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

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

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

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

Agencies Starved to Sabotage Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Science Grants Now Too Woke to Fund

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Scientific Merit to a Political Loyalty Test

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

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

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

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

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

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

Axing Advisory Panels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basic Science vs. Industry Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future Arrives Sooner Than Expected

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANI → AGI → ASI?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence Explosion

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

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

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

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

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

The Alignment Problem

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Our Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like the economy it feeds.

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

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

The United States and Iran are engaged in peace talks, and the Strait of Hormuz is at the top of the agenda. Meanwhile, the United Nations maritime agency is promoting an alternative route through the Strait. Several tankers have already used the new route, despite threats from Iran, which relies on the Strait as its main source of leverage. Traffic is still far below pre-war levels, and stability in the Strait depends on Israel ceasing its attacks in Lebanon. That doesn’t look likely.

A crude oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. (Kees Torn, CC BY-SA 2.0)

There’s a reason the Strait of Hormuz is now a household name. Over 20 percent of the oil consumed globally comes through the Strait. Likewise, nearly 20 percent of liquified natural gas is shipped through the Strait, mostly from Qatar. Since the start of the conflict in late February, these flows have diminished to almost zero.

Consumers worldwide are feeling the squeeze at the gas pump. It’s easy to see how the supply shock is affecting the prices of other goods and services, as well. After all, fossil fuels are the core of the modern economy, used in every sector. Agriculture is no exception, and the agri-food sector has indeed been impacted by the fossil fuel shortage.

But fossil fuels aren’t the only goods stuck in the Strait that conventional agriculture relies on. The Middle East is a major producer of fertilizer ingredients, such as urea, sulfur, and phosphate. About a third of urea exports come from the region, and 3.9 million metric tons of them have been suspended since the start of the war. The region affected by the war produces around 45 percent of sulfur exports. Saudi Arabia alone produces 20 percent of the global phosphate supply.

Prices for most food products have remained stable thus far. However, as new planting cycles begin, high fertilizer prices will affect producers’ productivity and, therefore, profitability. If the Strait remains closed, it won’t be long before they pass these costs on to consumers. It’s a good time to ask ourselves what would happen if, instead of a temporary geopolitical crisis, it was ecological breakdown causing agricultural productivity to dip.

How High Is Inflation?

Inflation has accelerated globally over the last few months, and experts are blaming high energy and transportation costs. Before the start of the conflict, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) predicted “all-items” inflation would be 2.8 percent in 2026. In March, they revised their forecast upward to 4.2 percent.

When asked by reporters whether he is concerned about inflation levels, U.S. President Trump said, “I love the inflation,” and that they’re “going to come down like a rock” when the war is over. (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The OECD also revised their global GDP growth projections for 2026 from 3.4 to 2.8 percent. It’s not surprising that increased inflation and decreased growth are going hand in hand, as the money in the economy chases fewer goods than monetary authorities had expected. If the conflict is prolonged, the OECD predicts GDP growth will dip below one percent. This hasn’t happened since COVID and, before that, the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

Vegetable oil prices have spiked, largely because high oil prices have increased demand for biofuels, which have inputs in common with vegetable oil. Otherwise, food prices have stayed fairly constant. After all, the Middle East is not a big exporter of staple crops. And fertilizer shortages haven’t hit food prices yet.

However, the producer price index (PPI) serves as an early warning system for consumer price inflation, and right now, “the signals are flashing red.” The PPI is a measure of the prices producers receive for their outputs—from other producers or from retailers—as opposed to the prices consumers pay for final goods. Looked at from another angle, the PPI is an index of the prices producers face in their production activities. U.S. PPI stood at six percent year-over-year in April.

Experts are pointing the finger at the oil price shock and tariff pressures. However, the PPI for fertilizer inputs in the United States has increased by 17 percent since February. Likewise, the PPI for fertilizer manufacturing has increased by 14 percent. Just weeks after the start of the war, the global price of urea had doubled. Sulfur prices are well above historical averages, and already-high phosphate prices have also increased, though more moderately.

What would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was closed so long that producers and retailers could no longer absorb increased input costs, passing them on to consumers? Thinking bigger-picture and longer-term, what would happen if high food prices persisted due to ecological overshoot? Let’s approach this question through the lens of the trophic theory of money.

Mouths Fed Per Farmer

The economy is embedded in and depends upon Earth’s ecosystems and, like those ecosystems, has a “trophic” structure.

Long-time steady staters will be familiar with the trophic structure of the economy. Like primary producers (plants) in ecosystems, agriculture and extractive sectors make up the “trophic base” of the economy. Materials and energy flow from this base to heavy manufacturing, then light manufacturing, forming a trophic pyramid. Services are provided at every step; perhaps “gervices” is more apt, as all services are married to goods in their production and consumption.

Just looking at the numbers, it’s easy to lose sight of the economic importance of food. Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus said, “Agriculture, the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just three percent of national output. That means that there is no way to get a very large effect on the U.S. economy” (Science, September 14, 1991, p. 1206). Our machines may not run on food, but we do. If you couldn’t use money to buy food, you would quickly lose interest in your job.

That’s the essence of the trophic theory of money: We use money because there is agricultural “surplus,” in the sense that farmers grow more than enough to feed themselves. One corollary of this theory is that the “warranted” money supply reflects the number of mouths fed per farmer. This relationship may not be linear, given that value is added to producer goods and services further up the trophic pyramid, until the prices of final goods and services are reached. But it’s undeniable that the relationship exists.

If increases in mouths fed per farmer enable economic growth (and corresponding growth in the warranted money supply), what happens when the number of mouths fed per farmer decreases? Barring temporary blips in the late 1980s and during COVID, food supply per farmer per day hasn’t decreased since global data became available in 1961.

We’re gearing up for another blip, as fertilizer shortages threaten to decrease the number of mouths fed per farmer. Countries outside the Middle East are stepping up to fill the void. China lifted export restrictions on urea, and the United States and European Union have taken steps to increase fertilizer production.

This may soften the blow of the current geopolitical crisis, but it will only hasten the long-term ecological one. We should be prepared for a scenario where climate change, freshwater shortages, and degraded soils render useless our best efforts at maintaining current levels of agricultural productivity. In that scenario, what would happen to the rest of the economy?

Pushed to Grow Food

Like fossil fuels, agricultural outputs can serve as direct inputs for other sectors. Globally, an estimated 12 percent of cropland production goes to non-food uses, which include biofuels and textiles. In the United States, 31 percent of the corn grown is used for biofuel.

But let’s focus on the majority of agricultural outputs, which are used as food, either standalone or as ingredients. The trophic theory of money implies that, if farmers can’t feed as many people, more people will become farmers, while the warranted money supply decreases. But the “nominal” money supply remains, at least for some time, so inflation ensues, as the nominal money supply is no longer warranted.

A community garden in the Bronx in New York City. (Flickr, Public Domain)

Especially in high-income countries and in cities, you might expect inflation to drive people to cut back on non-essential consumption. It would also reinforce the push toward homegrown food production, even in urban settings. A recent survey found that 87 percent of Americans are planning food-growing projects in 2026. Of those food growers, 61 percent listed rising grocery prices as their top motivator.

In many low-income countries, subsistence farming provides a safety net when food prices go high. Unfortunately, this method for coping with high prices isn’t as effective as it could be. That’s because smallholder farmers—the majority of whom are “net food buyers”—often don’t own enough land to increase production, much less to surplus levels.

Pulled to Grow Food

In an interview for the Herald, Rob Vos, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said, “If prices go up or farmers expect higher prices, then—if they can—they’ll try to produce more of those commodities. Sometimes, it’s a substitution effect, from one crop to another. But generally, we see that if there’s a chance to produce more and sell more in the markets, farmers will try to do that. And if needed, they’ll also increase the amount for labor, which will push up wages.”

However, Vos emphasized food-price increases must be significant for demand for agricultural labor—and subsequently, wages—to rise substantially. What’s more, output prices (what farmers receive) must rise at least commensurate with input prices (what farmers pay) to incentivize farmers to grow more food.

Let’s again apply a trophic lens to a scenario where supply shocks cause the economy to shrink. Because this would decrease the warranted money supply, it seems unlikely that anyone’s real wages—adjusted for inflation—would increase. However, we might expect wages in the more vital sectors at the economy’s trophic base, if not to increase, to decrease less than in other sectors. In other words, we might see wage redistribution toward the sectors most necessary for our well-being.

In the case of sharp fertilizer-price increases, Vos says farmers may feel more pressed to improve their fertilizer-use efficiency than to hire more labor. Fertilizer application is not always optimal. “When fertilizers are cheap, there will be farmers who buy more than they need and waste it or use too much of it. For these farmers, there’s quite a bit of space to reduce costs.”

Industrial, or conventional, agriculture typically requires more inputs, such as fertilizer, and less labor than other farming techniques. (Elevate Legal Services, CC BY-NC 4.0)

But according to Vos, most modern farmers already use fertilizer efficiently, at least in terms of maximizing short-term yields. To reduce their fertilizer inputs, “These farmers need to adapt their practices and technologies, and that doesn’t happen overnight. They could consider switching to biological forms of fertilizer, like manure, but in many contexts, that’s not as productive as chemical use. So, they’d lose productivity unless they’re able to combine use of biofertilizer with improved farming practices.” In other words, chemical fertilizer prices would have to rise steeply and stay high before farmers are likely to switch to alternative fertilizers and practices such as regenerative farming.

This brings us back to labor, because—though Vos pointed out this isn’t always the case—the consensus is that organic and regenerative farming require more labor than “conventional” agriculture.

“Development” in Reverse

Most people would consider the movement of labor to the agricultural sector to be “development” in reverse. When presented with the trophic theory of money (TTOM), Rob Vos compared it to structural change theory, the dominant development theory in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The idea is that for an agricultural economy to transition to an industrial economy—assumed to be desirable—agricultural productivity increases are necessary. “People have known that, probably for centuries or millennia. For ancient societies to build temples and churches, they needed a lot of surplus labor that wasn’t working in agriculture. Agriculture needed to be productive enough to feed all that surplus labor.”

Is fewer farmers always and everywhere a worthy goal? (Narek75, CC BY-SA 4.0)

What sets TTOM apart is that it provides a conceptual model for describing the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection in monetary as well as physical terms. It helps us demonstrate that the growing flow of GDP fundamentally requires an expanding trophic base and a growing ecological footprint. It places the economy firmly within the context of planetary boundaries, pointing to the limits of structural change.

It also helps us understand why agricultural productivity growth is plateauing. The ecological crises that will eventually cause it to reverse are driven in part by the very practices that enabled explosive productivity gains in the short term.

Will we wait for this to play out extensively, forcing the economy to contract with devastating social consequences? Or will we intentionally transition to a steady state economy, via degrowth in some regions, building a new agri-food system fit for people and planet in the long run? Maybe the new system will require more labor, and maybe we can harness that for improved well-being. The Strait of Hormuz closure, despite the devastation it has caused, is an opportunity to go back to the agricultural drawing board to catalyze sustainable change.

Alix Underwood is managing editor at CASSE.

The post A Wave of Inflation from the Trophic Base appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Ecological footprint and biocapacity are derived using an accounting framework that quantifies economic activity in relation to the environment. Researchers have described this accounting framework as the supply (biocapacity) and demand (ecological footprint) of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity.

Launch of the 2026 edition of the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts. (Footprint Partnership)

Many people and organizations around the world use these metrics to communicate and measure impacts on the environment. Some governments include ecological footprint and biocapacity data in their climate and biodiversity strategies. Non-profits use this data to communicate environmental impact to the public.

Let’s explore some of the theoretical and methodological assumptions in the ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting framework. As a researcher in the ecological footprint community, I have attempted to characterize these assumptions how the original researchers intended for them to be interpreted. I did not include all perspectives on these assumptions, nor did I include all assumptions and critiques. The goal is to give practitioners and others using the data a greater understanding of how it should be interpreted.

Generating the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts (NEFBA)

Ecological footprint measures the area needed to support the demands of economic activity, and biocapacity measures the area available to support those demands. In a sustainable world, ecological footprint would not exceed biocapacity. However, this is not the case in an economic system plagued by growth obsession. Global ecological footprint has exceeded global biocapacity since the early 1970s, a condition known as ecological overshoot.

Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative at York University and the University of Iceland generate National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts (NEFBA) every year. The NEFBA include data reflecting a country’s economic production, trade, and consumption. The Ecological Footprint Initiative is a research and data hub for world-leading experts in ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting. They also apply the NEFBA at other scales—global, regional, and local—and improve upon the methodology.

Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative calculate the NEFBA by stitching together numerous reliable international data sources. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (UN) FAOSTAT database is an important source of data in the NEFBA. Footprint researchers extract data from FAOSTAT on crop and livestock products, fish capture, forestry products, land use, and land cover. Other data sources include the International Energy Agency for carbon emissions, UN Comtrade for traded goods, and Global Carbon Budget for the quantity of carbon emissions sequestered by the world’s oceans.

Data sources for the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts.

Over the past 30 years, practitioners and scholars around the world have developed the ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting methodology, and researchers have scientifically verified it in numerous publications. The NEFBA (previously referred to as NFA) were first generated by researchers at the Global Footprint Network (GFN) in the early 2000s.

GFN is a not-for-profit research organization helping society respond to ecological overshoot. In 2018, GFN transferred the NEFBA production to York University’s Ecological Footprint Initiative. Since then, GFN has focused on promotion and application of the data. Their flagship promotional campaign is Earth Overshoot Day.

Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative employ the same rigorous methodology that GFN used. The Ecological Footprint Initiative also leads a multi-stakeholder partnership called the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab (IEFLL). This lab aims to improve the NEFBA methodology and make the data more accessible to practitioners and the public. IEFLL mobilizes knowledge on their blog and YouTube channel.

From Hectares to Global Hectares

To understand the assumptions made to generate the NEFBA, one must first understand how ecological footprint and biocapacity are quantified. Researchers use a global-average unit of bioproductivity called global hectares. This allows them to compare different land types, times, and regions. How do researchers go from hectares to global hectares?

There are three main parts of the ecological footprint equation: (1) productivity demand, (2) yield factor (YF), and (3) global equivalence factor (EQF). Let’s assume we’re calculating the ecological footprint of a country. The productivity demand is the national harvest of a specific product—or, in the case of the carbon footprint, the carbon emissions—in annual metric tons, divided by the national yield of the same product in annual metric tons/hectare. The yield factor is the national yield divided by the average world yield, both in annual metric tons/hectare. The global EQF is “a productivity-based scaling factor that converts a specific land type (such as cropland or forest) into a universal unit of biologically productive area, a global hectare.”

Simplified ecological footprint and biocapacity equations for U.S. forest products. YF = yield factor. EQF = equivalence factor. Forest land biocapacity also accounts for carbon sequestration, which is not captured here.

The biocapacity equation includes (1) bioproductive area, (2) yield factor, and (3) global EQF. The bioproductive area is the national growth (annual metric tons) of a specific resource divided by the national yield (annual metric tons/hectare). The yield factor and global EQF are the same as in the ecological footprint equation. The main difference between these equations is that ecological footprint includes the annual harvest rate and biocapacity includes the annual growth rate. When the harvest yield exceeds the growth yield, that indicates ecological overshoot.

Surprising Assumptions About the Cropland Ecological Footprint

Even after thirty years of refinement, condensing concepts as complex as economic activity and the biosphere’s regenerative capacity into a single metric requires making some assumptions. One conceptual assumption concerns the cropland component. The cropland footprint measures the amount of land demanded to grow crops consumed by humans or used as fibre materials, and some crops consumed by livestock and fish. Cropland biocapacity measures the amount of cropland available to grow these crops. This only includes land already used for crops, not all of the bioproductive land available to convert to cropland.

In 2015, the United States contained 166 million hectares of cropland (green). (U.S. Geological Survey)

Because humans manage all growth on cropland as harvests, the harvest yield and growth yield are exactly the same. The assumption, therefore, is that cropland ecological footprint of production cannot exceed cropland biocapacity. In other words, the cropland component cannot enter into ecological overshoot.

Ecological footprint researchers consider this to be a “conservative assumption.” They have used it since William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed the concept in the early 1990s. The NEFBA framework accounts for other natural resources that the agricultural industry uses to harvest crops and manufacture crop-derived products. For example, they account for fossil fuels used to power machinery. However, these other resources are included in their respective footprint components—in the case of fossil fuels, the carbon component—rather than in the cropland footprint component.

Some scholars argue that since cropland footprint cannot exceed biocapacity, this implies sustainability. Yet there are many environmental issues with intensive agriculture, such as excess fertilizer use disrupting soil health and polluting water systems. But if synthetic-fertilizer use increases cropland yield, this is registered in the NEFBA as an increase in cropland biocapacity. Some researchers suggest incorporating data on historical cropland yields, comparing them to present yields to account for changes in soil health.

Surprising Assumptions About the Built-Up Land Ecological Footprint

At first glance, built-up land might seem like one of the easier footprint components to understand. It measures the area containing built infrastructure such as housing, roads, and other buildings. However, as you dive into the theoretical and methodological weeds, there are important assumptions and data limitations that complicate calculating this component.

One difficulty is that there is no comprehensive global dataset detailing the relationship between built-up land and traded goods. In other words, we don’t always know the amount of built-up land required to manufacture traded goods. Therefore, the calculation doesn’t include imports or exports, and built-up land ecological footprint of production equals built-up land ecological footprint of consumption. Researchers argue this likely distorts the data, overestimating built-up land footprint for countries that are net-exporters and underestimating it for net-importers. The built-up land footprint of trade can be estimated for specific countries, or at smaller regional scales, depending on data availability.

Another concern is that, like the cropland component, built-up land footprint equals built-up land biocapacity. This is because both values are assumed to capture the “bioproductivity lost to encroachment by physical infrastructure.”

Another key assumption is that the lost bioproductivity per hectare is equal to that of cropland. In other words, infrastructure is assumed to be built on land that had been cropland, although this is not always the case. “In tropical countries, for example, infrastructure often occupies previously forested areas, and in the Middle East and Central Asia, built infrastructure almost certainly occupies formerly arid non-productive land and hence should have no associated biocapacity.”

Is the bioproductivity of Riverdale Park a good representation of the bioproductivity lost to the development of its host city, Toronto? (Dillan Payne, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Researchers hotly debate the best way to resolve this methodological hurdle. Each proposal comes with its own assumptions and complications. Some researchers suggest using geospatial data for more accurate estimates of what land-cover type was replaced by built-up infrastructure. Others suggest using geospatial data to calculate the bioproductivity of greenspaces in built-up areas such as parks and gardens. Researchers at the IEFLL partnership are testing how to use Earth observation data to improve the NEFBA.

Another suggestion is to remove built-up land from the ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting framework. This implies built-up land has zero biological productivity and is not relevant when measuring the demand and supply of bioproductive land.

Underestimating Environmental Impact

Ecological footprint and biocapacity data can be difficult to interpret because of the inherent complexity of distilling a wide array of information into a single metric. It is conceptually difficult to turn global economic activity and bioproductivity into an “ecological overshoot” ratio.

Global ecological footprint compared to global biocapacity, in global hectares, between 1961 and 2025. (data from the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts)

Yet, when we so urgently need to raise awareness about limits to growth, we shouldn’t let perfection get in the way of progress. The ecological overshoot ratio is a strong tool for communicating environmental impacts. Additionally, it has a powerful ability to lead people to draw connections to nature because it is a land-based metric, measured in global hectares.

The key takeaway is that the theoretical and methodological assumptions baked into the accounting framework lend themselves to underestimating environmental impact and overestimating regenerative capacity. Like with most other scientific measurements and conclusions, researchers are being conservative. It’s not as if humanity needed another reason to reduce the global ecological footprint and transform economic systems to a steady state, but just in case: Global ecological footprint might be higher than we expect.

The post Surprising Assumptions When Estimating the Ecological Footprint appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The Marriner S. Eccles building in Washington, DC, home of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. (Jbarta, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Federal Reserve System has more influence over the rate of economic growth—certainly nationally and arguably globally—than any other institution. When it sets the federal funds rate, the Fed affects the decisions of producers and consumers far and wide. When it lowers the rate, producers borrow more, from Midwest farmers to Silicon Valley techs. Likewise, consumers borrow more for everything from cars and houses to laptops and smartphones. People roll their sleeves up, the economy is stimulated, and GDP grows.

At least, that’s what the Fed hopes. At times, though, the Fed finds itself “pushing on a string,” dropping the federal funds rate with little effect on economic activity. But the Fed has numerous tools and tactics for stimulating economic activity, and it has a long track record of doing so.

That was a good thing for much of the 20th century, but it was bad for the environment. By the latter decades of the century, the global economy was clearly in ecological overshoot. This realization, stemming from fuller integration of the natural sciences, gradually spawned the poorly funded but conceptually powerful field of ecological economics. Today, the calls to look “beyond GDP” are going mainstream, and they’re not just about the GDP metric. They’re a diplomatic way of saying that economic growth—increasing production and consumption of goods and services in the aggregate—is no longer a suitable goal for the world, all things considered.

Meanwhile, growth remains ingrained in Fed culture, given the Fed’s deep ties to Wall Street. Its governors are typically economists or lawyers, many of whom move in and out of the private banking sector, Fortune 500 corporations, government, politics, and academia. Among its professional staff, the Fed employs over 400 Ph.D. economists, practicing a profession notorious for the “invention of infinite growth.”

Beyond its culture, the Fed is mandated, pursuant to the Federal Reserve Act amendments of 1977, to proactively promulgate economic growth.  In particular, it must “maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates…so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”

Strictly speaking, then, growth per se is not the goal, but rather a means to achieve “maximum employment.” The logic is straightforward. All else equal, a growing GDP entails an increasing number of jobs. That’s especially important when a population is growing at a significant rate.

If the real economy is growing, with more jobs and all, “growth of the monetary and credit aggregates” (a growing money supply, especially) is needed for “stable prices.” Incidentally and conversely, growing the money supply is conducive to a growing real economy, at least in the short term.

But with those 1977 amendments, Congress was trying to have its cake and eat it too. By then, the Phillips curve, demonstrating the inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation, had been circulating for almost 20 years. Lowering the federal funds rate was growthmanship 101, but it  was (and is) inflationary. Readjusting the rate upward helps stabilize prices, but it’s recessionary.

The “dual mandate” of the Fed turned out to be mission impossible, and the source of tremendous political and financial strain. But there’s a simple cure: the steady state economy. This will surely take an act of Congress, prefaced as follows.

Mission Possible, and Proper for the 21st Century

Unfortunately, the steady state economy is a cure that the Fed, as currently cultured, is bound to reject. At best, the Fed might view it as one part cure and two parts poison. Led by Kevin Warsh, the anti-regulation, pro-growth Chair, the Fed would likely be one of the last bastions of growthmanship, even if the rest of the polity moved toward steady statesmanship.

The Fed’s dual mandate was less impossible—and less destructive—when Mission Impossible aired in the 1960s. (Banknotes meant more, too.) (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

So it’s a waiting game for the logic to seep into the Fed that the best way out of the dual-mandate dilemma is to abandon the goal of growth and adopt the goal of a steady state economy. The logic should be seeping in soon, given that the U.S. population has nearly stabilized. That makes the goal of full employment more achievable without a growing GDP. It also makes achieving (or even “promoting”) economic growth a losing battle.

The population is projected to fully stabilize around 2056, opening a wide and obvious window for “steady statesmanship” in monetary policy. Given that the steady state economy amounts to stabilized population × per capita consumption, the steady state economy will be halfway established, in a sense, as the century reaches the halfway mark.

However, the Fed is so steeped in the growth paradigm that it is likely, even in the context of a stable population with full employment, to interpret its mandate as a call for economic growth per se. The growth would be deemed desirable not so much for the purpose of maintaining full employment—a goal already accomplished—but for the further purposes of increasing per capita consumption and GDP. To defend that interpretation, it will no doubt point to the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, a sort of twin jet to the 1977 Federal Reserve Act amendments.

For the Fed to accept the logic of a steady state economy being congruent with its mandate, then or ever, it will have to develop some expertise in ecological economics. Otherwise it will remain oblivious to ecological limits and the environmental costs of growth. Even if it becomes more aware of biodiversity loss, climate change, and the unravelling of the planetary ecosystem, the Fed will fall back on the old fuzzy notion that technological progress will resolve any conflicts between economic growth and environmental protection.

The Fed will overlook the fact that research and development (the process of technological progress) entails economic growth based upon pre-existing levels of technology. It will ignore the fact that such growth will be causing the very environmental deterioration that the technological progress will be expected to mitigate from behind the 8-ball. It will overestimate the availability of environmentally beneficial R&D funding, conveniently forgetting about the numerous other forces in the private and public sectors competing for profits, dividends, and economic surplus in general.

In other words, it will take a Sustainable Monetary Policy Act to foist some ecological economics into Fed leadership and staff. A section on reorganization, at a minimum, can help with this challenge.

To inject a bit of good news, though, consider the heights to which the Fed could bring the field and practice of ecological macroeconomics, if only it chose to dig in and do so. What staunch and effective steady staters they could be!

Opening Eyes and Minds to Ecological Limits

It’s not only the Fed that has a difficult time spotting or accepting limits to growth. So did William Greider, the deep-diving author who divined the Secrets of the Temple (his dramatic handle for the Fed). At the 711^th page of his exhaustive analysis, Greider produced this telling paragraph:

“From the sixties onward, each succeeding decade produced slower growth, higher levels of permanent unemployment and declining real wages, less progress on capital formation and productivity. For many years, all these portentous developments had been blamed on inflation. Now that inflation was gone [1986], it was obvious that something else was responsible, deeper problems in the aging economic structure that remained unattended.”

Ecological economics is a poorly funded, yet richly conceptualized framework to help the Fed in determining the “monetary and credit aggregates” central to its mandate. (Issuu)

Yes, it certainly was obvious that something else was responsible, but for ecological economists, so was the “something else.” Limits to growth. Environmental, ecological, and therefore economic limits. By these later decades of the 20th century, the low-hanging thermodynamic fruits had been picked. It was getting more difficult by the year to find the land and resources—the “natural capital”—required to adequately complement the outsized stocks of labor and capital (manufactured and financial) for the sake of vigorous economic production.

Yet in the entirety of Greider’s 798-page tome, the environment never showed up. Nothing about limits to growth, the Club of Rome, Herman Daly, steady-state economics… all of which were in play during Greider’s project.

It’s not so much a critique of Greider; Secrets was more or less a biography of the Fed, not an interdisciplinary treatise. And, of the gazillion meetings attended by Fed Chair Paul Volcker and duly reported by Greider, there didn’t seem to be a single one with the Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, EPA Administrator or any other leader with (we would hope) a good grasp of ecological limits.

A similar phenomenon was revealed in Lords of Easy Money by the top-notch investigative journalist Christopher Leonard. To wit, from page 302:

“[Fed Governor Tom] Hoenig’s warnings in 2020 were different in one important way from his warnings a decade earlier. Now he could point to the historical record… In the 1990s labor productivity in the United states increased at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. During the decade of ZIRP [zero interest rate policy], it rose by only 1.1 percent… Average real GDP growth, a measure of the overall economy, rose an average of 3.8 percent annually during the 1990s, but by only 2.3 percent during the recent decade. The only part of the economy that seemed to benefit under ZIRP was the market for assets. The stock market more than doubled in value during the 20 tens. Even after the crash of 2020, the markets continued their stellar growth and returns.”

In other words, while the Fed was pulling out all the stops with unheard-of zero percent interest rates (and other desperate measures), the economy just wouldn’t grow as it had decades prior. Not the real economy as measured with GDP. Limits to growth were kicking further in, so instead of making a dent in the real economy, the vast majority of stimulus money flowed into Wall Street, stirring speculators into action and inflating asset prices. “Fictional capital,” some call it (echoing Marx’s concept of “fictitious capital”).

Leonard also quoted Ben Bernanke himself: “But the fact is that nobody really knows precisely what is holding back the economy” (page 140). And, like Greider, Leonard never mentioned the environment in the 373 pages of Lords.

Nor did insiders Danielle DiMartino Booth and Joseph Wang, who wrote Fed Up and Central Banking 101, respectively.

The Fed book with the most promising title—Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek—had nothing explicit about limits to growth. However, it did include some anecdotes about an interest in climate change taken by some Fed principals, including Lael Brainerd and Jerome Powell. There’s a seed of hope in that. In general, though, Smialek described a Fed that is light years behind its cousins in the central banking community (much less the sustainability sciences) when it comes to the big-picture, long-term concern of climate change. And so far, even among the European central banking cousins, it’s more about “green growth” than limits thereto.

You can’t really blame these authors. They were mostly trying to describe what the Fed did and does. They just never witnessed Fed principals discussing limits to growth, ecological macroeconomics, or even the basic environmental underpinnings of the economy. Certainly not enough to warrant any reporting thereon.

In the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act, Congress must find and declare limits to growth, loud and clear, providing guidance to the Fed for learning and applying such crucial knowledge. The Fed needs this knowledge, not only for helping to manage a sustainable economy, but so they can stop beating their heads against the wall with the likes of ZIRP, QE, and SPVs (“special purpose vehicles,” yet another mechanism for increasing liquidity).

Utilizing a New Capacity

It’s not that the Fed has no concept of capacity. They clearly do, as evidenced by their “capacity utilization” data. The problem is that the Fed limits the concept to manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities. And there is scant evidence that the Fed has a good grasp of the natural resources involved in production. Production functions, taught to all aspiring economists, are typically based on the assumption that natural resources are a given, inexhaustible, and efficiently exploited form of capital.

Federal Reserve Districts have a significant degree of bioregional coherence, increasing potential for big-picture, long-term capacity utilization assessments. (ChrisnHouston, CC BY-SA 3.0)

For estimating capacity utilization, then, the Fed focuses on the percentage of manufactured capital (plant and infrastructure) being used during the period in question. Their method entails simplistically “assuming sufficient availability of inputs to operate the capital in place.” They divide output (such as the latest year’s output of copper) by a “capacity index,” which seems to be nothing more than the output from a reference year, such as 2017.

Such an assumption belies the Fed’s notion of “sustainable maximum output.” It doesn’t take an overly long view to realize that “sustainable maximum output” is an oxymoron when applied to non-renewable resources such as oil and minerals. It should be plain as day that extracting and using non-renewable resources (such as combusting petroleum) constitutes an irreversible reduction of capacity.

And why doesn’t the Fed apply its capacity utilization concept, insufficient as it may be, to renewable natural resources such as timber, fisheries, and rangeland? At least with renewables, the concept of sustainable maximum output, or “maximum sustained yield,” is sound. Maybe the Fed ignores these resources because market share is below some unspecified threshold for the Fed’s consideration. The Fed might reason that it can’t cover all the bases of economic inputs, given its primary concerns over macroeconomic trends and policy.

Well, the Fed may want to consider that renewable natural resources comprise the foundation of the real economy. The economy has a trophic structure; a very basic principle of ecology with clear implications for monetary policy. The Fed should pay close attention to agricultural surplus, meaning production that feeds more than the farmer (as opposed to wasted excess production). It is the agricultural surplus that allows for a proportionate division of labor, which goes a long way toward determining a warranted money supply.

The Fed gets credit for recognizing the difference between actual and potential GDP. That clearly indicates some conceptual awareness of macroeconomic capacity. As usual, though, the ecological underpinnings of GDP are overlooked. From the supply side, it’s all about labor and capital. Alternatively, like at the Atlanta Fed, the difference between actual and potential GDP redounds to a Keynesian focus on demand.

Quantifiably Too Easy

A buildup to the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act can’t go without mentioning some highlights of the banking itself, as practiced or precipitated by the Fed while it endeavors to “maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates.” All that borrowing alluded to in the opening paragraph—borrowing conduced by lowering the federal funds rate—means the banking system must produce more money, far beyond the cumulative balances of their reserves.

When commercial banks issue loans, the money typically gets deposited, temporarily at least, at other banks, which are likely to loan some or all these new deposits, too. The “money multiplier” kicks in, “producing” multiples of the original amount of new (freshly loaned) money.

Before 2020, it was fashionable to calculate precisely how many dollars could be created in the century-old system of “fractional reserve banking.” For example, with a million dollars of deposits and a reserve requirement of 10%, nine million dollars of new money (minus some change) could be created.

On March 15, 2020, the Federal Reserve System abolished fractional reserve requirements and adopted a more subjective (and more opaque) “ample reserves” regime. The consensus seems to be that “ample” would be a more fitting adjective for “liquidity” than “reserves” under this new regime. To put it in lay terms, money got looser yet.

Much of the fiat money created by banks turns “fictional,” wound up in assets far removed from the real economy. (vonmeer, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Beyond reserve considerations, the Fed can simply computerize new money into existence. Perhaps the most infamous episode was the “quantitative easing” (QE) following the 2008 financial crisis and commencing in 2009, when the Fed “purchased” $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities from imperiled commercial banks. It kept the financial system afloat, and how.

“Purchase” is a peculiar way to put it, considering the money didn’t come from a pre-existing supply, loaned in a free money market. Rather, the QE money was imagined mentally, decided upon politically, and manifested unto the balance sheets of commercial banks—the big ones like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and Bank of America—at the touch of a keyboard.

A more socially acceptable episode of QE was when the Fed “purchased” $4.6 trillion of Treasury securities (bills, notes, and bonds) and agency mortgage-backed securities during the covid pandemic. The Fed pulled out all the stops to obviate the freezing of markets, prevent a liquidity crisis, and generally stabilize the financial system.

While these were exceptional episodes, a fear is spreading that QE has become a way of life in an increasingly indebted, unstable, and unsustainable economy. These hasty episodes of flooding the markets with money, whether producers are ready for it or not, have the “allocative effects” of enriching Wall Street investors instead. This phenomenon explains, to a large extent, the development of the “K-shaped economy,” with the rich getting richer—way richer, way faster—while the middle class heads toward poverty.

Meanwhile, as best we can tell, the Fed continues to ignore the ecological fundamentals behind the instability.

Political Viability and Statutory Context

Presumably no one is naïve enough to think that a Sustainable Monetary Policy Act, with features described or alluded to above, is politically viable at this point in history. On the other hand, to think such a policy will never be viable is hardly credible either. Governmental paradigm shifts with broad public appeal happen with some regularity. Think for example of Reinventing Government and the Contract with America, two substantive, policy-wonkish and legislatively laden movements in one decade (1990s).

Robert F. Kennedy delivered a famous critique of GDP growth at the University of Kansas. Will it be echoed at the Fed? (Bill Eppridge, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Steady staters have two giant allies in the struggle for steady-state politics: sound science and common sense. Limits to growth get more obvious by the year. Meanwhile, scientists and ecological economists are painstakingly documenting the evidence. At some point, conventional economists and lawyers will see the writing on the wall.

Unprecedented policy stands a better chance—on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and at the Fed—if the policy itself is ready and waiting in legislative form. Prior to that, talk about policy reform is just that: talk. And with limits to growth, it’s not particularly uplifting or unifying talk, as it usually tends toward lament, warning, regret, finger-pointing and the like.

So, it’s time to go beyond mere talk and consider a first-cut Sustainable Monetary Policy Act (SMPA). It’s a proactive, positive vision that should resonate not only with steady staters, but with citizens concerned with a fair shake for all, stable money, and accountability at the Fed and through the banking system at large.

To make perfect sense of the SMPA as introduced below, readers must view it as a component of the Steady State Economy Act, which is intended as a self-sufficient, omnibus bill to move the country toward a steady state economy. With plenty of effort, a little bit of luck, and maybe divine providence, the Steady State Economy Act will catch a foothold on Capitol Hill during the 2030s.

Meanwhile, “feeder bills” may be proffered on an as-viable basis. With that approach, a standalone SMPA would probably find traction toward the end of the run, complementing especially the fiscal policy measures packaged in the Steady State Economy Act, including the Sustainable Budgets Act and the Sustainable Taxes Act.

The Act

The full title of the SMPA is “An Act to establish sustainable monetary policy conducive to and corresponding with sustainable real economic activity.” Section 1 provides the short title (Sustainable Monetary Policy Act).

A Federal Reserve System attuned to uneconomic growth would be a giant leap for mankind. (CASSE)

Section 2 comprises the findings and declarations of Congress. For paradigm-shifting legislation like the SMPA, Section 2 could very well be the most important one. It’s where the new paradigm is summarized. In Subsection (a)(3), for example, Congress finds that “The best available science indicates that the national and global economies are operating at or beyond their long-term environmental capacity, and therefore unsustainably.” That will clearly be a first in monetary legislation. The corresponding declaration is in Subsection (b)(5), “The Federal Reserve System must take every precaution to avoid the growth of the economy to a level that damages long-term ecological capacity.” (These clauses give rise to Sections 7-9 pertaining to the monitoring of ecological and economic capacity.)

Herald readers familiar with the trophic theory of money will find familiarity in Section 2(a)(12), where Congress finds that “a viable money supply with real purchasing power is ultimately dependent upon the agricultural surplus at the base of the economy, which allows for a division of labor and makes money a meaningful concept.” This is the basis for several mandates to follow.

Section 3 provides definitions, some of which will likely be firsts for statutory law, including “fund-service resources.” Among the many examples of fund-service resources, forests not only provide timber (stock-flow resources) but concurrently function as funds of carbon sequestration and pollination services. These economically crucial services appear to be entirely overlooked by the pre-SMPA Fed. This is a significant problem, because overlooking the value of fund-service resources is conducive to the drawdown or liquidation of natural capital stocks.

Section 4 is where the real action begins to manifest. It calls for reorganization, putting an end to the esoteric, “quasi-governmental” stature of the Fed, placing it squarely into the U.S. government as a cabinet-level agency, with the Fed Chair reporting directly to the President. This alone would engender substantial political support.

Readers will rightfully wonder, “How’s that going to look with a President like the growth-obsessed Donald Trump?” (Kevin Warsh would wonder, too.) Recall the assumption that the SMPA presupposes the broader SSEA, which mandates the Administration to engender a public-private transition to a steady state economy. Stemming from the SSEA, steady-state fiscal and regulatory policies are concurrently at play, making it far easier for the Fed to get in the steady-state game and stick with the program.

Conversely, having the Fed chair on the Cabinet, mandated toward the steady state economy, would provide for expert macroeconomic reinforcement, helping to hold presidents and Treasury secretaries accountable.

There’s more to Section 4, like positioning the Chairman of the Commission on Economic Sustainability (a SSEA construct) on the Fed’s Board of Governors, ex officio, to provide expert advice on ecological capacity. Similarly, it adds the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City as an ex officio member of the Federal Open Market Committee (the body that sets the federal funds rate target), “for purposes of providing continual expertise on agricultural production.” Despite the general shake-up, Section 4 is designed to retain nearly all Fed board and staff, while adhering to the SSEA principle of “no net gain in bureaucracy.”

Section 5 is perhaps the most crucial section, next to the findings and declarations. Short and simple, it reorients the Fed with the new mandate of transitioning toward a steady state economy. It also calls for maintenance of a money supply “that reflects, waxes and wanes with the level of real economic activity,” fairly ensuring that at least this one effective way of keeping inflation at bay returns to Fed operations. Section 5 essentially precludes quantitative easing (short of a declaration of crisis by the Monetary Emergency Committee established in Section 14).

Section 6 calls for long-term planning; very long compared to what the Fed is accustomed to. As with the broader SSEA, Section 6 establishes a planning horizon of 150 years, essentially forcing the Fed to consider the natural world of environmental, ecological, meteorological, geological, and climatological forces. These are forces, ranging in predictability, that impact the real economy the Fed is called in Section 5 to dovetail the money supply with. Keeping these natural forces in mind will help prevent the Fed from reverting to the old mode of perpetual-growth thinking.

Section 7 establishes a Division of Ecological Capacity Monitoring to provide the Fed with expertise in natural capital accounting and the concepts and methods of ecological footprint and biocapacity assessment. This division will also provide educational resources to Fed Board and staff.

Section 8 kicks off a special role for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (home base of the aforementioned Tom Hoenig). Just as the New York Fed specializes in open market operations, and the Atlanta Fed specializes in payment systems, the Kansas City fed can and should—and in some ways has already started to—specialize in the agricultural surplus that literally and figuratively feeds the rest of the economy.

Section 9 helps the Fed bridge the gap from some of its old practices to the new. It builds upon the Fed’s economic “capacity utilization” assessment to a more ecologically valid approach. It expands the scope from short-term capital and labor capacity to long-term ecological and agricultural capacities.

Section 10 shifts the paradigm of the Fed from seeking zero gap between actual GDP and potential GDP. It should indeed close the gap, vis-à-vis employment, but not overall. The renewable natural resources at the trophic base of the economy need to thrive in a state of reasonable ecological integrity, and a gap between actual and potential GDP provides an insurance policy for natural disasters and geopolitical crises.

Section 11 addresses interest-rate management. While it eschews the details of open market operations, it echoes the goal of sustainability and indeed the steady state economy as populations stabilize. It reinforces the steady-state paradigm shift for the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, and prohibits “incentivizing higher levels or faster rates of economic activity at any period during which the real economy is in ecological overshoot.”

Section 12 invokes (implicitly) the trophic theory of money and calls on the Fed to closely monitor food surpluses for more ecologically grounded insights to economic capacity and likewise to the scale of money supplies that will be neither inflationary nor deflationary.

Section 13 puts a cap on bank size and number, Section 14 limits quantitative easing to emergencies, and, as Congress runs out of gas for further monetary policy engineering, Section 15 requires the Fed to develop the detailed rules and regulations for achieving the goals and objectives of the Act (standard procedure for program-shifting legislation).

Monetary policy development has been a bridge too far for the sustainability sciences, and even in the ecological economics community. Let’s hope that the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act changes that. It could use some fleshing out over time, prior to the rollout of the omnibus Steady State Economy Act, but if we simply precipitated a paradigm shift in the Federal Reserve System—from growthmanship to steady statesmanship—the SMPA would be a profound success.

Brian Czech is CASSE’s Executive Director.

The post Special Report: Introducing the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

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.