, regenerative, and plant-based elements. It must also go through a phase of degrowth to a steady state, along with a human population and economy that fit on a finite planet.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Chemical Safety Sacrificed on the Road to GDP appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

As the artificial intelligence (AI) boom explodes with a race for ever more powerful models, so does the need for its infrastructure. This takes the form of huge, windowless buildings housing thousands of data servers. Projects may involve numerous buildings—sometimes a dozen or more—with added infrastructure such as hundreds of backup generators. These amalgamations are termed data centers or, in some cases as an indication of their enormity, “hyperscale data centers.”

Over 4,000 data centers have been built or are under construction in the United States, with corporations seeking approval for thousands more. Nearly half the world’s data centers are in the United States, with an annual electricity consumption of over 180 Terawatt-hours. This is estimated to reach 426 Terawatt-hours by 2030. That’s 1.7 times the electricity used by the entire state of Florida in 2023.

Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, from the air. (Billy Hathorn, CC BY-SA 3.0)

To meet the rapidly growing demands of AI, data centers are materializing across the country. However, corporations are targeting some locales for multiple facilities because of their resources and vulnerability to economic incentives. For example, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, was facing proposals for 13 data centers (90 buildings in total).

But in many of these targeted locales, residents are resisting. Data center proposals have triggered a high-stakes resistance in Lackawanna County’s Borough of Archbald, a tight-knit community of 7,500 people. With five data centers proposed for Archbald alone, the borough has engaged in one of the most intense battles against data centers in the United States.

Archbald’s battle epitomizes what is occurring in hundreds of communities nationwide. Whether the scale and impact of the proposed data centers are in the best interests of residents is hotly contested. Residents have questioned the motives of town leaders. The local movement to prevent the digital juggernaut from damaging Archbald’s community is building.

The AI-Driven Tsunami

As a “foundational infrastructure” for cloud computing and AI use and development, data centers will attract nearly $7 trillion in investment by 2030. This massive enterprise is in part due to the colossal computational needs of developing powerful LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Data center developers often seek out communities with massive power capacity, as these facilities require as much electricity as small cities. The Lackawanna River Valley, where Archbald resides, has access to electricity via the 500-kilovolt Susquehanna-Roseland Transmission Line.

The six data center campuses proposed for Archbald. Project Scott was recently rejected by the borough council. (Track Data Centers, labels added by author)

Furthermore, relieving the heat from thousands of computer servers requires vast amounts of water for evaporative cooling. Just one of the five data center campuses proposed for Archbald may need up to 3.3 million gallons per day from Lake Scranton for this purpose. Around eighty percent of the water withdrawn for data centers evaporates. The remainder becomes wastewater that local governments must treat in their sewer systems.

Developers and their tech clients are also keen to locate in rural communities that have open, undeveloped areas, lax zoning regulations, and compliant city or county government. Revenue-starved communities are particularly easy targets. Lackawanna County is vulnerable due to the demise of the coal industry and decline of manufacturing in cities like Scranton. While data centers offer minimal lasting employment, they are tempting for local property tax revenue. One data center in Archbald could add over $4 million in annual revenue, dramatically increasing the borough’s operating budget.

For many residents, the increased tax revenue amounts to a Faustian bargain. They worry about the round-the-clock droning sound for which data centers have become infamous. Nationwide, people living near data centers have reported sleep disturbances, stress, headaches, and nausea. Additionally, Archbald residents are outraged by the clear-cutting of forests and loss of farmland already underway to accommodate the data centers’ massive footprints. What’s more, they do not want faceless industrial facilities imposing on their culturally rich, historic town.

Archbald residents are also aware that other communities have been starved of water or had their electricity forfeited to the voracious appetite of these complexes. Utility rates have skyrocketed in Pennsylvania, increasing as much as 20% in a single year.

All of these anticipated impacts would come on top of a history of chemical contamination from polluting industries. Aline Browning, leader of the Lackawanna Citizens’ Overwatch Project, shares that “[Lackawanna’s]…community is riddled with cancer; our rates are significantly higher than both state and national averages. We have spent decades as a dumping ground for industrial negligence.”

Residents share a sense of betrayal by their elected leaders, who enabled not one, but multiple developers to exploit their community yet again, for an increase in the borough’s coffers.

Paving the Way

A plan for the proposed Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus in Archbald Borough. Each building is approximately 1000 feet long and 90 feet tall. (LaBella, Archbald Borough Council)

Archbald adopted initial zoning to permit data centers in 2023, consistent with a statewide economic development trend. The intention was to attract high-tech development by allowing “internet server buildings.” But the initial zoning did not satisfy the desires of hyperscale-facility developers interested in the area’s water and energy resources.

The borough council, planners, manager, and five developers (Western Hospitality Partners, PDC Realty, Cornell Realty Management, Green Mountain 6 LLC, and Provident Realty Advisors) had a series of meetings to negotiate “conditional use” plans to allow land use code exemptions.

Of the nearly 90 data center buildings proposed for construction in Lackawanna County, 50–60 are planned for Archbald. Developers’ intend to build five data center “campuses” occupying 14 percent of the borough’s area. Key projects are the massive 1,600-megawatt Wildcat Ridge and the 1.62-million-square-foot Project Gravity. 

Constituent Rebellion

On November 24, 2025, the borough council voted 5–2 to pass a zoning amendment creating a “Data Center Overlay District.” As described by Archbald Borough Manager Dan Markey, data centers will be vital revenue producers for the borough. According to Markey, just one data center could provide more than 60 percent of Archbald’s annual budget. By this measure, and all else equal, the five proposed data centers would pay property taxes equal to 300 percent of the borough’s budget.

The overflow crowd at the November meeting erupted with shock and anger. Many accused members of the council of predetermining their rightful decision and disregarding the considerable public opposition.

Since then, with pressure mounting to deny developer applications, three councilmembers have resigned, including the council president, Dave Moran. On March 27, 2026, the borough council voted 5-0 against the conditional use application for Archbald I LLC’s Project Scott. On this reversal of fortune, the hundreds of residents attending the hearing stood and cheered.

400 residents attend a May 14, 2026, public meeting on the plan for the Wildcat Ridge Data Center. (Stop Archbald Data Centers)

On April 15, the Archbald Borough Council appointed three new members to fill its vacancies. The newly elected members are fully aligned with residents in opposing data centers.

Meanwhile, legal battles have ensued. Archbald I LLC filed a land-use appeal in Lackawanna County Court against the council on April 24. Pennsylvania’s land-use framework frequently frustrates local governments. The Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code heavily restricts municipal authority. For instance, the law allows developers to exploit the “curative amendment” process to force zoning changes in their interests.

Archbald officials have been advised by their lawyers not to speak to the press, and more lawsuits are likely in store from developers. But, of the thirteen data centers proposed in Lackawanna County, eight have been rejected or withdrawn. The five remaining are up to the decisions made in Archbald by the recently reconfigured council.

Better Representation

Activists oppose data centers in Lackawanna County. (Stop Archbald Data Centers)

Some of Archbald’s community leaders are speaking out against data centers. Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan is one such leader. During a recent session, he commented on the recent attempts by developers to alter code and secure approval at the residents’ expense:

“So, let’s eviscerate all of the hundreds and thousands of acres of land in Lackawanna County, so we can use Google, so we can help this guy make a billion dollars. But let’s not pump the brakes…When are we gonna stop letting developers and speculators come in here and say, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll throw you a couple million dollars, by the way, which everybody could use.’ But they flashed this big shiny object at us. We’ll buy you a fire truck. Maybe we’ll buy you a police truck. We’ll fit up your police and fire departments with something, and let us just destroy the land and the water and the air. That’s not right.”

Archbald’s concerns about data centers are shared by localities across the country. And as citizens organize, more and more data centers are being blocked at the local level. Data Center Watch found that over $64 billion in projects across the country have been blocked or delayed in less than a year. Concern about data centers has evolved from local zoning disputes into a unified, bipartisan national movement. The common themes of water and energy use, noise, back-up generator pollution, and the despoiling of countryside are creating massive political backlash.

Eleven states have bills before their legislatures to enact data center moratoriums, although none have been adopted yet. In Pennsylvania, State Senator Katie Muth has proposed a three-year pause on hyperscale data center developments. This would allow time for assessments of impacts on local and regional infrastructure. Activists are urging Pennsylvanians to write in Muth as a protest vote against Governor Josh Shapiro, who has come out strongly in support of data centers.

Citizen groups like Lackawanna Citizens Overwatch Project and Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance are stepping up to support leaders, such as Gaughan and Muth. The group Stop Archbald Data Centers, with 12,000 Facebook members, is fielding candidates and keeping members updated on local meetings.

Growth-Driven Catastrophe?

The costs of data centers include massive local impacts on water, energy, and quality of life. Aside from tax revenues, what benefits will data centers bring society? Data centers power AI, and AI proponents offer a panoply of social and personal goods that are utopian in description. Drudgery of work eliminated, cancer cured, and longevity increased, perhaps infinitely. Meanwhile, GDP soars, and all wants are satisfied.

Who pays the price for AI and its infrastructure? (Hanwha Data Centers, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to AI that meets or surpasses all human cognitive skills. AGI has not been achieved, but it is the stated goal of frontier AI firms. Wedded with robotics, such technology may render workers, even highly skilled ones, superfluous. Data centers are the crux of this enterprise, as the computing power and memory needed to develop and run this architecture are gargantuan. Right now, computing costs exceed the cost of human workers, but with recent breakthroughs, they will likely fall dramatically.

Many activists opposing data centers are aware of the job-destruction threat that AGI poses and are communicating this threat to the public. This is beginning to elicit a political response. Notables across the political spectrum, from Bernie Sanders to Josh Hawley, are sounding the alarm.

And many highly respected AI-safety experts are going further. They’re warning that AI won’t just replace jobs, but humanity as a whole. Religious leaders have expressed similar concerns. Pope Leo XIV stated, “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen, because this moment needs words that are capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.”

The message seems to be getting across to the public. Gallup found that over 70 percent of Americans are opposed to data centers in their local area, with nearly half saying they are strongly opposed. Young college grads are booing speakers touting AI at college commencements. 2026 may well be the year when public sentiment turns en masse against not just data centers, but the growth-driven mania that seeks to replace people with automata. The battle against these resource- and humanity-consuming technologies is integral to Keeping Our Counties Great, while we still can.

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

The post The Data Center Showdown in Lackawanna County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

If you’ve heard of the steady state economy, you’ve probably heard of Herman Daly.

Herman Daly provided the key scaffolding for modern steady-state economic theory. But he built on the ideas of many before him, including Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Daly’s key advisor at Vanderbilt University. The term “steady state” is often used to describe an economy where capital stock is steady but growth may persist. But Daly was clear that his steady state was a homeostasis beyond growth, where economic output and material throughput stabilized at an ecologically sustainable scale.

As Daly persistently reminded us, this steady state could generate broad prosperity, and sustainably. This depended on population stabilization and more substantial sharing of resources and income. “We are addicted to growth,” Daly asserted, “because we are addicted to inequality.”

Daly’s steady state is a revolutionary concept, but also a creative combination of older systems and ideas. He assembled it with strands of political economics and proven practices much older than his own masterful synthesis. Some of these precursors are well-known, and some are obscure.

The Economists

Many of the world’s economic visionaries sought to understand natural resources, planetary limits, and the critical role of planned redistribution. Thomas Malthus was one such theorist. Writing at the turn of the 18^th century, he focused on the “new worlds” coveted by European settlers and colonizers.

Malthus recognized that his fellow Europeans conceived of these places as “open lands.” As such, he feared, there would be a temptation to displace indigenous peoples, assume that resources were endlessly abundant, and encourage an ill-advised population boom. Resources were plentiful, but with his “population principle,” Malthus posited that a population boom would deplete them more rapidly than most imagined.

Only a few decades later, John Stuart Mill became the first to lay out an analysis of the stability of demand relative to price for certain goods and services. He also presaged Henry George’s late 19^th-century thinking on unearned rents and how they ought to be taxed (quite fully).

John Stuart Mill, the father of the “stationary state.” (George Frederic Watts, Public Domain).

For Mill, such concepts opened up the idea that societies and governments could control the distribution of income to the benefit of all. He envisioned this as a path to a “stationary state” without population growth or growth in aggregate economic activity. Mill had provided an answer to the Malthusian dilemma.

Closer to Daly’s era, Georgescu-Roegen and Kenneth Boulding blazed related pathways. They described principles crucial to the establishment of steady-state theory. Georgescu-Roegen touted the idea that the principle of entropy had to form the basis for any examination of economic systems. He perceived that earthly limits mattered a great deal. Population pressure was destined to bring resource scarcity to the fore, and existing resources were subject to constant degradation.

To Georgescu-Roegen, a pendulum was not the most telling metaphor for the  global economy, despite the swings between boom and bust. Rather, he viewed the economy as more of an hourglass, processing limited resources pursuant to “time’s arrow.”

Boulding was president of the American Economic Association in 1968 and 1969 and a scientifically trained systems thinker. He popularized the notion of an “economics for Spaceship Earth.” Reflecting on the limits reckoned by Malthus, Mill, Georgescu-Roegen, and others, Boulding helped us see the economy as a subset of our finite planet. Early in his career, he also conceived of a homeostasis at the level of the firm. Unlike the more financialized creatures in the current corporate landscape, Boulding’s firm need not depend on perpetual growth.

An Overlooked Essay of John Maynard Keynes

Writing in 1930, John Maynard Keynes saw the way to “economic bliss” with population stabilization and the broader sharing of our world’s immense productivity. (Patrick Chartrain, Public Domain)

John Maynard Keynes is best known for his revolutionary work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Six years before he published The General Theory, however, he speculated on “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Echoing Malthus and Mill, Keynes informed his readers of a simple way to banish the misery of the Great Depression. Productivity had become so capacious, he asserted, that even modest redistribution of its output could renew prosperity and full employment. This redistribution also lent itself to a shorter work week and increased leisure.

Keynes later wrote of a “consumption function” that revealed how government-engineered redistribution could focus demand on necessities and induce enough investment for full employment. It could do so, moreover, without banking on endless growth, in population or economic activity. These ideas made Keynes—perhaps the world’s most highly regarded economist—a nascent steady stater.

Along with his monetary theory that illustrated the futility of hoarding, Keynes’s principles of wealth redistribution would form the backbone of his General Theory. Today, that General Theory is still the clearest expression of how modern economies succeed or fail. It also helps us envision how modern economies may end their reckless pursuit of growth.

The Political Progenitors

Much like these imaginative and worldly economic philosophers, numerous political leaders helped build the sturdy foundation for Daly’s steady-state edifice. Though less explicit than Mill’s stationary state, the ethos of limits and management of natural resources—coupled with attention to redistribution—infused their governing philosophies.

Thanks to Maureen Cavanaugh’s scholarship, the death of Pericles did not intern his progressive tax foundation. (Alonzo Chappel, Public Domain)

The golden age of Athens was built on a prototype of modern progressive (redistributive) tax systems, as thoroughly described by legal scholar Maureen B. Cavanaugh. Centuries down the road, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and British parliamentarian William Beveridge illustrated how government planning and attention to social welfare could eliminate deprivation, with growth as an unnecessary afterthought.

The U.S. presidents Roosevelt—Theodore and Franklin—called attention to the limited and fragile natural resources upon which we all depend. TR established key parts of what became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He saw to the passage of the Antiquities Act, which allowed for the protection of “significant natural resources,” “national monuments,” and the wild lands that surrounded or composed these “monuments” (like the Grand Canyon). FDR established 140 national wildlife refuges, 29 national forests, and 29 national parks and monuments. He also created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted over two billion trees.

LBJ’s Great (Steady-State) Society

Most notable of all, but perhaps the least recognized as a steady stater, was Lyndon Johnson. Speaking at the University of Michigan in 1964, LBJ explained the essence of what he called the “Great Society.” He began his address with a challenge: “Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth.”

President Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson were known among friends and associates as “wilderness warriors.” (LBJ Library)

President Johnson added that leisure should be welcomed as a “chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.” He described the Great Society as “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

LBJ called for a society “where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” He lamented that “green fields and dense forests are disappearing.” “Once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, he added, “his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.”

Johnson was the most instinctive Keynesian of the modern U.S. presidents. He knew, therefore, inequality could be made small and poverty defeated. He also knew that, while an increment of growth would always accompany the eradication of unnecessary unemployment, continued economic growth in the aggregate wasn’t necessary. LBJ started building a prosperous economy that—for the first time since the nation started tracking GDP—didn’t rely on perpetual growth. Importantly, unlike many predecessors, he didn’t dismiss long-overdue civil rights in the process.

Like Keynes, Johnson also understood that population stabilization posed no threat to U.S. or global prosperity. He welcomed it as a key element of any successful modern economy. In his 1966 State of the Union address, he promoted U.S. assistance for international population programs. He pushed for these key aid programs throughout his tenure in office.

In the same address, Johnson called for an attack on “the wasteful and degrading poisoning of our rivers.” He promoted and signed the Wilderness Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and launched the Land and Water Conservation Fund. LBJ also helped pave the way for the key 1970s environmental laws. When the government passed the Wilderness Act, it brought 9 million acres of land under federal protection. In the sixty years since its inception, the Act has protected another 100 million acres of the nation’s wildest places.

And when President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, he did so in response to a years-long congressional push that began with President Johnson’s encouragement. This legislation can be regarded as a blueprint for the necessary containment of human economic activity. It is this, of course, on which a steady state economy rests.

In the (State) Laboratories of Democracy

U.S. state leaders have also established important steady-state footholds. Toiling often amid political pressures for growth and “development,” some U.S. governors have illustrated how to resist such pressures. Californians have been among them, and with an economy large enough to rank fourth among nations, their policies have global influence. But the surpassing environmental advocacy—and fragile ecosystems—in other states should also command attention.

Gifford Pinchot, a key ally of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, demonstrated how governors could lead a conservation movement. As the chief executive in Pennsylvania from 1923–27, and then again from 1931–35, Pinchot promoted state-level scientific management of natural resources. The National Governors Association was formed in 1908 after President Roosevelt convened governors to discuss the future of the nation’s natural resources. It became an important vehicle for Pinchot’s conservation ethic and for the earliest sharing of state management “best practices.”

Pinchot followed on the heels of governors like Michigan’s Fred Warner. In 1909, in the wake of Michigan’s timber industry collapse, Warner established a commission with authority over all of Michigan’s reserves and public lands. Some of these state leaders clashed with preservationists such as John Muir. But their increasingly popular “conservationist” stands elevated Pinchot’s well-known maxim, championing “the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.” It was the strict attention to the long run that tied this new class of governors to earthly limits and the possibilities for a steady state.

Less well known than the charismatic Gifford Pinchot or Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson were figures like Delaware’s Russell Peterson. Peterson was concerned about pollution, in particular, but also the preservation of Delaware’s treasured coastal wetlands.

Russell Peterson was governor of Delaware (1969-1973), chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (1973-1976), and the president of the Audubon Society (1979-1985). (Office of Senator Thomas Carper)

He moved aggressively to protect the Diamond State’s lands, instituting a moratorium on all coastal development in 1970. Peterson then convinced his legislature to pass the Coastal Zone Act, which included zoning restrictions meant to stymie industrial “development.” He also blocked a Nixon administration plan to turn the Delaware Bay into a “superport” for an expanded petrochemical industry.

A Republican governing in a state dominated by the world’s largest chemical company (E.I. duPont de Nemours), Peterson stood firm. “Governors usually embrace whatever new enterprise will produce new taxes and new jobs,” he wrote in his autobiography, “yet here I was, the new governor, questioning whether this is what we wanted.” Peterson added in retrospect that what he sought was an economy that “meets the needs of the present generation without shortchanging the future.”

In the same era, Michigan’s William Milliken and Oregon’s Tom McCall were fellow GOP governors who also challenged the “economic development” status quo. They were just as keen as Peterson on the protection of their state’s environmental endowments. Moreover, all three served when recessions pushed states hard in the direction of compensatory “growth.” Their stewardship and courage, therefore, offer especially notable lessons. Their legacies live on in Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon.

Though few of these thinkers and political leaders secured a decisive transformation, all illustrated the possibility of a prosperous steady state economy. All were buffeted by reactionary opponents, with narrow vision and selfish concerns. These opponents fell back consistently on the easy but always compromised way out: growth.

But as Herman Daly reminded us repeatedly before his death in 2022, our reliance on growth has become more uneconomic with each passing year. To free ourselves from this wholly unnecessary reliance, we must revive our collective memory of a rich political and theoretical tradition, one in which sustainability and broad prosperity stood together.

David Shreve is a Senior Economist at CASSE.

The post Overlooked Steady Staters appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Humans have come to rely on chemicals not only to increase the fruits of our agricultural labor but also to stop other species from partaking in the feast. And the toll exacted by these “pest”-killing chemicals is immense.

Rachel Carson conducts marine biology research in the Atlantic in 1952. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Over 60 years ago, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson detailed the effects of DDT, the first widely used chemical pesticide, on ecosystems and human health.

Thanks to the environmental movement that stemmed largely from Carson’s book and courage, the U.S. government has since banned DDT. However, an ugly procession of thousands of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and rodenticides has followed.

In 2023, humans used 3.7 million metric tons of pesticides globally. That’s up almost 200 percent from 1990, when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) started keeping track.

As pests build resistance, our pesticide use traps us in a vicious cycle—not dissimilar to the fertilizer-use cycle we’ve entered. And, as with fertilizers, the causes and effects of the pesticide cycle are not evenly distributed across the population. Pesticides are unique, however, in their devastating levels of inefficiency. Ninety-eight percent of sprayed insecticides miss their pest targets, affecting non-target organisms instead. The number for herbicides is 95 percent.

Let’s explore humanity’s history with pesticides, their impacts, and the reasons we cannot seriously curtail pesticide use while obsessed with growing the economy.

From the Glory Days to the Dirty Dozen

Historians believe Ancient Sumerians used sulfur compounds to kill insects in the 25^th century BC. By the 17^th century AD, the use of plants, such as tobacco and herbs, and chemical elements, such as arsenic, as pesticides was common. With mechanical innovations like sprayers, the industrial age, beginning in the late 18^th century, facilitated increases in pesticide use.

Of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pesticide office directors since 1974, all seven who continued to work after leaving the EPA went on to make money from pesticide companies. (top: EPA, bottom: National Archives)

However, synthetic pesticides didn’t come on the scene until the 1930s. Historians attribute them with saving thousands of people from insect-borne diseases during World War II. The decades that followed were the pesticide glory days, with little awareness of their consequences or restraint in their application. But when Silent Spring hit the market in 1962, it launched a movement that resulted in landmark environmental laws.

The newly created U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned domestic use of the insecticide DDT in 1972. However, the new laws weren’t robust enough to effectively regulate the variety of pesticides flooding the market or the geographic extent of their use. The need for a global convention became evident, and the United Nations responded with the Stockholm Convention, which came into effect in 2004. Member states set an initial goal to eliminate twelve of the most dangerous “persistent organic pollutants,” nine of which were pesticides.

But governments can’t keep up. The United States permits the use of thousands of different pesticides with hundreds of different ingredients. And government collusion with pesticide companies—uncovered in Canada and the United States—calls into question the sincerity of their efforts to keep up.

Bringing a Bazooka to a Knife Fight

An engraving of a London rat-catcher from 1789; Europe has been controlling rodent populations far longer than the United States. (Welcome Collection, CC BY 4.0)

We’re in deep with pesticides, and our relationship with them is taking a sickening turn. Pests are becoming resistant. Scientists have known for some time that pests, many of which reproduce rapidly, develop resistance via natural selection. They have also known that chemical pesticides can negatively impact populations of pests’ natural predators. But these effects, together with climate change, which is working in favor of pest populations, have created levels of resistance so alarming that some are calling it a “pest revival.”

Bowie State University Biology Professor Steve Sheffield has studied pesticides for decades. In an interview for the Herald, Sheffield called the pest-resistance cycle an evolutionary arms race. “We escalate, and they escalate. And then we have to escalate, and they escalate, and back and forth.” Sheffield explained how we sometimes accelerate this arms race by “bringing a bazooka to a knife fight”:

“In places like London, where they’ve had settlements for thousands of years, they’ve also had rats for thousands of years. Their arms race has been escalating that entire time. And unfortunately, their second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides have made their way over to the United States, and we’ve started using them. It’s overkill, because our rodents are not as resistant as the ones in Europe. So, we end up with all sorts of ‘secondary poisoning.’ A mouse eats the stuff, then an owl eats the mouse, then the owl dies because it has ingested the rodenticide in the mouse.”

The Primary Outcome of Pesticide Use: Pollution

The vast majority of pesticide used doesn’t serve its intended purpose. Instead, it travels—often large distances—through the soil, water, and air. On 64 percent of global agricultural land, pesticide residues exceed “no-effect concentrations.” In high-biodiversity regions, pesticide residues exceed no-effect concentrations by at least three orders of magnitude on over four million km². That’s larger than the surface area of India.

One could say that pollution is the primary outcome of pesticide use, rather than increased food production.

When it comes to humans, farmers and other pesticide handlers are at highest risk of health impacts. However, the general public is also exposed via the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. Pesticide exposure is linked to acute symptoms ranging from skin rashes to death, as well as chronic diseases. According to the World Health Organization, the most widely used pesticide ingredient, glyphosate, is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” In the United States, over 13,000 lawsuits have been filed over glyphosate’s links to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The second most widely used ingredient, atrazine, is linked to tumors, breast and uterine cancer, and lymphoma. The third most widely used, metolachlor-S, is linked to anemia and diarrhea.

It’s worth noting that glyphosate, atrazine, and metolachlor-S are all herbicides. According to Sheffield, the most critical gap in public knowledge about pesticides is the tendency to think herbicides are safe because they target plants, not animals:

“Maybe they’re not killing mammals or birds outright, but they’re causing sub-lethal effects, which debilitate one or more body systems. People also thought that herbicides are not very persistent in the environment. Well, some of them are very persistent. You could apply them, and next year you could find huge levels of them in the soil and in other environmental media.”

This man’s mother was exposed to Agent Orange when he was in gestation. (Agent Orange Deformities, CC BY 2.0)

Sheffield pointed to the infamous Agent Orange, composed of TCDD and 2,4-D, as an example of the persistence and human health impacts herbicides can have. The United States used Agent Orange, alongside five other herbicide cocktails, to defoliate the Vietnam jungle in the ‘60s. The public associates Agent Orange with horrible human-health consequences. But this hasn’t fueled sufficient anti-herbicide sentiment for the overall reductions that we need. For example, farmers still use 2,4-D legally.

Non-human animals are not immune to herbicide impacts either, nor to the impacts of other types of pesticides. Controlling for other factors, there is a statistically significant relationship between pesticide use and the loss of imperiled species. And when we zoom in to the microscopic level, we find that pesticides negatively affect soil microbes and soil respiration, leading to soil fertility loss. In this way, the vicious pesticide cycle is bound to the vicious fertilizer cycle.

Pesticides and the Growth Economy

Pesticides use and GDP, indexed to 100 for comparability. (authors’ graph, data from FAOSTAT and the World Bank)

The theoretical underpinnings of our hypothesis that GDP growth causes growth in pesticide use (and vice versa) are much the same as the underpinnings of the hypothesis that GDP and fertilizer use are causally related. Pesticides are tightly linked to our dizzying levels of agricultural productivity. Productivity growth pushes labor from agriculture and other extractive sectors (the “trophic base” of the economy) to manufacturing and services. This facilitates growth of the overall economy.

As with fertilizers, experts hotly debate the extent to which we need pesticides to support the human population. In one study, researchers determined the United States would need to convert twelve million hectares of wildlife habitat to cropland to produce the same amount of corn with no pesticides. The UN tackled such assertions head-on in a 2017 report. They stated that “Reliance on hazardous pesticides is a short-term solution that undermines the rights to adequate food and health for present and future generations.”

However, it is undeniable that pesticides have played a role in us reaching a population of eight billion. And their role in individual consumption increases and shifts—to more resource-intensive goods—is even more undeniable.

In the United States, the quantity of herbicides and insecticides applied to feed crops (primarily corn and soy) for factory-farmed animals in 2018 was estimated at 235 million pounds. That’s nearly a quarter of the country’s total pesticide use that year. The production of livestock—99 percent of which comes from factory farms, in the United States—accounts for 40 percent of global agricultural GDP. More GDP, more pesticides.

Population size and consumption patterns are the indirect linkages between pesticides and the size of the economy. Let’s also consider pesticides’ direct contribution to GDP. The value of the global pesticide market in 2019 was $68.6 billion, with estimated growth to $87.5 billion by 2024.

Together, the European Union, China, and the United States control over 80 percent of the pesticides market. In many cases, pesticide corporations have their headquarters in countries that have banned domestic use of their products. Their primary buyers are low- and middle-income countries. The United States is an exception, allowing the use of 85 pesticides that are being phased out or have been banned in the European Union, China, or Brazil.

A Statistical Assessment

From 1990 to 2023, pesticide use and GDP had a positive relationship across the 168 countries in our regression analysis. We employed pesticide-use data from FAO and real-GDP data from the World Bank. We found that pesticide use increases by an average of 29 kilograms for every additional $1 million of GDP. The results are highly statistically significant (p < 0.001).

The results of a two-way fixed effects regression, with GDP as the independent variable and pesticides use as the dependent variable.

Importantly, FAO’s data reflects pesticides applied within national borders. When countries import food, they effectively outsource part of their pesticide footprint. Imports are subtracted in the GDP equation, but they affect the importing country’s GDP indirectly. Imports may be used as an intermediate input in higher-value activities, and food imports facilitate structural shifts toward non-agricultural sectors.

It is also worth noting that, though no global dataset is perfect, FAO’s pesticide-use data displays some particularly troubling imperfections. Multiple countries have long runs of identical annual values between 1990 and 2023. This suggests FAO replaced missing data with repeated values from previous years. Of the 168 countries in our analysis, 65 exhibited at least 5 consecutive years of identical values, with some cases extending over multiple decades.

To see whether this materially affected the results, we re-estimated the regression after excluding countries with long repeated-value runs. The estimated increase in pesticide use per additional $1 million in GDP increased to 32 kilograms. The results were still statistically significant.

Let’s reframe our regression results—from all 168 countries, for a conservative estimate—in terms that are easier to grasp. 29 kilograms per million dollars is equal to 2.9 kg, or over 6 pounds, per $100,000. Six pounds may not sound like a lot, but small amounts of these potent chemicals can wreak havoc on ecosystems. Just how much havoc depends on which pesticide.

Let’s consider glyphosate. According to the EPA, glyphosate is toxic to freshwater organisms at 11,900 micrograms per liter. So, 2.9 kg—2,900,000,000 micrograms—is enough to poison 243,698 liters of freshwater. These figures are likely much higher for glyphosate, in the United States, at least, where glyphosate use has been increasing more quickly than overall pesticide use.

And it’s about to increase even more quickly. President Trump is working to dismantle the country’s already-too-weak regulations, alienating his MAHA supporters in the process. The White House issued an executive order calling for more domestic production of glyphosate. Leveraging the Defense Production Act, the order frames production of the chemical as a defense issue. It reads, “With…U.S. needs far exceeding current output, the threat of reduced or ceased production gravely endangers national security and defense, which includes food-supply security.”

However, this pesticide promotion is undoubtedly linked to the administration’s obsession with GDP growth—an obsession shared with most governments. Pesticide alternatives exist, and organic farming holds abundant promise. However, we will not make a sufficient and permanent dent in pesticide use until we root out this growth obsession. Only then will we finally bring back a nice collection of spring-time song.

Alix Underwood is managing editor at CASSE.

Marwa Ebrahem is a quantitative analyst at CASSE.

The post Spring: Ever More Silent appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The public’s ability to weigh in on vital matters impacting human health, safety, and our ecological footprint is under grave threat. As part of its aggressive campaign of deregulation, the Trump Administration has been eliminating the opportunity for public comment on rules made by federal agencies.

In the early months of 2025, the Trump Administration issued a series of Executive Orders that declared economic growth a priority. These orders directed agencies to repeal regulations deemed to stand in the way of that growth. An Executive Order from February 2025, for example, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative” directed agency heads to identify for elimination:

Trump has directed agencies to repeal regulations that protected human and ecological health. (The White House)

…regulations that harm the national interest by…impeding technological innovation, infrastructure development, disaster response, inflation reduction, research and development, economic development, energy production, land use, and foreign policy objectives.

A memo issued in the aftermath of these Executive Orders specified that these repeals should proceed without public notice or comment.

Clearly, the Administration understands the power of public comments to provide a check on regulated industries. This is particularly vital as the agencies that do the regulating are increasingly captured by those very industries.

The Power of Public Comments

Public comments on proposed policy have shaped the most monumental environmental and public interest victories in the United States. Strengthened public lands protections, toxic chemical regulations, labor laws, and air quality standards all emerged from robust processes for public input.

Agencies make rules that interpret and implement laws passed by Congress. Under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) of 1946, agencies must notify the public of proposed rules and rule changes. They also must solicit public comment, and consider and respond to all comments that are relevant and substantive. Although the APA does not specify a minimum length for comment periods, most are 30-60 days.

Public commenting is baked into agencies’ rulemaking processes under the Administrative Procedures Act. (Government Accountability Office)

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) provides another avenue for public comment on the environmental, social, and economic consequences of proposed federal projects. The 1969 statute directed federal agencies to adopt agency-specific regulations spelling out how they would implement it.

Most public commenting occurs through Regulations.gov, a portal linked to Federal Register announcements of new projects, rules, and changes. Agencies may also hold meetings, hearings, and town halls to allow the public to weigh in on proposed policy.

Examples and Limitations

Some of the most consequential environmental and public health proposals have attracted hundreds of thousands of public comments. The 2024 National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) update was significantly stronger than the previous standard for air pollution. The update was informed by nearly 700,000 public comments and advice from the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee—an influential committee that Trump has just reconstituted with industry representatives in place of academics. The tighter air pollution limit could prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma annually.

That is, if it is allowed to stand. Industry groups, concerned the new limit will constrain construction and manufacturing, have sued to revert to the old standard. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has moved to do just that.

In recognition of the vital role of public comments in shaping policy, agencies have until now made commenting relatively straightforward and accessible to all. (Government Accountability Office)

Even the masses of nearly-identical public comments that result from organizational campaigns have had an impact on key regulations. The 2015 EPA rulemaking that expanded Clean Water Act protections was shaped by such campaigns. So was the 2015 Federal Communications Commission ruling on net neutrality. Both of these rulings are now on Trump’s deregulatory chopping block.

Of course, many regulations end up largely unchanged from their proposed form despite substantial public involvement. And industry input is undoubtedly weighed more heavily than input from the public, scientists, or other experts. Industry and interest groups often have the opportunity to meet with agency officials and influence rulemaking before the public is even aware a rule change is under consideration. And administrations, especially the present one, rarely publicize opportunities for comment.

Rolling Back Public Input on the Road to Deregulation

The Trump Administration is taking the undermining of public input to a whole new level. Last summer, the administration removed a tool from Regulations.gov that made it easier for advocacy groups to collect and submit public comments. Citizens and groups are left to navigate a complicated and inconsistent system—when they can comment at all.

And in many cases, they cannot. In its first six months in office, the administration issued roughly 600 final rules among six science agencies. Most were rules to roll back or eliminate regulations protecting public health and safety. For almost a third of these, there was no public notice or comment.

To justify these flagrant violations of the APA, the Administration is exploiting a loophole known as the “good cause” exception. The APA specifies that an agency may forego public notice and comment when it for “good cause” finds that providing public comment opportunity is “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.” Historically, the exception has been used rarely; primarily for emergencies.

Trump’s Department of Transportation has eliminated the rule that allowed states to track greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. (Bureau of Transportation Statistics)

The argument that this exception applies to the repeal of regulations agencies deem “unlawful” will not likely hold up in court. But in the meantime, changes made with no public input are having real impacts on public health and the environment. Many of these impacts will be irreversible, regardless of how (or if) courts rule.

Examples abound. Three months into Trump’s second term, the Department of Transportation eliminated a 2023 rule with major implications for climate change. The rule required states to monitor vehicular greenhouse gas emissions on major roads, and was shaped by 40,000 comments. It was repealed under the good cause exception, with no public notice or opportunity for comment.

Gutting NEPA

Perhaps most alarmingly, early last year the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued an interim final rule to rescind agency regulations implementing NEPA.

The interim final rule is itself a mechanism that undermines the purpose of public comments to inform rulemaking. It allows comments on rules that have already been published, as opposed to proposed rules designed for significant public discourse. An interim final rule may or may not be altered in response to comments; the mere notation as “final” (interim or not) makes alteration less likely.

In the case of NEPA, the CEQ’s February 2025 rule generated more than 108,000 comments that have not been addressed. It triggered numerous agencies to rescind their own NEPA regulations, in interim final rules that themselves generated an additional 164,000 public comments. But the rules are now in effect, the comments unaddressed.

As a result, agencies are proceeding full-speed ahead on actions with serious environmental and public health implications. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for example, implemented a rule last July that excludes public involvement from most national forest projects. This includes logging, mining, road building, grazing, and the killing of wildlife (coyotes, for example) by the cynically-named Wildlife Services program. It also includes USDA responses to disease outbreaks in factory farms.

The Department of Energy is proceeding to build nuclear reactors using new technologies, with no notification or comment opportunity for the communities that will be forced to host them.

The Department of the Interior has invoked President Trump’s “energy emergency” in its “alternative arrangements” for NEPA implementation. These prescribe that environmental assessments for public land energy projects be completed in 14 days, with no required public comment.

Public comments overwhelmingly favored the creation of a buffer zone around the sensitive ecosystem, wildlife, and cultural resources of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. (National Park Service)

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) within Interior recently announced plans to open lands surrounding Chaco Canyon to oil and gas drilling. The 1,100-year-old historical site in New Mexico is surrounded by a 330,000-acre buffer zone. This is the product of years of advocacy by tribes to whom the site is sacred. BLM allowed only seven days for public comment on the proposal, a time period that nonetheless yielded 70,000 comments.

While the administration has just finalized its rule rescinding NEPA regulations, the agency rollbacks already in place are being challenged in court.

This is good news, according to Darya Minovi, Fair Access Research Manager for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In an interview for the Herald, Minovi pointed out that Trump lost most cases related to the APA in his first term.

Public Comments’ Hidden Superpowers

Which leads us to another key value of public commenting: Comments can bolster legal challenges to agency rules. Although industry undoubtedly has the upper hand when it comes to shaping these rules, public comments play a role beyond their APA-mandated consideration in rulemaking. “Every time I submit a public comment,” said Minovi, “I think of how it could be used in a court case down the line.”

The 2015 EPA ruling on the definition of “Waters of the United States” was informed by thousands of public comments. It extended Clean Water Act protections to 60% of the nation’s waterways. (Tim Lumley, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Indeed, public comments are vital tools for educating the courts, legislators, agency staff, and the public at large. Public comments become part of the public record, and part of the reservoir of ideas available to shape a more livable future.

This is true even for ideas that are too far ahead of their time for most policymakers of today. And it is true for public comments at state, county, and local levels. For example, a county comprehensive plan is an opportunity for educating county leadership and the public about the merits and mechanisms of a steady state economy for environmental protection and economic sustainability.

The administration’s attack on public commenting represents no small threat to democracy, human rights and health, and environmental protection. It also underscores a hopeful reality: that the public prioritizes these values over the growth that imperils them. This reality should inspire us to use our right to public comment wherever we still can, and to fight back vociferously against its erosion.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Eliminating Public Comments: Another Bow to GDP appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Counties facing growth challenges can use a variety of tools in their land-use planning to prevent sprawl. One tool is a “greenbelt” composed of a ring of natural and agricultural land that is conserved to hem in urbanization.

Greenbelts have long been a popular planning method in Europe. Researchers at Concordia University compared 30 European cities with greenbelts to 30 without. They found decreases in urban sprawl in almost all of the greenbelt cities. Fewer examples exist in the United States, but the Charleston County Greenbelt Program serves as a leading domestic model.

Located along the Atlantic seaboard, Charleston County is South Carolina’s largest county by land area. It stretches over half of the state’s 187 miles of coastline. Two of the state’s three largest cities, Charleston and North Charleston, are located in the county, creating substantial growth pressures. North Charleston has expanded into neighboring Dorchester and Berkeley Counties.

The greenbelt program has kept this urban-expansion prediction from the mid-1990s from coming true. (Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments)

This urban expansion was first quantified and raised as an urgent concern in 1997 by the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments. Remote-sensing imagery revealed that between 1973 and 1994, urbanization of land outpaced population growth by more than sixfold. This finding alarmed regional planners and elected officials as it indicated a further expansion of 250 percent in area by 2030 if left unchecked. In response, the county created a funding mechanism to address lagging infrastructure and loss of greenspace.

Today, the Charleston County Greenbelt Program stands as a premier example of how proactive land conservation can prevent worst-case growth. The program has secured over 28,000 acres, safeguarding natural systems while supporting rural livelihoods and public recreation. Yet, this innovative, voter-backed funding model faces an inherent tension. Its dependence on transportation dollars may lead to contradictory infrastructure, undermining conservation goals.

Envisioning a Green Network

By the early 2000s, growth had led to infrastructure deficiencies in Charleston County. In response, officials proposed a way to fund road repair and expansion: a sales tax of 0.5 cents on a dollar for 25 years. The funds would be devoted to transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges, and highways) and to the county’s mass transit system. Some of the revenues would go to maintenance, but some would be utilized for roads accommodating new development.

A vendor at the North Charleston Farmers Market. (North Charleston, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Citizens and conservation groups recognized that the development of roads and the disappearance of greenspace, both of which were accelerating, are intrinsically linked. They lobbied the county government to include greenspace protection in the expenditures. This message resonated well with voters and, in 2004, the tax was adopted by referendum.

The goal described in the referendum was to protect the most vulnerable properties to ensure at least 30 percent of the county’s total land area remained green. When the plan for achieving this goal was developed, 160,000 acres were already protected. Most of the protected area was in the Francis Marion National Forest or in coastal areas such as the 66,000-acre Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. The county aimed to secure at least another 40,000 acres.

Officials decided to allocate 63 percent of the new tax revenue to transportation infrastructure, 20 percent to public transit, and 17 percent to greenspace protection. The expected revenue for the greenspace program over the 25-year duration of the tax was $221 million.

 The Greenbelt Plan Takes Shape

After the referendum passed, the Charleston County Council appointed a 14-member Greenbelt Advisory Board (GAB). The board conducted comprehensive public outreach, surveying county residents and then creating a Comprehensive Greenbelt Plan in 2006. The executive summary of the plan described Charleston County as standing at a “turning point” because of the growth trajectory and the need to preserve land. 

The Comprehensive Greenbelt Plan, as adopted in 2006, was ambitious. Reflecting the needs of county residents, it established six types of greenspaces for protection:

• Passive greenspace: parks with limited trails for recreation and education;
• Natural resources: upland forests, wetlands, and riparian areas;
• Heritage landscapes: historic and cultural sites;
• Productive landscapes: agricultural land;
• Natural infrastructure: land providing substantial ecosystem services, such as tidal marshes, which protect ecosystems and communities from hurricanes; and
• Active greenspace: more-developed parks and athletic fields.

The document also included plans for corridors to connect greenspaces.

The green bullseyes represent greenbelt land acquisitions where public access is permitted (private acquisitions aren’t shown). (Charleston County Greenbelt Program)

Since 2006, the GAB has considered the protection of these land types when evaluating applications for funding. Furthermore, the transportation-tax legislation mandated that 70 percent of the greenbelt funding be allocated to land in rural areas. The remaining 30 percent goes to land within the City of Charleston’s urban growth boundary (UGB).

The GAB serves as the sole advisory body to the county council for urban and rural funding. Eric Davis, the director of the greenbelt program, told the Steady State Herald that the county doesn’t use the program to purchase and own land. Rather, other groups, such as municipalities, conservation organizations, land trusts, landowners, and businesses, submit proposals for grants to protect land.

Moreover, according to Director Davis, the program’s impact is rooted in its ability to multiply public investment. “Matching funds are very important to our program. We want our funds to leverage additional funds, and the scoring by the GAB reflects that.” To date, the program has attracted more than $240 million in matching funds, including state, federal, and local government grants, landowner donations, and partner grants.

Progress and Controversies

Over the past two decades, the greenbelt program has protected over 28,000 new acres. About two-thirds of this land is protected by conservation easements—legally binding restrictions on development. The remaining acres have been purchased in fee simple, transferring full ownership to organizations like land trusts. By 2016, a progress analysis indicated the county was well on its way to protecting 30 percent of its land.

The Charleston County council determines how much funding flows to the greenbelt program. (Charleston County)

The county council resolved to expand the program by increasing the transportation tax to one cent on a dollar. There was another referendum in November 2016. It passed by 52 percent of votes cast, significantly less than the 59 to 41 percent margin of support in 2006.

Though the revenue stream increased, the council chose to reduce the share allocated to the greenbelt program from 17 to 10 percent. Even so, the program was expected to accrue an additional $211 million by 2042.

But another change fundamentally altered the program. The county changed the 70:30 rural-to-urban allocation to 50:50. Land acquired in urban areas tends to be public, while land acquired in rural areas tends to be private. Director Davis explains, “There has always been a bit of tension between land that allows public access, and private land protections. Some of our county council members don’t see as much value in a private conservation easement.”

These changes have caused concern, particularly from land-trust organizations. Preservationists see the time horizon for saving rural land shrinking. Public sentiment may align with these views, given the failure of a 2024 referendum for another half-cent tax increase. That funding was intended for a multi-billion-dollar expansion of Interstate 526 into the Charleston Peninsula. Critics argued this pro-growth project would fuel over-development and suburban sprawl. 

Modifying the Model

The next step in the Charleston County Greenbelt’s evolution may come this fall. The county council is considering yet another attempt at a tax increase, with the details currently in development.

Although efforts to protect undeveloped land have yielded success, much remains to prevent sprawl, protect wetlands, and maintain biodiversity in Charleston County. (Lowcountry Land Trust)

In anticipation of the coming tax, an impressive consortium of conservation groups produced a report on the land preservation necessary to protect the county’s ecological integrity. They determined that over $750 million in additional funds are needed to protect the ecological integrity of rural areas (outside the UGB). They noted that protecting land inside the UGB costs some 15 times more per acre than protecting land outside of it. They implied that the county should reconsider the 50:50 split in revenue allocation.

However, at a meeting two days ago, the council approved the 50:50 split. That said, three public hearings will provide opportunity to amend the ordinance and ballot language before the referendum.

Matt Williams, President and CEO of the Lowcountry Land Trust—the main author of the report—noted in a Steady State Herald interview that the time is ripe for greater commitment. Greenbelt initiatives can be more effective by leveraging new state funding, according to Williams. In early 2026, Republican Governor Henry McMaster has championed a “10 Million Acres” initiative. The goal is to triple the present 3.2 million acres with some status of protection to 10 million acres—half the area of the entire state.

Williams described a nexus of state and county funding that could multiply land protection dramatically: “It’s exciting what has been accomplished over the past years. We have support from the public for expanded greenbelt funding in Charleston County and neighboring counties. And, we have a shared bipartisan sentiment at the statehouse. This has led to more success for land protection, but there’s still so much left to do.”

If the Charleson County council doubled the current amount of transportation tax revenues allocated to the greenbelt program, from 10 to 20 percent, it would result in around $850 million. This could go a long way toward realizing the goal of the conservation groups. And public survey results indicate solid support for land protection to stave off development pressures.

At their April 28 meeting, the council took the middle road, approving 16.24%, or around $690M, for the greenbelt program. Again, three public hearings will provide opportunity to amend this decision before the referendum.

Future Challenges

The coming months will be crucial in determining the future of what has been a model for land protection. Since Charleston County established its greenbelt program, surrounding counties have followed suit. Berkeley and Dorchester Counties approved greenbelt programs through a similar taxation process in 2024.

The Francis Marion National Forest is an important northern obstacle to sprawl in Charleston County, South Carolina. (Melanie Olds/USFWS)

A greater share of the proceeds of the tax, if directed to rural and ecologically sensitive land, will render a better outcome for sustainability. And, transitioning taxes to limit transportation projects to maintenance of existing roads and public transit would be a superior strategy to preserve biocapacity. That approach may win public support, given the skepticism in the county about expanding superhighways.

Even then, it may not fully align with steady-state principles to fund the preservation of natural areas with taxes derived from the very economic activity that threatens natural areas to start with. To evolve to a steady state, we must resolve the “trophic conundrum” that reduces biocapacity in one area to preserve it in another. This is one of the arguments for conservation by regulation (in contrast to a market approach).

That said, the major up-front expenditures (fee title and easement procurement) for greenbelt designation are one-and-done, solving some of the trophic conundrum when greenspace acquisition is completed. Management of greenspace and enforcement of regulations entails ongoing expenditure, but political leadership and community support—such as volunteerism, honoring easement terms, and public adherence to greenspace regulations—can make greenspace maintenance sustainable.

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

The post Charleston County’s Greenbelt Success appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Footprint accounting 101.

The science is clear: Our rate of economic activity is having disastrous impacts on the environment, starting with the climate so crucial to our survival. Economic activities require the use of natural resources and systematically entail pollution. Resources eventually get used up, as does the capacity of the planet to assimilate waste. We are reminded of Herman Daly’s long-running emphasis that the economy is a subsystem of the environment, not the other way around.

Expanding on this, steady-state economists and other post-growth advocates argue that economic growth cannot be decoupled from material throughput. This can be explained with the trophic theory of money, which follows from the trophic structure of the economy of nature. Agriculture and extraction comprise the trophic foundation of the economy, and all other sectors rely on that trophic base. Therefore, we cannot rely on “dematerialized” sectors to grow the economy while decreasing its disastrous impacts on the environment.

Therefore, consumption must be reduced, particularly in high-income countries that consume more natural resources and release more waste. But just how much do high-income countries need to reduce their economic activity to be sustainable? Two metrics help us understand sustainable limits by quantifying the relationship between the environment and the economy: ecological footprint and biocapacity.

The Conceptual Framing of Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity

The ecological footprint is a measure of the area needed to support the demands of economic activity. Biocapacity is a measure of the area available to supply natural resources and absorb waste at a sustainable rate. When the ecological footprint exceeds biocapacity, that indicates ecological overshoot. The Ecological Footprint Initiative has been measuring global ecological footprint and biocapacity since 1961. We have been in overshoot since 1971.

Global ecological footprint divided by global biocapacity, split by footprint components, from 1961 to 2024, with the red line emphasizing the overshoot threshold. (National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The ecological footprint and biocapacity are made up of comparable components, including cropland, grazing land, forest land, fishing grounds, and built-up land. In addition, ecological footprint includes a carbon component.

Scientists measure ecological footprint and biocapacity with a unit called the global hectare. They convert the productivity of different ecosystems to global hectares based on the world average productivity of a hectare. This enables comparisons between different land types, places, and years.

Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity of the United States

The United States has a high ecological footprint that is larger than its biocapacity. In 2022, there were roughly one billion hectares across the United States. When categorized into the biocapacity components and compared to global average productivity, this equates to 1.25 billion global hectares (gha) of biocapacity.

Area, biocapacity, and ecological footprint of the United States in 2022. (National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, CC BY-SA 4.0)

In other words, U.S. land, most notably cropland and forest land, was more productive than the global average. The average biocapacity of one hectare of U.S. cropland was 3.7 gha. One hectare of forest land provided an average of 1.6 gha of forest land biocapacity. However, this above-average biocapacity of cropland and forest land does not indicate sustainability. The country’s total ecological footprint is far higher than its total biocapacity.

In 2022, the U.S. ecological footprint of production was over 2.5 billion gha. This was similar to the ecological footprint of consumption, because the footprints of imports and exports were nearly equal. However, there were differences among the footprint components of imports and exports. The carbon component was more prominent in the ecological footprint of imports, whereas the cropland component was more prominent in exports. This means the United States imported more carbon-intensive goods and services than it exported, and exported more cropland-intensive harvests than it imported.

U.S. Trends: Better or Worse?

One good sign is that total U.S. biocapacity has been increasing over time. In 1961, total biocapacity was just over 1 billion gha, and by 2024, biocapacity had grown to 1.3 billion gha (2023 and 2024 data were forecasted).¹ This is because of increases in agricultural productivity. Biocapacity is a measure of what the environment can provide for human use, not of biodiversity or ecosystem health. In fact, it has a negative correlation with biodiversity indicators. Cropland illustrates this tension well, as using fertilizers and chemicals can increase agricultural productivity at the expense of ecosystem health.

Ecological footprint, biocapacity, and population of the United States from 1961 to 2024. (National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The U.S. population has also been increasing over time, which has decreased biocapacity per person. In 1961 biocapacity was 5.7 gha/person, and in 2022 was 3.8 gha/person.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ecological footprint of consumption has been increasing. In 1961 it was 1.6 billion gha, and by 2024 it reached 2.5 billion gha. Counteracting that increase to some degree is the per-person ecological footprint of consumption, which has decreased in recent years. In 1961, it was 8.9 gha/person, and in 2022, it was 7.9 gha/person. Although this is not a huge reduction, it provides a glimmer of hope that the country can reduce its footprint per person to offset population growth. However, it would need a very sizeable reduction to retreat to the safe operating space of its biocapacity.

In summary, the best available ecological footprint and biocapacity science reveals that the United States is exceeding a sustainable level of resource use for the production and consumption of goods and services. In 2022, the ecological footprint of consumption was 7.9 gha/person, and biocapacity was 3.8 gha/person. Ecological footprint is more than double biocapacity, meaning that economic activity is (over) two times the amount the United States can sustain. And with its outsized carbon footprint, the American economy is impacting the biocapacity of ecosystems on Earth.

Diving Into the Footprint Details

The average American travels forty miles per day, taking a toll on the climate and mental health. (Raysonho, CC0 1.0)

The carbon component makes up 64 percent of the ecological footprint embodied in the consumption of goods and services in the United States. Almost all of this carbon component (95 percent) comes from fossil fuel emissions. The largest share of these emissions (37 percent) comes from transport, of which road transport constitutes the majority. The next-largest share of U.S. carbon emissions (34 percent) comes from public and private utility companies producing electricity and heat for sale to third parties.

For many people, these details highlight the importance of decarbonizing electricity and heat generation and shifting transportation to less emissions-intensive modalities, such as rail. However, the emissions reductions needed to bring the United States back within its biocapacity are so immense that “green” alternatives aren’t sufficient. Americans must also reduce consumption of electricity and heat, as well as the distance they travel, because “green growth” is not possible.

In 2022, cropland made up 18 percent of the U.S. ecological footprint of consumption. Of the cropland ecological footprint, 84 percent was used for crops consumed by people and pets, 15 percent was used to feed livestock, and less than 0.5 percent was used to feed fish. Almost 700 million metric tons of crops were harvested, and just over half was maize. The second most harvested crop was soybeans at 17 percent of total harvests.

Yet the proportion of ecological impact does not equal the proportion of total harvests. For instance, maize made up 52 percent of crop harvests (metric tons) and 43 percent of the cropland ecological footprint of production (gha) in 2022. On the other hand, soybeans accounted for 17 percent of harvests (metric tons) and 32 percent of cropland ecological footprint of production (gha). Therefore, soybeans had almost double the ecological impact per metric ton of harvest in the United States.

The United States in the Global Context

The United States consumes far more than its share of the Earth’s natural resources. The global average ecological footprint of consumption was 2.7 gha/person in 2022. The United States crushed that benchmark at 7.9 gha/person. The average U.S. citizen consumed resources at almost three times the rate of the average global citizen.

Here’s another way of thinking about this: The United States is responsible for twelve percent of the world’s ecological footprint of consumption. Yet the U.S. population only amounts to four percent of the world population. This represents a highly disproportionate environmental impact.

The U.S. ecological footprint per person is even higher than that of most other high-income countries. The average ecological footprint of consumption in high-income countries is 6.1 gha/person.

Average ecological footprint of consumption per person (2022) by World Bank income classification, with example countries. (National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, CC BY-SA 4.0)

There are important debates about best practices for presenting ecological footprint and biocapacity data. Often, the ecological footprint of a territory is compared to the biocapacity of that territory. For example, U.S. ecological footprint is compared to U.S. biocapacity. This implies that a country achieves sustainability if its ecological footprint is lower than its biocapacity.

Many criticize this approach as an unfair representation of sustainability, because some countries are blessed with exceptionally high biocapacity. For instance, in 2022, the ecological footprint in Canada was 8.4 gha/person, and the biocapacity was 14.4 gha/person. Canada’s biocapacity was clearly higher than its ecological footprint. However, its ecological footprint per person was in the top ten highest in the world. Therefore, perhaps it is also important to compare a country’s ecological footprint to world average biocapacity (global ecological balance) in addition to the country’s biocapacity (local ecological balance).

In 2022, global biocapacity was 1.5 gha/person, significantly lower than the U.S. ecological footprint of 7.9 gha/person. In other words, U.S. citizens consume resources and emit carbon at five times the global average sustainable rate.

Ecological footprint and biocapacity data illustrate that we are using natural resources and releasing waste at unsustainable rates, in the United States and around the world. It shows that this has been happening for decades. The United States and other high-income countries are disproportionately responsible for this state of overshoot. They must pump the brakes on resource consumption and waste emissions if we are to exist within local and global sustainable limits. They must pump the brakes, in other words, on the economy.

¹ Except where otherwise linked, all data referenced in this article is sourced from the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, which are produced by researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative for the Footprint Data Foundation.

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

The post Measuring Ecological Limits: The United States and the World appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The promise of tomorrow’s tech wonders: always keeping us spellbound. (HarshLight, CC BY 2.0)

Lovers of technology tend to love quantitative analysis. But when it comes to the accounting of Earth’s biocapacity and our ecological footprint, these same technophiles are often happy to ignore simple arithmetic. While increasingly rigorous and reliable, the “overshoot” accounting they dismiss does include some difficult-to-measure variables. It will always be imperfect.

But for many nearsighted techno-optimists, this is beside the point. They argue that modern scientists have engineered such technological marvels that we should only expect more, with increasingly miraculous potential. These evangelists of innovation contend that we need not fret. They say the overshoot solution is “just around the corner,” firmly in the hands of the world’s inventors and engineers.

The Alluring Promise of Technology

Technological breakthroughs have increased our resource-use efficiency. Over the last half-century, U.S. energy productivity—or economic output per unit of energy—has increased by about 50 percent. In the United States, despite rapidly increasing digital processing demands, innovations had—until the dawn of AI-cryptocurrency grid-busting mania—kept associated energy demand in check.

Despite markedly greater efficiency in energy use, most developed nations still use more energy with each passing year. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, Energy Institute, Our World in Data; CC BY 4.0)

Many societies have figured out ingenious ways to recycle, re-use, and reduce, shrinking the ecological footprint of key production processes. A majority of the world’s steel, for example, is now a product of recycling rather than mining new ore. Almost a third of the world’s tungsten demand is met with recycling. Much is manufactured today with less waste and less throughput than before.

Further “green” innovations appear close at hand. More streamlined nuclear energy production (not without safety concerns) or wider deployment of geothermal energy may lessen our fossil fuel dependence. Solar energy—still comparatively costly and unreliable as a base fuel for energy systems—has become much more practical at the residential level than once imagined. Prospective battery-storage improvements promise greater feasibility for all intermittent energy sources.

Tradeoffs and Limits

If history is any indicator, however, these breakthroughs come with significant tradeoffs. Nuclear energy will likely remain relatively costly and risky. Intermittent availability will always limit the broad usefulness of solar power. Energy returned on energy invested (EROI) is declining rapidly for fossil fuels, and no substitute, renewable or not, appears likely to revive the old, higher EROI.

The agricultural Green Revolution, full of technological marvels, helped us feed more citizens at a lower cost overall. It offered promises of abundant food supplies for a growing population. But productivity increases required a massive infusion of fertilizer and water, which poisoned the Earth and depleted critical freshwater supplies. Regrettably, Green Revolution innovations have even compromised inexpensive oceanic food sources, on which much of the world still depends.

A quote from Norman Borlaug’s 1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address. (Lou Gold, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Norman Borlaug, whose critical work in high-yield agriculture sparked the Green Revolution, reminded us just prior to his death in 2009 that the revolution was a humanitarian emergency response. As such, it came with difficult-to-avoid compromises. Its returns were limited and would diminish rapidly if population pressure were left unaddressed. Indeed, by the time of Borlaug’s death, the revolution’s returns were already diminishing noticeably.

In a similar vein, metastasizing cryptocurrency and AI use have overwhelmed computer chip processing efficiencies.

Whether their gains are offset by population pressure, reinvestment of financial savings, Jevons Paradox, or the mindless GDP bulldozer, new technologies alone promise little relief from overshoot.

It’s no surprise, then, that our ecological footprint continues to overshoot Earth’s biocapacity, despite the cavalcade of technological wonders. Against a rising population and the inefficiency of our conventional trickle-down economics, the footprint-biocapacity reckoning remains untenable. Nor has our ballooning footprint resulted in substantial progress against global poverty outside of South and East Asia.

If technophiles can add and subtract, they must realize that without changed population and wealth-distribution dynamics, technological innovation can do little to deliver sustainable, broadly shared prosperity.

A Steady-State Riddle

Humanity faces an insurmountable predicament and an important riddle. In both cases, the potential of technology as a solution is overstated. Our predicament? The cheap hydrocarbon basis of modern prosperity is fading away. At our current economic scale, or anything close to it, fossil fuels cannot continue to function as the heart of a healthy economy. There may simply be no way to reconcile our need for cheap energy, our current population, and widespread well-being.

In 1926, Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon coined the term homeostasis, which described life processes that varied but remained relatively constant. (Welcome Collection, CC BY 4.0)

The vexing riddle stems from the inevitable reversal of economic growth. How can the world welcome the fertility transition—already in motion—and manage economic activities so that this transition generates prosperity rather than deprivation? Conventional efforts to redistribute wealth, built mostly on meager “safety nets,” are not up to the task. Without better sharing of the income and leisure from our immense productivity, hoarding and speculation will make this riddle impossible to solve.

There may be an optimal homeostasis on the horizon, but we will not reach it with technology alone or with unregulated market forces. We can reach it with better economic distribution and less population pressure.

The Delusion and Its Origins: Economic Theory and Practice

Few are willing to recognize our predicament or consider the factors that play into the end-of-growth riddle. Most ignore planetary boundaries and rising inequality, imagining that technological innovation will always provide an escape hatch. From what odd source does this willful delusion originate?

On one level, it is a logical extension of popular neoclassical equilibrium economics. This brand of economics consists of exotic and enticing mathematical expressions built on imaginary scaffolding. As defined in Entropy Economics, equilibrium theory states that we (in developed nations) live in the best possible world, and that we can keep it so long as we do little to disturb it. In this world, scientific breakthroughs and the free-market sorting of their relative merits combine to elicit, without fail, an optimum status quo, including a GDP growth rate typical of the late 20^th century.

Like all other fusion-reactor dream machines, this one—at the Lawrence Livermore Lab—was eventually abandoned. (Nuclear Fusion Reactor, CC BY 2.0)

Yet, time and again, economies based on this approach threaten sustainability and, more and more, prosperity. With little need to recognize the ecological foundation of the economy, equilibrium-theory followers also tend to be suckers for wasteful and unsettling investment bubbles. From Florida real estate in the 1920s to cold-fusion dreams and AI flackery today, these Ponzi schemes can keep reality at bay long enough to pump, profit, and dump. And then it’s on to the next speculative adventure.

As the Dutch proved with the 17^th-century “tulip mania” bubble, frenzied speculation is not limited to techno-dreams. The tech world, nevertheless, tends to generate speculation, with ease and with a large ecological footprint. If your paradigm is economic theory that ignores ecological reality, it is difficult to avoid this recurring brand of unreality, especially when the allure of short-term personal gain is so palpable. “Get the machine that goes ‘ping!’” our favorite Monty Python actors once reminded us.

The Delusion and Its Origins: Human Psychology

Basic human psychology also contributes to groundless techno-optimism. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman illustrated, we conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort. Efficiency gains from some technologies are easy to observe. Our ecological footprint is diffuse and not so easy to see or feel. We’re reluctant to deduce the particular from the general (my lifestyle contributes to ecological overshoot). But we’re quite willing to infer the general from the particular (this technology helps me, so it must be good for the world).

As Daniel Kahneman illustrated, common “heuristics,” our ingrained “rules of thumb,” often divorce us from reality. (Alfred Kiefer, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Kahneman also discovered a widespread prejudice when people sized up a new and bracing technology. They consistently rated it as offering exaggerated benefits and understated its perils. This prejudice makes it difficult to grasp what Robert Gordon illustrated in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: No technological innovation of the last century has advanced productivity and efficiency as much as the 1920s electric-power revolution. Diminishing returns to capital and to technological advance are baked into modernity, but most of us never recognize this.

Kahneman also illustrated a tendency with important implications for economic de-growth: Negotiations over a shrinking pie produce outsized psychological discomfort. Our perverted and unrealistic conception of optimal business-firm practices serves as an additional blind spot. Based on a purposeful mischaracterization of actual corporate behavior and case law, the prevailing business ethos supplants optimum profits with maximum profits. Compelling a chase for ever-rising profitability, “the firm” finds it difficult to countenance anything but perpetual growth. Seeking more becomes a principled practice, underwritten most effectively by techno-fantasies.

Humans are primed to resist the discord they associate with resource limits. When we bump up against limits, smart scientists and engineers (and their cheerleaders) are positioned to act as “white knights,” riding to the rescue.

If tech experts promise some new form of the productivity miracles they have occasionally delivered, few question their ability to do so. Neither the probability of success nor the likelihood of diminishing returns is carefully considered. Dreams about “absolute decoupling” of economic growth from resource use are only the most fantastic manifestation of this compelling evasion.

As a result, we see little need to shrink our pie (and share it more generously). We ignore the implications of scarcity and expensive energy. And since our brains evolved to punish meanness more readily than reward generosity, this too encourages habitual blindness. We don’t recognize the problem, or consider changes to address it, until it reflects behavior mean enough to unsettle us. And we characterize generosity, a foundational principle of all major religions and a key component of sound economic policy, as a sign of weakness or naiveté.

Seeing Through a Glass Less Darkly

For these reasons, we should neither be surprised nor swayed by the blind faith and willful delusions of technophiles and their free-market economist friends. Technology will continue to mesmerize, and it will bring small and welcome efficiencies. But it will also remain subject—in the face of mounting resource scarcity–to diminishing returns.

The second law of thermodynamics sheds light on the limits to the resource-use efficiency we can achieve via technology. It is the law of entropy: In all living systems, resources dissipate. On a lightly populated planet with a biocapacity greater than the population’s ecological footprint, we could thrive despite entropy, as the sun continuously adds energy to the system. But on a crowded planet, entropy cannot be ignored. Rising scarcity and pollution outflank innovation at every turn.

The projected 2026 Earth Overshoot Day, on which we use up that year’s allocation of resource and waste-absorption biocapacity, is June 5. (Global Footprint Network)

Despite all the innovations and efficiencies introduced over the last half-century, our global ecological footprint has steadily outpaced our planet’s biocapacity. This overshoot manifested itself for the first time a little over fifty years ago and has grown steadily. The only exceptions have occurred during recessions (most recently in 2007-08) or because of shocks like the COVID pandemic.

But brutal deprivation cannot be our only spur to action. Without conscious planning and the explicit recognition of planetary boundaries, a prosperous homeostasis may stray increasingly out of reach. Placing continued faith in a magic technological rescue will keep it there. Rising numbers of AI propagandists are dragging us into this familiar corner. They are encouraging business-as-usual economic policy and blinding us to real solutions—not so much connected to technology. Their delusion will become more and more problematic.

We do have viable alternatives. We can transcend our ingrained selfishness and misplaced pro-natalist anxiety. We’re unlikely to overcome these obstacles, however, if we remain dazzled by the technological world. As Canadian rock band The Guess Who famously protested in a recording released only a couple of weeks before the first Earth Day, “Colored lights can hypnotize; sparkle someone else’s eyes.”

David Shreve is a Senior Economist at CASSE.

The post Blinded by the Light: Techno-Optimism in Overshoot appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Montreal, December 13, 2022—During a press briefing on 12/12/2022, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, stated she didn’t “believe” there was a conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. Her “belief” runs contrary to UN Secretary General António Guterres, who kicked off the conference by noting, “With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.”

Secretary Mrema is behind the times, still harboring a fallacious belief in “green growth.” Meanwhile, hundreds of delegates and conferees have signed the CASSE position on economic growth describing the “fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation.”

Despite the $88 trillion GDP extinguishing species, displacing habitats, polluting air and water, acidifying oceans, bleaching coral reefs, melting glaciers and ice caps, and pumping forever chemicals into our soils and aquifers, Mrema fuzzily thinks we can have our cake and eat it too: continue growing an already-devastating GDP while reversing the Sixth Mass Extinction.

Secretary Mrema—an outstanding leader in other ways—is WRONG about GDP vs. biodiversity. E.O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, David Suzuki and many other world-class conservation scientists have spoken out about the fundamental conflict between GDP growth and biodiversity. While some countries do need economic growth, as no one would deny, growth won’t magically occur without impacting biodiversity.

With all the calls for “30 by 30,” or even “Half-Earth” — whereby much of the planet must be protected from economic activity, it should be obvious that the proper economic policy would be not growth for most countries, but rather the steady state economy (and even degrowth in countries with rapacious ecological footprints). In other words, biodiversity conservation calls for “steady statesmanship” in international diplomacy. Unless Secretary Mrema can recognize and acknowledge this, she should be replaced by someone who can and will.

~ends~

For more information, contact CASSE at info@steadystate.org or Brian Czech at 703-901-7190.

The post At COP15 Mrema is Wrong — Guterres is Right appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Trump’s deregulatory agenda has particularly favored the energy sector. (Gary Machen, CC BY-ND 2.0)

At the beginning of his second term, President Trump pledged a regime of aggressive deregulation to stimulate economic growth. Unfortunately he has followed through on that promise, claiming 646 deregulatory actions over the past year. These have aided industries ranging from slaughterhouses to automakers no longer bound by emissions standards under the Obama-era Endangerment Finding, which has now been reversed.

The energy sector has been among the foremost beneficiaries. Environmental rollbacks have already unleashed accelerated oil, gas, and mineral development, especially on treasured public lands.

Aside from its reckless imperilment of the natural world, Trump’s deregulation poses alarming risks to human health and safety. Among the most alarming are changes to regulations governing nuclear reactors and their waste.

Rollbacks Too Radioactive for Public Notice

In January, with no public notice or involvement, the administration overhauled nuclear safety regulations. The changes, though made in secret, were shared with the companies that stand to benefit from them.

Although its exact scope remains unknown, we know that the overhaul cut over 750 pages of Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear safety regulations. The changes nix requirements that groundwater, wildlife, and plants be protected from harm by radioactive materials. They replace these requirements with vague exhortations that “consideration must be given” to avoiding such harm. They double the allowable limit of accidental radiation exposure for workers before an investigation is triggered. And they cut entire chapters on how and with what physical barriers to secure nuclear material.

Trump issued the changes in a series of orders intended to expedite the construction of a new generation of reactors. Under the terms of a pilot project launched at a meeting with industry last May, at least three of these new so-called small modular reactors (SMRs) should be operational by July 4.

“Small” modular reactors are actually as large as a city block. They generate less than 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity, in contrast to the 1,000 MW generated by conventional large nuclear plants.

Concept design for a 300 MW modular reactor planned to repower the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan. (Department of Energy)

The program will be under the direct oversight of the DOE. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is more independent and has overseen the safety of commercial reactors since the 1970s. However, the NRC will only consult on the development of reactors built under the pilot. The program will also be exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider and solicit public comment on the environmental consequences of major projects.

The rollbacks, as far as we know, only apply to reactors built under the pilot. But their impacts could reach much further, according to Edwin Lyman, Nuclear Power Safety Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re pretending that these are test reactors that are not being built to generate commercial power,” said Lyman in an interview for the Herald. But the changes “could propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States.”

Nuclear Safety Regulations: A History of Hard Lessons

The rollbacks target regulations that emerged from decades of hard lessons and careful deliberation. After World War II, when the United States demonstrated the terrifying power of the atom in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, governments around the world quickly harnessed that power for commercial use. The U.S. government put a single agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, in charge of both the promotion and the regulation of nuclear power.

The conflict of interest inherent in this dual mandate was soon put to the test. In the 1960s, a Bandwagon Market for new reactors strained the ability of the agency’s small staff to ensure safety. Runaway costs and construction delays took their toll on public sentiment toward nuclear power. So did persistent concerns about radiation leakage from nuclear plants in the case of an accident or during routine operation.

The government established the NRC in 1974 to address public unease and provide independent regulation of the industry.

Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. (Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, CC BY-SA 2.0)

But NRC oversight was not enough to prevent the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history just five years later. In 1979, a combination of mechanical failures, malfunctioning indicators, and poor employee training at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania caused about half the fuel to melt. Although minimal radiation was released, the accident triggered the evacuation of 144,000 people and widespread public alarm.

Other mishaps have plagued the industry. In 1975, a fire broke out at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama when a worker used a lighted candle to check for proper sealing around cables. In the early 1990s, whistleblowers at the Millstone Power Station in Connecticut reported that they had faced intimidation or dismissal for calling attention to dangerous violations of NRC regulations. And in 2002, an inspection at the Davis-Besse nuclear power station in Ohio revealed significant corrosion of the pressure vessel’s head. The degradation was so severe as to indicate prolonged negligence in maintenance and inspection.

Each of these incidents had a chilling effect on public sentiment toward nuclear power. This effect was magnified by accidents at Chernobyl in 1986 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in 2011. The NRC has since implemented significant safety reforms including improved operator training, emergency preparedness, and equipment requirements.

Data Centers’ Gluttonous Energy Demand

Given this history, one might think we’d need a pretty good reason to scrap nuclear safety regulations.

No such luck. The current push toward deregulation originates with one industry, and it is one of questionable relevance to human well-being. It is the proliferation of electricity-guzzling AI data centers that is driving the push to gut regulations and build reactors in a hurry.

Google Data Center, Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Chad Davis, CC BY 2.0)

Data centers, which are increasingly but not exclusively used to power artificial intelligence, accounted for more than four percent of U.S. electricity consumption in 2023-2024. This figure is likely to increase to 17 percent by 2030. Although natural gas will power most AI in the near future, investments by tech billionaires and firms may soon change that.

Meta, Nvidia, and Bill Gates, for example, have invested millions in nuclear startup Terrapower, which the NRC just approved to build a reactor in Wyoming. This was the first commercial reactor approved in the United States in more than a decade. The speed of its approval suggests the NRC may be taking safety shortcuts to grease the wheels of industry growth. Under increasing bipartisan pressure from Congress, the agency’s response has been to streamline permitting and, critics argue, compromise safety.

A Perilous Deregulation-Driven Renaissance

Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Georgia. (Department of Energy)

In addition to putting safety on the line, hasty permitting can actually increase costs. The story of two reactors recently completed in Georgia displays this unfortunate consequence. In 2009, Georgia Power received NRC approval to build two reactors. These reactors, the first to receive approval in three decades, would join two existing reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta. These had themselves come online in 1987, at a cost exceeding their budget twelve fold.

In 2023–24, Vogtle Reactors 3 and 4 were completed—seven years behind schedule and $23 billion over the initial budget of $14 billion.

Despite the industry’s 2003 promise of energy “too cheap to meter,” Georgia utility customers are now paying some of the highest rates in the nation.

Such delays and cost overruns are par for the course for the industry. But contrary to the claims of nuclear proponents, they can seldom be blamed on burdensome regulation. In the case of Vogtle, construction errors, corporate malfeasance, and regulatory laxity were at fault. A study noted that “inadequate Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation and streamlining procedures meant to encourage investment in new nuclear projects contributed to excessive costs.”

And the dangers of lax regulation are large even for reactors that are small. SMRs contain less radioactive material and produce less heat. But rule changes that eliminate safety features could make them more dangerous, in the case of an accident, than a large reactor with stronger safeguards.

SMRs also do not address the persistent problem of waste. Data centers, industrial facilities, and communities with an SMR will likely have to house nuclear waste on site indefinitely. This prospect is particularly concerning in light of studies predicting greater volumes of waste and more reactive waste from SMRs than from traditional reactors.

Although SMRs have a smaller land footprint than conventional reactors, they produce energy less efficiently. This is in part due to economies of scale. It is also due to increased neutron leakage from their compact cores—leakage that damages the reactor and generates more waste.

Beyond safety and waste concerns, critics argue that SMRs’ potential to meet energy demand has been vastly overstated. Energy expert Vaclav Smil estimates that to contribute 10 percent of its electrical supply, the United States would have to build 1,300 SMRs generating 100 MW each. This does not account for the coming explosion in energy use from AI.

Limits to Nuclear-Powered Growth

The industry allies who populate the Trump Administration and tech billionaires like Peter Thiel are not the only partisans of today’s bandwagon nuclear market. Nuclear power is also being hailed as a solution to climate change.

But existing nuclear capacity only mitigates two to three percent of global GHG emissions. This figure is limited by the fact that nuclear power, for the most part, only provides electricity. Electricity accounts for only 20 percent of global energy demand. The industry touts its potential to fuel some industrial processes. However, generally, nuclear cannot produce the high temperatures required for processes like steel and cement production that account for significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Another limitation is uranium. Like fossil fuels themselves, nuclear fuels are a finite resource. The highest grade uranium used to power reactors has already been mined, so future mining will yield lower grade ore. This ore will require more fossil fuels expended to yield the same amount of energy. It is a story of diminishing energy return on energy invested common to most of Earth’s rapidly depleting resources.

Uranium mining generates hazards of its own, as at this historic mining area in Mesa County, Colorado. (Environmental Protection Agency)

In our resource-constrained world, it is also worth noting that nuclear power has an extraordinary demand for water.

As war with Iran imperils our access to cheap oil, nuclear will likely be embraced with increasing urgency. But every part of the nuclear fuel cycle, from mining uranium to building a reactor to keeping that reactor cool, requires fossil fuels.

And at the end of that cycle, nuclear waste must be contained for as long as it remains radioactive. For some materials, this may be thousands of years. This is a time scale that will include climate change and resultant floods, fires, tornadoes, tsunamis, and civil unrest. Keeping waste safely contained on such a time scale, and under such circumstances, is also complicated by the potential for supply chain disruptions that block trade of materials essential for containment.

Ultimately, nuclear power may partially answer the question of how to produce less carbon while generating electricity. But it does nothing to solve the much larger and more fundamental problem of ecological overshoot. That is a problem that cannot be solved by simply “transitioning” modern, growth-obsessed techno-industrial society to run on novel energy systems.

It is a problem for which the only real solution is to scale down our population and our economic enterprise, to a smaller steady state that is in balance with Earth’s capacity.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

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