Footprint accounting 101.

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

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

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

The Conceptual Framing of Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity

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

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

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

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

Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity of the United States

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

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

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

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

U.S. Trends: Better or Worse?

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

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

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

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

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

Diving Into the Footprint Details

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

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

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

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

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

The United States in the Global Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Alluring Promise of Technology

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

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

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

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

Tradeoffs and Limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Steady-State Riddle

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

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

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

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

The Delusion and Its Origins: Economic Theory and Practice

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

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

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

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

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

The Delusion and Its Origins: Human Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing Through a Glass Less Darkly

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Shreve is a Senior Economist at CASSE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ends~

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rollbacks Too Radioactive for Public Notice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear Safety Regulations: A History of Hard Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Centers’ Gluttonous Energy Demand

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

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

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

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

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

A Perilous Deregulation-Driven Renaissance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Limits to Nuclear-Powered Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Nuclear Safety Now Optional Under Trump appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Albemarle County is in the heart of Virginia. (David Benbennick, Public Domain)

I’ve lived in Albemarle County, Virginia, for over forty years. Albemarle is a mostly rural county in the Piedmont region. It surrounds the city of Charlottesville.

For decades, the county valued its open spaces and created many policies to ensure their protection. Recently, leadership has taken a pro-development turn, jeopardizing citizens’ quality of life and many of our community’s natural features.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the Albemarle County government took a cautious approach to growth and development. During this period, conservative and progressive board members alike played key roles in establishing environmental programs and policies. County planners were generally supportive of integrating conservation proposals into planning policies. So was the county public.

In the 1990s, Albemarle County participated in the regional Thomas Jefferson Sustainability Council, created two open-space easement programs, and established a now 20-year-old program to monitor and protect its biodiversity. The county has a natural resources manager on staff who supports a range of conservation efforts.

During the 2000s, Albemarle County helped fund a series of studies by Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population on the optimum population size of the Albemarle-Charlottesville community. In recent years, the county committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050, developed a climate action plan, and established a staffed climate program.

Changing Times

Beginning with the Great Recession of 2008 and the rise of the Tea Party, the local political environment shifted. In 2010, a bloc of conservative members of the board of supervisors launched a financial austerity campaign. Consequences included a significant reduction in planning staff, reduced interest in environmental protection, and expanded interest in economic development.

This bloc didn’t last. Today, all the Albemarle County supervisors are Democrats. However, like their Republican predecessors, Democratic supervisors in recent years have supported economic development, ignoring most of its associated costs. In January of this year, two new supervisors joined the board. Time will reveal their inclinations toward growth.

Albemarle County’s current board of supervisors. (Albemarle County Government)

The 2020–2023 COVID-19 pandemic heavily impacted Albemarle County political dynamics. Activist attendance at public meetings fell off and hasn’t recovered. County policy formation suffers from the reduction of this environmental activist community, which has historically shown up at public meetings and held decision makers accountable.

Residents still support environmental protection, including climate action, and many of the green programs of past decades remain in place. However, we have new leadership in the county that is zealously pursuing economic growth and has shown little interest in examining its environmental consequences.

A New (Not Improved) Comprehensive Plan

Albemarle County completed an update of its comprehensive plan in October 2025. The update began in late 2021. At the start of the update, nearly all the planners were recent additions to the county staff, with few intellectual ties to past county policies. They initially proposed a nearly complete scrapping of the old, widely admired plan. Changes included jettisoning the key rural areas chapter.

The public pushed back, leading eventually to the inclusion of a rural areas chapter in the new plan. The planners made a commitment to create an in-depth, standalone rural areas conservation plan, similar to the county’s biodiversity action plan.

Highway 29N, the main business corridor in Albemarle County, has been key to economic development.

For all its previous caution about promoting growth, Albemarle County never quite endorsed a stable population or a steady state economy, either. Its growth management policy has been and continues to be an orderly accommodation of growth, which leadership perceives as inevitable. According to the new comprehensive plan, the county’s population is projected to increase by 31,000 by 2044. Planners take this growth as a given and focus the plan on providing housing and other infrastructure to accommodate it.

Rivanna Futures is Hatched

In Virginia, economic development gets special treatment. With the rationale that proprietary information should not be publicly disclosed, the Code of Virginia allows local governments to close meetings at which economic development projects are discussed. Partnerships between local governments and businesses can be hatched and approved without sunshine, and without their environmental consequences adequately weighed.

In 2023, the Albemarle County supervisors announced that the county had already agreed to purchase 462 acres of land for $58 million. This land adjoins Rivanna Station, a U.S. Defense Department installation and a significant contributor to the local economy. According to officials, the county purchased the land to provide room to expand Rivanna Station and supporting industries. The supervisors deemed the purchase necessary to prevent Rivanna Station from relocating to another community.

The county’s plan for development of these acres is referred to as the Rivanna Futures project. The government expects the project to anchor development of a larger, regional, high-tech “Innovation Corridor.” A high-ranking county official suggested the Rivanna Futures project might “realize a level of potential similar to Silicon Valley at its onset.”

A concept map of the Innovation Acceleration Campus, part of the Rivanna Futures project, presented to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. (Albemarle County Government)

According to an engineering analysis of Rivanna Futures, the project could create nearly 900 new jobs. As has been the case for other such projects, many of the new jobs undoubtedly would be filled by people who move to the county with their families.

The county is behind schedule in meeting its commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050. Its climate action plan emphasizes the preservation of its forested land, while leaders pursue growth projects that entail substantial deforestation. Wary of simultaneous climate and development promises, residents asked the county to conduct analyses of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts of Rivanna Futures before considering a required rezoning.

Albemarle County applied to itself for permission to rezone the property that it purchased for tens of millions of dollars. The deputy county executive submitted the application, and the board of supervisors judged it. During the review, Planning Commissioners complained that supporting documents submitted by the county fell far below the standards usually required from applicants. Even the Free Enterprise Forum, a business-friendly interest group, critiqued the county for giving itself preferential treatment.

The county government defended its actions by claiming it needed a quick rezoning to apply for state economic development funds. Albemarle County approved its rezoning without the environmental analyses requested by activists. The county subsequently received a grant of $9.7 million from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership to prepare the Rivanna Futures site for building. This rezoning process illustrates conflicts of interest that arise when local governments play developer.

In October 2025, AstraZeneca announced it would build a $4.5 billion pharmaceutical plant on the Rivanna Futures property. The plant will provide 600 new jobs. This project may receive a special appropriation from the state of Virginia for $191.3 million.

The People Press Pause on a Data Center Proposal

Rivanna Futures isn’t the only development project favored by some leaders of the Albemarle County government. They recently considered a new data center ordinance. The proposed ordinance would have allowed data centers of up to 500,000 square feet to be built by right in designated overlay zones. An overlay is when an additional set of regulations is superimposed on an existing zoning district.

A massive, noisy data-center complex in another Virginia county, Loudoun. Northern Virginia is the world’s largest data-center market. (Getty Images, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Data centers consume vast amounts of water and energy, the latter now provided mostly by burning fossil fuels. Staff presented the proposed ordinance without an analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions of the new centers that would be permitted. Environmentalists objected.

The proposal did include maps of four possible data center overlay zones. Residents living near the proposed zones learned of the maps and became agitated. In October 2025, shortly before a scheduled public hearing to adopt the ordinance, the board of supervisors agreed to indefinitely pause consideration of the ordinance.

Despite this win, Albemarle County leaders generally appear committed to growth, even with pushback here and there from the public. It’s clear that for now, they’ll pursue growth regardless of conflicts with environmental commitments and, if necessary, via substandard processes.

Prospects for a Green Revival

Albemarle County could become a green leader again. This would require executing a multi-part plan. First, our planning processes must acknowledge the severity of the ecological crises we face. Second, we must create a strong, independent natural resources planning department. This department would address rural areas protection, natural resource conservation, and climate change. Third, we must convince county leaders to stop seeking unsustainable growth.

Many long-time Albemarle residents want to keep our county great.

Step three, convincing leaders to abandon the pursuit of growth, is the most difficult. Most current officials truly believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, development projects will improve the county’s tax base and employment. Putting the brakes on overgrowth requires long-term vision and a willingness to reject empty promises of shared prosperity and political rewards from proponents of development. It also requires concerned citizens who can readily understand how the costs of growth outweigh its benefits.

Economist Milton Friedman suggested, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change.” If we can cultivate a larger base of knowledgeable and vociferous local activists, we might be able to persuade decision-makers to abandon their infatuation with growth. Otherwise, we may have to wait for a crisis to alter our political landscape.

Tom Olivier is an environmental activist and long-time resident of Albemarle County with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University.

The post Albemarle County, Virginia: Green Leader No More appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

President Trump wants to be the King of GDP, but he might not make it through the Strait of Hormuz. (Quoteinspector.com, CC BY-ND 4.0)

Given his long-running obsession with GDP growth, an obsession punctuated with mid-terms in mind, President Trump has made some peculiar moves. Just this week, his stripping of immigrant truckers’ licenses took effect, as part of a broader crackdown on immigrant labor, a key source of economic growth. His hyperactive imposing of tariffs has undermined comparative advantage, a condition relied upon for global GDP growth. And now, with the war in Iran, the American economy is in for a heavy hit.

Only 20 days in, the war has already caused the biggest oil supply shock in history. We know what happened when that other iconic oil shock occurred, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-1974. It turned a period of stubborn stagnation into the “Great Inflation,” the longest bout of inflation in U.S. history.

The Great Inflation was extended by the Iranian revolution in 1979, when again, oil supplies were sharply constrained. That ensured years of “stagflation” (inflation combined with recession) that no politician could fix.

Unless you’re an arms dealer or a war contractor, it’s hard for Americans to find a silver lining in Trump’s war. Young voters seem especially flummoxed. Even before he invaded Iran, they were “abandoning him in droves.” While it’s too early to tell for sure, war in Iran will probably exacerbate the abandonment and extend it to other age groups.

 Strait of Hormuz: Achilles Heel of an Obese Economy

The global economy is roughly 82 percent fossil-fueled. The Big Three fuels are oil, natural gas, and coal. If agriculture feeds the economy (as it literally does), fossil fuels are the steroids that make it bigger and faster.

Strait of Hormuz: macroeconomic bottleneck. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

That makes the Strait of Hormuz the Achilles heel. Oil shipped through the Strait accounts for over 20 percent of global oil consumption. The oil comes primarily from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. Nearly 20 percent of liquified natural gas (LNG) comes through the Strait as well, mostly from Qatar.

The King of GDP and his War Department are making a huge blunder by laying waste to Iran. Even with a bombed-out Tehran, Iran retains almost total control of passage in the Strait. Rather than the “unconditional surrender” Trump naively trolled them with, Iranian leaders have opted to choke off the Strait.

The Strait of Hormuz is now the torn Achilles tendon of global GDP. Perhaps the only silver lining is the environmental benefit of a smaller, slower economy (an entirely unintended consequence ). Unfortunately, not all else will be equal, as the oil shock will prompt Trump to “drill baby drill” even harder, domestically. And, exacerbating the war will itself take a heavy environmental toll.

Boots on the Ground and Boats in the Water?

Yes, the United States could invade Iran with boots on the ground and boats on the water, and eventually defeat the forces that control the Strait. However, those forces consist primarily of the Strait-smart Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). American success is hardly surefire.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy uses small, swift attack boats to converge upon commercial tankers. (Fars News Agency, CC BY 4.0)

Trump’s claim on Tuesday that the United States has decimated Iran’s military is misleading. No doubt Iran’s conventional navy has taken a beating, but the IRGC navy is another matter. They use small, dispersed attack boats to quickly converge on helpless tankers. They operate coastal batteries firing Qader missiles with a range of 120 miles. They possess huge stockpiles of naval mines. They have midget submarines and unmanned surface vessels, or “floating bombs.”

And suddenly, the IRGC has thousands of drones. They’ve learned to briskly manufacture inexpensive models, and for all we know, they may be receiving hundreds of drones per week from the 5,400 produced per month in Russia. These are the dreaded Shahed drones that have made life hell for Ukrainian troops and civilians. As a former U.S. Air Force pilot described, “It’s like having a sniper always following [you]. But unlike snipers, drones pursue you through open doorways and around corners. They chase you around obstacles and wait for you to emerge from a hiding place.”

The IRGC has an estimated 150,000 troops, 20,000 sailors, and can evidently mobilize a paramilitary force—the Basij—of 600,000 volunteers. It has allied, armed groups to call upon from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, among others. The Guards are accustomed to operating in a decentralized condition, in order to “overcome any vacuum in the absence of the supreme leader, the ultimate decision maker.”

Securing the Strait of Hormuz, then, won’t be the “little excursion” Trump has deluded himself with. It requires a bloody, uncertain, drawn-out war within a war that kills scores of U.S. troops while Trump’s popularity plummets in tandem with the rate of GDP growth. Trump will have only himself to blame, and not only for invading Iran. With GDP-obsessed leaders like him, U.S. citizens still don’t recognize the need for degrowth toward a steady state economy. They’re still not prepared to trade GDP growth for much of anything, much less an imbroglio in Iran.

The Other Barrel of the Economic Shotgun

Care to guess what else flows through the Strait of Hormuz, comprising nearly a third of another global supply? Hint: We’re not talking about saffron, dates, or Persian rugs.

It’s fertilizer, including urea, diammonium phosphate (DAP), and anhydrous ammonia.

Cargo up in flames at the Shahid Rajaee Port in Bandar Abbas, Iran (April 26, 2025). One common fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, is highly explosive. (Abbas Zakeri, CC BY 4.0)

Urea is the most widely-used synthetic fertilizer in the world, applied to grain crops, root crops, and even leafy vegetables. These crops typically need a boost of nitrogen, and urea provides it. When phosphorus is limiting, DAP fills the bill. In alkaline soils, anhydrous ammonia is injected into the soil to help with nutrient uptake and to lower pH.

Fertilizer is a key ingredient in another revolution relevant to Iran, the United States, and global GDP: the Green Revolution. But as a result of Trump’s war, fertilizer prices are already spiking, according to Michael Werz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the Middle East,” he writes, “the price for urea rose by 19 percent within a week, creating new fiscal challenges for agriculture sectors across the globe.”

So far, American farmers have been partially buffered, because in many parts of the country, fertilizer supplies for spring planting were laid in before the war started. This is not the case, though, in northern growing areas, and the current choking of fertilizer flow may impact supplies for summer and fall applications as well. Again,  this may not be a bad thing for the environment, but it portends human suffering in the form of hunger.

Backside of a Page in Putin’s Playbook

Putin wants Ukraine grain, and benefits from shortages elsewhere. (Valdemar Fishmen, CC BY 2.0)

One of Putin’s lesser-known motives for invading Ukraine was the rich black soils, or “chernozem,” that make Ukraine the bread basket of Europe. Russia already has a substantial chernozem belt of its own, bordering Ukraine. Commandeering the eastern half of Ukraine would connect these areas, providing Russia with perhaps the world’s greatest agricultural advantage.

An agricultural advantage in tandem with the vast natural gas reserves of western Siberia would provide Putin with a double-barreled shotgun of economic power to threaten foes and attract anti-West friends, far into the future.

In the case of Iran, similar logic is involved, but in reverse. Iran can punish the United States and much of the world by withholding petroleum and fertilizers—essentially energy and food— from the global markets. It is no coincidence that Russia and Iran have gravitated toward a strategic alliance.

For the United States, led by a football fan, it’s a bit like facing an offense (Putin) and a defense (Tehran), with special teams performed by the likes of North Korea and Belarus. On the twisted scoreboard would be U.S. and Russian GDP, or rather the rate of GDP growth. And with Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the momentum has shifted toward the anti-West team.

Shortage at The Trophic Base: Essence of Inflation

Long-time Herald readers know that money originates—annually as well as evolutionarily—via the agricultural surplus that frees the hands for the division of labor and makes money a meaningful concept. That’s the trophic theory of money.

Pursuant to the trophic theory, a vast amount of agricultural surplus warrants a vast money supply to meet the vast demand stemming from a vast division of labor. Anything that lowers the amount of agricultural surplus likewise lowers the “warranted money supply,” the amount of money that mirrors real economic production. The pre-existing or “nominal” money supply is thereby inflated, with too much money chasing too few goods.

A corollary of the trophic theory is that, the closer a good is to the trophic base of the economy, the more influential it will be in determining rates of inflation. Agricultural production is at the very base. Close to the base, too, are extracted or harvested resources such as minerals, sawtimber, and fisheries.

Commodity shortages at the trophic base of the economy—most notably shortages of grain crops and fossil fuels—are the most conducive to inflation.

Fossil fuels have a unique trophic niche. Similar to minerals, they are extracted directly from the earth (at the trophic base, in that sense) and, after refining, used just as directly in the production or operation of a vast swathe of economic sectors. A fossil-fuel shortage, then, is roughly as inflationary as an agricultural shortage, and in reality the two are tightly linked in the modern era of fossil-fueled farming.

Consider Putin’s war on Ukraine, for example. Especially in 2022 and 2023, it had a significant impact on Ukrainian grain production in the field. Grain exports were blocked, too, and large quantities of grain were destroyed in port. Ukrainian grain output is important enough that the war decreased the warranted money supply. Putin’s war, the covid pandemic, and aggressive fiscal stimulus coalesced into a perfect storm for inflation.

Putin’s war is still an inflationary strain on the global economy, and now it is accompanied by Trump’s war in Iran. Putin’s war hit grain harvests hard and indirectly impacted oil supplies, too, as European nations had little choice but to boycott Russian oil. Trump’s war hits oil supplies hard and indirectly impacts agriculture, as the shipping blockade in the Strait of Hormuz prevents the free flow of fertilizer.

What Can a President Do?

Citizens across the globe are being hurt by Putin and Trump. The bellicose ways of these autocratic politicians are causing inflation, unprecedented in scope. It’s a global cost-push inflation from the trophic base up; the type of inflation our monetary authorities have little recourse against.

The 2026 scenario of Trump’s war in Iran, Putin’s war in Ukraine, and other resource wars brewing across the globe corroborates what steady staters have long concluded: Peace is a steady state economy. And so is a stable dollar (and ruble and pound and yuan), as limits to growth are reached.

A clear-thinking, conscientious president would call for conservation at this point in history, connecting with hearts and minds in the process. (National Archives & Records Administration)

In response to 2026, a wise president would do what Jimmy Carter did on July 15, 1979. He would exhort Americans to conserve. Lowering the thermostat, shutting the lights off, and generally reducing consumption would go a long way toward mitigating the inflationary, recessionary effects of supply constraints.

And frankly such conservation would be good for the American soul. You couldn’t listen to Carter’s address without hearing that message between the lines. “All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.”

But Carter was ahead of his time, and the “malaise speech” (as penned by detractors and shoddily adopted by the press) was eventually deemed a political gaffe. I’m not so sure it would be today. It depends a lot on the president’s personality, empathy, and sincerity. Treated like adults, concerned citizens can be woken up to limits to growth. Even AI gets it about limits to growth.

In some ways, Americans are now predisposed to support a steady state economy. They find exorbitant salaries and conspicuous consumption distasteful at best and increasingly unsustainable and unethical. They can connect the dots from greed to exceedingly risky wars.

Unfortunately, if there was ever an anti-Carter, it’s Trump. Carter was clear-minded and conscientious; Trump is confused and conniving. It’s a bad time for confusion because, approaching his 80^th year on Earth, Trump faces a plethora of tough decisions. Many of these heavy choices—like what to do about the Strait of Hormuz—stem from his aggressive meddling in too many affairs.

Trump wants to be crowned King of GDP, but he badly wants a Nobel Peace Prize, too. Given that peace is a steady state economy, he’s not going to get both. It’s looking more and more like he won’t get either.

And the Strait of Hormuz? It may be more than an Achilles heel for the global economy. It may go down as the political Waterloo for Donald Trump.

Brian Czech is CASSE’s Executive Director.

The post The Strait of Hormuz: Trump’s Waterloo? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The size of our economy, measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is intimately linked to our use of artificial fertilizer. So is the ecological havoc we are wreaking on the planet and its inhabitants.

Fertilizer production has increased by 520 percent since 1961. (Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0)

Between 2002 and 2018, while the population increased by 22 percent, the per-hectare use of synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers—the three most common types—increased by about 23, 13, and 56 percent, respectively. However, the responsibility for—and benefits of—fertilizer use aren’t evenly distributed. Though estimates vary widely, some claim that industrial agriculture feeds only 30 percent of the population.

If so, we can add fertilizer to the list of ways high-income populations are disproportionately contributing to planetary breakdown. Artificial fertilizer is ecologically problematic out of the gate, as its production depends intimately on fossil fuels.

And as for fertilizer application, it is one of the world’s largest sources of water pollution. What’s more, in the long term, fertilizer degrades the very soil to which it is applied. This traps farmers in a vicious cycle, needing ever more external inputs to maintain high yields.

Agriculture and Fertilizer: Relationship Turned Toxic

Historians have found evidence of organic-fertilizer use from 8,000 years ago. Early farmers likely noticed that crops grew better where animals congregated, ingested, and defecated.

In the 18th century, it became common to use ground-up bones, such as these bison skulls, for fertilizer. (Soerfm, CC BY-SA 3.0)

However, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientists made the leap from organic to inorganic, or synthetic, fertilizers (hereby referred to simply as fertilizers). Critical to this leap was the development of the Haber-Bosch process in the early 20^th century. This process results in ammonia, the foundation of nitrogen fertilizers and a key ingredient in the most common phosphate fertilizers.

Fertilizer use accelerated in the 1940s. Ammonia, it so happens, is also a key ingredient in explosives. At the outset of World War II, the U.S. government constructed ten plants capable of producing 1.6 million tons of ammonia per year. After the war, priorities shifted from manufacturing munitions to restoring food supplies, and funding flowed to the agricultural sciences.

This funding was a catalyst for the Green Revolution, a 1960s movement that launched a productivity explosion in some parts of the world. High-yielding crop varieties are the poster children of the Green Revolution. However, the revolution would not have been possible without an accompanying boom in fertilizer use.

In recent decades, the ecological price of the agricultural model that spread with the Green Revolution has become painfully evident. Even the social benefits of this model, and their distribution, are hotly contested.

Making Fertilizer: Fossil-Fuel Feedstocks

The trappings of ammonia production. (Tseno Tanev, CC BY-SA 3.0)

When most people think of the ecological impacts of fertilizer, they think of pollution from agricultural runoff. However, fertilizer’s assault on the environment starts at the factory. Like any manufacturing process, fertilizer production requires energy, overwhelmingly provided by fossil fuels. The production of ammonia accounts for about two percent of global energy consumption.

But ammonia production also relies on methane—aka, natural gas—as a feedstock for its chemical processes. The most common production method involves the following: Methane (CH₄) is “reformed” with steam (H₂0), resulting in carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H₂). H₂ is the desirable output, reacting with nitrogen (N₂) to produce ammonia (NH₃).

But what happens with that “co-produced” CO? Water vapor is used to oxidize it, producing carbon dioxide (CO₂). Because of this, greenhouse gas emissions are inherent to the ammonia production process, not just a byproduct of the energy used to power it, replaceable by renewables. In fact, over half the 450 million metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions from ammonia production come from this chemical conversion of methane to hydrogen.

CO₂ emissions aren’t the only ecological issue with fertilizer production. Phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers require inputs from mines, which are linked to ecological devastation. But now, let us turn to the arguably more frightening issues associated with fertilizer application.

Using Fertilizer: Polluted Waters and Lands

The agricultural sector is the leading cause of water pollution worldwide, releasing phosphate and nitrogen compounds that wreak havoc on the hydrosphere. In 2014, livestock produced upwards of 5.5 billion tons of manure—37 times more than the sewage that humans produced. Much of that is not actually (or effectively) used as fertilizer, but some of it was counted in the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s estimate that the world consumed 183 million tons of fertilizer in 2020.

Much of the nitrogen in fertilizer doesn’t end up in crops. Instead, it leaks into our waterways, at devastating human and ecological costs. When the nitrate form of nitrogen accumulates in aquifers used for drinking, it can react with food in the body to make cancer-forming compounds.

Nitrogen and phosphate are key fertilizer ingredients because they stimulate plant growth. The wrong kind or too many plants can devastate ecosystems. When fertilizer runoff overloads water bodies—freshwater and marine—with nitrogen and phosphate, it catalyzes a process called eutrophication.

Fish kills are a common consequence of algal blooms caused by eutrophication. (Terry Ross, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Eutrophication can lead to algal blooms that are toxic to people and other organisms. It can also lead to hypoxia, otherwise known as dead zones, as the bacteria that decompose plant matter consume oxygen. Globally, dead zones increased tenfold from the 1950s to the 2000s.

In addition to its near-immediate polluting effects on water, in the long term, fertilizer also degrades the soil to which it is applied. It can deplete organic matter and harden and acidify the soil. Fertilizers can also contaminate soil with metals, endocrine disrupters, antibiotics, trace elements, and pathogens.

As if water and soil degradation weren’t enough, fertilizer application also leads to air pollution. Heavily fertilized fields release ammonia, which combines with other precursors to create particulate matter, the most dangerous form of air pollution. Additionally, soil microbes tend to misbehave when overloaded with nitrogen fertilizer, producing more of the potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. They also consume more carbon and release more CO₂, negating the soil’s vital carbon-sequestration abilities.

Fertilizer and the Growth Economy

Agriculture plays a special role in structuring (and growing) the economy. Fertilizer is a key component of the agricultural sector’s productivity increases. A 1 percent increase in fertilizer use is causally associated with a 4.5 percent increase in agricultural value per worker.

The less labor is needed to extract natural resources, including food, the more is available to turn them into higher-value economic products.

Productivity increases have enabled—or forced—countless people to migrate to other economic sectors. The result has been increases in economic output, aka growth, overall. We can represent this flow of labor, as well as energy and materials, from agricultural and extractive sectors, to heavy manufacturing, to light manufacturing, with a multi-level trophic pyramid.

And as labor moves up the pyramid, human diets require more inputs, including fertilizer, than ever before. In the United States, a third of the nitrogen and half of the phosphorus applied via fertilizer is used for corn and soybeans that feed animals, not humans. Alongside manure and other factors, fertilizer has given animal agriculture a reputation as the number one driver of global water pollution. All told, it is responsible for 43 percent of eutrophication.

It’s no coincidence that livestock production also contributes more than most other agricultural activities to economic growth. It accounts for 40 percent of agricultural GDP.

Subsidies Up the Growth Stakes

Fertilizer subsidies constitute one-tenth of subsidy spending in high-income countries and a whopping one-fourth in low-income countries. And yet the conventional government model for agricultural support—with fertilizer subsidies at its core—is relatively cost-ineffective. Public support for agriculture returns just 35 cents to farmers per dollar of support. This measure may not capture all the food-security benefits of this support, but clearly, governments could do better.

So, why do they stick to the fertilizer-subsidy status quo? According to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Ruth Hill and Danielle Resnick, it’s because these subsidies have a unique combination of four qualities. They have immediate benefits, boosting short-term yields; they are readily visible, garnering support from voters; they can be selectively distributed according to political priorities; and they are simple to implement.

But the long-term costs of excessive fertilizer subsidies may extend beyond ecological degradation and inefficient use of public resources. Most governments finance their spending—including on fertilizer subsidies—partly via interest-bearing bonds or loans. Governments must pay off this interest with future public revenues. Particularly in low-income countries, this can pressure governments to divert much-needed income gains away from public well-being and toward debt servicing.

In Malawi, where almost half of public agrifood spending goes to input subsidies and public debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP, farmer Grace Malaitcha finds hope in conservation-agriculture practices. (CIMMYT, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

However, the relationship between fertilizer subsidies and international debt is complicated. In an interview for the Herald, Resnick, who specializes in the political economy of agricultural policy in Africa, said, “Prior to the 1980s, you had governments heavily subsidizing inputs [such as fertilizer] for farmers, who were usually very poor. Then, with the structural adjustments of the 1980s, these subsidies were seen as unnecessary expenditure. Many governments had to get rid of them as a condition of IMF or World Bank loans. And then, around the late ‘90s, early 2000s, they started to come back in vogue.”

According to Resnick, fertilizer subsidies generally benefit the poor more than other types of subsidies, such as fuel subsidies, in low-income countries. That said, they also benefit better-off farmers much of the time. However, it’s undeniable that many of the world’s most vulnerable people depend on yields that their land could not provide without fertilizer. Resnick said, “I don’t think we could get rid of fertilizer entirely, given the challenges with soil fertility that naturally exist in parts of the world.”

Suffice it to say, any attempt to reduce fertilizer use should simultaneously mitigate negative consequences for the poor. Resnick pointed to some promising developments, including “debt for climate swaps.” These entail debt forgiveness in exchange for the implementation of climate-friendly policies, which might include cutting back on fertilizer subsidies.

GDP and Fertilizer Use

Clearly, modern economies rely heavily on fertilizer. The question is: Does economic growth systematically drive fertilizer use and/or vice versa? To explore this relationship, we examined data from 173 countries between 1990 and 2023. We combined fertilizer-use data from the USDA Economic Research Service with real-GDP data from the World Bank.

Fertilizer use is from the USDA Economic Research Service, and GDP is from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

We find that fertilizer use tends to rise as national economies expand. On average, within a given country, an additional one million dollars of GDP is associated with roughly one extra metric ton of fertilizer use. While the estimate is not statistically precise enough to eliminate uncertainty entirely, the relationship between fertilizer use and GDP remained positive when we ran alternative forms of the analysis model.

In plain terms, economic growth and fertilizer use move together. As the population grows and incomes rise, food demand increases and diets shift toward more fertilizer-intensive foods, particularly animal products.

Importantly, our measure reflects fertilizer applied within national borders. Some countries import much of their food, effectively outsourcing part of their fertilizer footprint. Although the value of imports is subtracted from GDP, the importing country may use that food as an intermediate input in higher-value activities, such as processing and food services. Food imports may also affect GDP indirectly insofar as they facilitate structural shifts toward non-agricultural, higher-value sectors (and more intensive diets).

Even so, the overall pattern suggests that under the current agricultural system, economic expansion remains tied to fertilizer-dependent production. If fertilizer degrades soil, pollutes water, and contributes to climate change, then growth in GDP implies more ecological pressure.

If we don’t reduce our fertilizer use proactively, it may be forced upon us to the detriment of food security. We are seeing a glimpse of this as the U.S.-Israel-Iran war chokes off the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20–30 percent of global fertilizer exports pass.

When asked whether this shock might catalyze a transition away from fertilizer dependence, Resnick said, “I don’t think so. If you look at all the shocks we’ve had recently, whether it’s the Russia-Ukraine war, COVID, or the food-price crisis in 2008, the reaction has often been to maintain or increase subsidies. Even international financial institutions will give low-income countries some breathing space on their debt to enable them to subsidize their farmers through the shock.”

This is a better outcome, of course, than widespread famine, but it begs the question: What will it take to catalyze the transition? If our response to shocks is to double down on fertilizer use, perhaps the key is to seize times of relative stability to implement change.

Organic alternatives to fertilizer are the surface-level solution, but their widespread adoption will only be possible if we intentionally degrow the industrial agriculture behemoth. Reducing fertilizer subsidies is a key first step, as is drastically cutting meat production. Both of these steps will shrink the profits of the fertilizer oligopoly, but, pursued carefully, they have the potential to improve human well-being, especially in the long term.

Alix Underwood is managing editor at CASSE.

Marwa Ebrahem is a master’s student in Applied Economics at The George Washington University and a Research & Insights Intern at CASSE.

The post The Vicious Fertilizer Cycle and the Growth Economy appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The Trump Administration, in its dedication to self- and industry enrichment, is hoping to sell a sacred cow: public lands. And while many such efforts have been defeated in the past, the current no-holds-barred growth regime elevates their chances of success.

Public lands of the United States. (USGS, Public Domain)

Federal lands are set aside in all 50 U.S. states for the benefit of all Americans. Primarily in the American West, these lands span 640 million acres of natural resources, priceless wildlife habitats, beloved recreation areas, majestic wilderness, and watersheds that protect clean water for millions.

Four agencies manage the vast majority of the acreage. The National Park Service, which manages 433 units across 80 million acres, prioritizes conservation of natural and cultural features for the public’s enjoyment. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages the 89 million acres of the National Wildlife Refuge System for wildlife conservation pursuant to the “wildlife first” principle. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages 244 million acres, and the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees 193 million, have “multiple use” mandates that permit extractive activities like mining, logging, and grazing.

All have in common that they are held for the benefit of the American public by the federal government, as the entity best equipped to manage and sustain them in perpetuity.

Public Lands: A Hard-Earned Treasure

The story of U.S. public land acquisition is one of tireless effort by citizens and policymakers over the past more than 150 years.

The story begins, of course, with the colonial appropriation of lands from Native tribes, often by dishonest treaty, brutal conquest, or epidemic. Decimation of the tribes was so pronounced that the historian David E. Stannard called it the “American Holocaust” in his scholarly book by that title.

In 1781 the colonies began ceding western portions of what is now the United States to the new federal government, creating the first public lands. By 1867, following the acquisition of lands from France, Spain, Great Britain, Mexico, and Russia, federal holdings extended to the Pacific Ocean and encompassed 1.8 billion acres.

Most of these holdings were subsequently transferred to individuals and states; some were reserved for military use or mineral extraction. But an appreciation of the intrinsic value of public lands took hold quickly in the American consciousness.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the widely-read writings of John Muir and a growing awareness of Indigenous conservation practices contributed to a nascent land-conservation movement. The federal government granted Yosemite Valley to the state of California in 1864, and established Yellowstone National Park in 1872. These were the first public lands designated for the explicit purposes of conservation and public enjoyment.

Yosemite Valley, California, in 1907. (Library of Congress, Public Domain)

At the time, there was also an emerging awareness that unchecked logging was destroying forests and diminishing water flows. The Forest Reserves Act of 1891 enabled the president to establish forest reserves on the public domain. Presidents of both parties did so enthusiastically, establishing most of the western national forests over the following decades. They did so usually in response to petitions showing broad support among states and citizens.

In the East, where little federal land remained, protecting forests and the waterways they sustain took longer. There was a need for legislation that would allow for the federal purchase of private lands. Persistent efforts by citizens and scientists, bolstered by Theodore Roosevelt’s creation of the Forest Service in 1905, finally produced the Weeks Act of 1911. This legislation has since been used to create more than 40 national forests covering more than 20 million acres.

Roosevelt’s energetic acquisition of land for wildlife, wilderness, and public enjoyment has left a legacy of millions of acres of forests, wildlife refuges, and parks that remain under federal ownership and some degree of protection to this day. Congress has generally matched this enthusiasm. They have passed legislation such as the 1964 Wilderness Act. They have also designated hundreds of wild and scenic rivers, national recreation areas, and other areas where conservation and recreation are prioritized.

The broad popular mandate for protection extends even to BLM lands, generally the most economically marginal and least protected public lands. The BLM was established in 1946 to manage what were largely lands used for grazing in the western United States. In the 1960s, in response to growing interest in public lands, the BLM held hundreds of hearings to determine their fate. The overwhelming response was that these lands should remain under federal ownership, and managed for multiple use. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976, BLM’s “Organic Act,” put this popular sentiment into public law.

Big Beautiful Lands Subjected to Big Ugly Selloff

FLPMA specified that BLM land could only be disposed of under strict criteria and to serve the national interest. Parcels that meet these criteria are marked “available for disposal” in planning documents and encompass more than 6 million acres. These include popular recreation sites that are always at some risk of disposal, usually to energy interests or developers, according to Erik Molvar, Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project.

The time-honored FLPMA process for land disposal is also time-consuming. Growth interests have turned to Congress to speed up the timeline and expand the lands available. Special legislative proposals like 1998’s Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act have done just that, allowing the sale of BLM lands within a boundary surrounding Las Vegas. Despite resulting sprawl, pollution, and climate change, Nevada members of Congress are pushing to expand that boundary.

Such efforts are usually associated with the political right, as conservatives have consistently, though perhaps irrationally, aligned with growth over conservation. But Nevada’s economy is so dependent on Vegas-centered growth, elected leaders of both parties are on board.

Whether motivated by the prospect of growth or by fringe ideologies that dispute public lands’ constitutionality, large-scale land disposal efforts have also reared their heads. They are most often led by Western lawmakers whose states contain vast public acreage that is unavailable for development.

In 2017, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) pushed for the Trump administration to sell over three million acres to Western states. Amid intense public outcry, he scrapped the bill and soon left Congress.

Parts of Mill Creek Canyon, an area popular with hikers near Moab, Utah, would have been sold off with Sen. Mike Lee’s provision in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” (Kirsten Stade)

This past summer, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) included language in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that would have sold up to 1.2 million acres of BLM lands across 11 Western states. Lee’s supposed rationale—that federal lands must be used to build affordable housing—was not enough to overcome the idea’s abysmal unpopularity. The public backlash, even from Lee’s Republican colleagues, was so pronounced that the provision was jettisoned.

Unfortunately, we have not seen the end of such efforts. An unofficial Republican congressional committee has recently released a framework for a second reconciliation bill. One provision in the bill would:

Direct relevant federal agencies to sell off or lease at a low rate…federal properties to expand access to affordable private-sector housing.

The bill’s architects insist that only federal buildings and the mostly-urban property attached to them would be up for sale, according to Chris Krupp, Public Lands Attorney with WildEarth Guardians, in an interview for the Herald. That seems overly optimistic, given the vague language of “properties” and the provision’s expected $115 billion in revenues.

Quietly Creeping Disposal Schemes

Federal-to-state land transfer schemes are a favorite of federal land foes. The Land and Water Conservation Fund has, since 1964, used royalties from offshore oil and gas to purchase private lands for parks, refuges, and forests. An order last year by Trump’s Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum makes these land acquisitions much more difficult, especially for parks and refuges. It also allows for “surplus” federal lands to be sold back to the states.

Similarly, Trump’s budget request to Congress last year suggested selling or exchanging NPS units to states. But states lack the budgets to maintain new lands, and would likely divest them to private entities.

The same applies to schemes like Rep. Russ Fulcher’s (R-ID) to transfer Idaho’s federal lands to state and local governments. Fulcher insists that “the goal is not privatization but better stewardship through local stakeholder involvement.” But Western states are required by their constitutions to maximize revenues from State Trust lands for public schools. In states with growing populations, the path to maximum revenue may well lie through development and sprawl.

For those who see public lands as fodder for private growth, an easy option is to leave them under federal ownership while granting much of their control to the states. Shared stewardship agreements between the states of Utah, Montana, and Idaho and the Forest Service do just that. The agreements allow the states to expand commercial logging over millions of acres of national forests with minimal public oversight. They strip federal protections, yet leave the feds with the maintenance bill.

Such pathways to monetizing public lands have their appeal, given the massive unpopularity of selling them outright. Fee title ownership of lands by the federal government confers the strongest and most durable potential for conservation. But there is still massive opportunity for exploitation short of outright sale. That opportunity escalates as this administration strips federal protections against the ravages of the livestock, mineral, geothermal, and fossil fuel industries.

Informal privatization can even more easily evade public backlash. In many western states, public and private lands exist in a checkerboard pattern. Initially a product of alternating-parcel land grants to railroads, checkerboard public lands contain trails and recreation sites that are inaccessible except via those private parcels. Historically, access has been protected by easements that establish rights of public access via private property. When private landowners removed agency signage on public parcels and put up their own No Trespassing signs, federal agencies sided with the public. But that is changing. Now, “Private landowners are treating public lands as if they are their own private domain,” said Molvar.

The checkerboard pattern of land ownership in places like Northern Nevada makes public lands vulnerable to privatization. (Onx and TRCP)

Americans overwhelmingly support public lands, but not many understand their full significance. Most are familiar with public lands only through the iconic national parks they have visited. But Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite would not be what they are without the millions of acres of less-protected USFS and BLM lands surrounding them. If these large expanses of buffering, wildlife-supporting, undeveloped land surrounding them were to be sold off for growth, their complex ecosystems would unravel.

“The universe of people who have a stake in public lands is 100 percent of the American population,’ said Molvar. “The only question is, do they know it?”

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Selling Off Public Lands: The Push to Privatize a Public Treasure appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The post Conflict Between Growth and Conservation, Says Intergovernmental Platform appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Rutherford County is located in the central Tennessee farm belt. Its county seat, Murfreesboro, is precisely in the state’s geographic center, and it briefly served as Tennessee’s capital. But, because of greater commerce and superior roads, the legislature chose Nashville as the seat of power only a few years after statehood was granted in 1796. Decades later, Murfreesboro became a grim center of the Civil War. It was the site of the Battle of Stones River—a pivotal Union victory bought at the cost of immense casualties.

Rutherford County (outlined in red) has experienced the greatest population growth of all 95 Tennessee counties in recent years. (Tennessee State Data Center, Public Domain)

Today, a different kind of struggle defines the region, with Rutherford County again at the epicenter: rapid urbanization converting farmland to pavement and housing. The county is rapidly being absorbed into a megalopolis that includes Nashville, Davidson, Murfreesboro, and Franklin. This cluster of municipalities ranks among the fastest-growing in the nation. Runaway population growth and inadequate land planning are driving rapid sprawl, exceeding existing infrastructure capacity and eliminating high-quality farmland.

In many ways, Rutherford County is a microcosm of a national divide between developers profiting from unchecked expansion and residents whose quality of life is eroded by it. In an attempt to secure a more sustainable future, county officials recently revised their comprehensive plan to obviate sprawl. Yet, the proposed land-use limitations faced fierce blowback in the final days of the adoption process.

As local officials weigh eleventh-hour compromises that threaten to dilute the work of good-faith planners, the effectiveness of the entire plan hangs in the balance. For Rutherford County, a defining choice is only weeks away.

A Late Start

Comprehensive plans are important guiding visions that may also specify land-use parameters, such as density (number of units per acre). Rutherford County adopted its first comprehensive plan in 2011. This gave the county a late start; many counties developed theirs decades prior. The 2011 plan was followed by a zoning ordinance—a set of legally binding land-use regulations—in 2013.

Rutherford County land-use map from 2008 (left), with undeveloped parcels in green, residential developments in yellow, and commercial areas in red. The map on the right shows a 2035 projection with unrestrained development. (2011 Rutherford Comprehensive Plan, Public Domain)

Designed to guide development for 20 years, the 2011 plan was soon outpaced by the county’s rapid growth. It succeeded, however, in highlighting an alarming trend: Maps showed that without further government intervention, nearly all undeveloped parcels would be swallowed by residential development by 2035.

Moreover, even as the county adopted the 2011 plan, growth was already creating traffic gridlock and overcrowding in schools. Within a decade, planners began work on an alternative PlanRutherford to address the shortcomings of the original comprehensive plan. The county’s 10-member Planning Commission is responsible for creating the new plan in coordination with the Planning Department.

Alarm Bells

Rutherford County has a current population of 377,000 inhabitants, and Planning Director Doug Demosi projects it will surpass 550,000 by 2045. Such a large population increase will bring corresponding stress on infrastructure, increases in flooding risks, and loss of farmland and other open space. For PlanRutherford, planners assessed likely outcomes under various scenarios. The outcomes of the baseline trend are startling.

A portion of a “Growth Scenario Scorecard” from PlanRutherford showing outcomes of the likely trend scenario, with “Sprawl” and “Compact” scenarios based on land-use decisions. (PlanRutherford, Public Domain)

Rutherford County residents should expect over 400 percent greater flooding risks, with a 76 percent loss of farmland, under current trends. To illustrate other scenarios, PlanRutherford includes a Growth Scenario Scorecard with various “measures of success” under sprawl and compact land use.

The sprawl scenario is only incrementally worse than the baseline trend, indicating that sprawling land use is already in place. Alternatively, the county could realize modest gains under the compact scenario. This would entail reducing density in rural areas and concentrating development within nodes where infrastructure already exists.

Planners used these projections to develop a proposal for zoning changes, included in PlanRutherford. The proposal reflects an attempt to mitigate the worst-case scenario while accommodating current trends. In other words, it is a classic “smart growth” proposal for zoning that would, modestly, lower rural density relative to what it would otherwise become.

A Very Modest Proposal

On January 22, 2026, the county elected body, the Rutherford Board of Commissioners, met to determine whether they would accept the final draft of PlanRutherford. Planning Director Demosi presented on the intent of the plan: managing growth. He focused primarily on the plan’s Future Land Use Policy chapter. This policy includes three major area designations: Rural Preserve, Rural Living, and Country Suburban.

The land-use map on the left shows the urban growth boundaries of the municipalities within Rutherford County, and the map on the right shows the three area designations proposed in PlanRutherford. (PlanRutherford, Public Domain)

Fully half of the county has already been designated as urban or is within the urban growth boundaries of La Vergne, Smyrna, Eagleville, and Murfreesboro municipalities. The area proposed for the Country Suburban designation falls mostly within these boundaries. The new designation would allow up to three units per acre. This is not a substantive change from the Rural Medium-Density designation, under which much of this area currently sits.

With the Rural Preserve designation, planners intend to reduce development density on the periphery of the county. This designation would allow 1 residential unit per 5–15 acres. (Planners would determine precise limits when crafting zoning code.) The current Rural Low-Density designation allows 1 unit per 1–5 acres. This zoning change would help maintain the agricultural and cultural character of the county’s most rural areas.

Planners also propose the Rural Preserve designation for the area surrounding the local J. Percy Priest Reservoir. This would create a buffer area to protect the county’s water supply. The proposed Rural Preserve areas only occupy about 15 percent of Rutherford County and are all currently designated Rural Low-Density.

The Rural Living designation represents the largest area of proposed density change in PlanRutherford. According to Demosi, it has also been the most contentious in the revision process. In an attempt to establish a lower density transition area between County Suburban and Rural Preserve, planners proposed a limit of 1 unit per 1–5 acres (depending on proximity to services). The existing zoning in that area allows between 1 unit/acre and 3 units/acre. The proposed density reduction drew the ire of landowners and developers alike.

To Retreat or Stand Firm?

Planning Director Doug Demosi speaks about PlanRutherford at the January 22 meeting of the Board of Commissioners. (Rutherford County TV)

There was a laborious review process involving those objecting to land-use restrictions and those favoring restrictions to preserve a rural quality of life. Planners attempted to reach a balance acceptable to all parties. As Planning Commissioner and Road Board Member Michael Shirley stated, the Planning Commission is a “body that includes farmers, business owners, home builders, real estate professionals, and four sitting [members of the Board of Commissioners]. These members bring very different perspectives and priorities to the table.”

Shirley averred that “[PlanRutherford] is not rushed, and it is not incomplete. It is the result of more than four years of work. During that time, it has gone through multiple public input events, public comment periods, Planning Commission debates, workshops, formal public hearings, additional amendments, compromises, and ultimately a final vote. When that vote occurred, the plan passed the Planning Commission unanimously.”

Initially, the Board of Commissioners did not pass the plan due to developer pushback. This was despite impassioned testimony from supporters of the draft plan during a four-hour meeting. The Board voted 12–9 to amend the plan, sending it back to the Planning Commission for reconciliation. The proposed amendment was to increase the density in the disputed Rural Living area to 2 (instead of 1) units per 1–5 acres.

The Planning Commission had a decision before them: Amend the plan with the recommended density increase or return it with no change. They met on February 23 and resolved to keep the plan as is—with the lower density. The ball is now in the Board of Commissioners’ court, with a final decision due by mid-April.

The Downzoning Dilemma

At the current pace of land conversion, Tennessee loses an estimated 10 acres of farmland every hour. Concerns have prompted the governor and the state legislature to enact a Farmland Preservation Act. The law pledges $25 million to incentivize farmers to place their land in conservation easements.

With over 63,000 farms in Tennessee, the $25 million equates to less than $400 per farm. Critics say that’s not enough to deter developers from offering higher incentives for land. The scale of loss, fueled by high land values, is overwhelming the state’s incentives.

Furthermore, offering money to conserve land is a classic case of the “trophic conundrum.” Money can be spent on conservation in one area, but generating the money entails an ecological footprint in another area. In the big picture, then, true conservation can hardly be bought. Land-use control via zoning must be part of the remedy.

Rutherford County’s population has roughly doubled every twenty years since 1990. (PlanRutherford, Public Domain)

Like Rutherford, many counties facing runaway growth, in Tennessee and elsewhere, attempt to limit impacts via “downzoning.” Reducing building density on undeveloped natural and rural land can prevent county services and infrastructure from being overwhelmed and protect the environment and quality of life. But powerful development interests make downzoning politically risky and legally challenging. They may threaten lawsuits on the basis of a takings: a limit to productive land use and value without adequate compensation.

Downzoning is especially challenging once growth has escalated land values. Because Rutherford County began so late to protect its rural and natural areas, planners working to limit development are at a profound disadvantage. With many landowners expecting to cash in on the boom, it’s not easy to push back on development. Modest “smart growth” has become the fallback position.

Leveraging Concurrency

The concept of concurrency is a powerful tool for policymakers facing tough decisions regarding growth. Simply put, concurrency is the timely provision of public goods relative to the demand for them. Local governments can leverage the idea of concurrency to help residents understand that public services and infrastructure—schools, roads, water resources, and parkland—often cannot keep up with unabated growth.

Applied to policy, concurrency can take the form of Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances. These ordinances prevent development if public infrastructure cannot accommodate it. Various locales have implemented moratoriums on new development to prevent exceeding the capacity of county infrastructure or services.

Civil War cannons stand as sentinels in defense of Murfreesboro at the Stones River National Battlefield, which is now surrounded by housing sprawl. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Another tool is to challenge the idea that downzoning inherently diminishes land value. Some analyses have shown that downzoning can preserve land value. Reducing the intensity of land use can increase land value as open areas become rarer. This scarcity effect can also maintain or boost the value of surrounding properties due to a desire to live adjacent to open land. Conversely, sprawl often diminishes land values by increasing pollution, crowding, noise, and crime. These negative impacts of sprawl often don’t make it into land-value calculations, but they should. And there is a point where civic leaders need to say “enough.”

Sprawl isn’t the only challenge to Rutherford County. In the not-so-long run, “heat, precipitation, and fire” are in the cards due to runaway greenhouse gas emissions. And in the longer run? One recent cli-fi title featured Murfreesboro for a story of survival in the year 2145.

According to the narrative, Murfreesboro is positioned barely north of a vast uninhabitable region called “Mesoland,” after the temperatures of the Mesozoic Era (the Age of Reptiles). It’s a scary story in which the county is protected from exceedingly threatening species only by the poorly patrolled “Mesoland Containment Corridor.” 2145 is fiction, not climate science, but it’s worth noting that the author (Peter Seidel, 1926-2025) was a long-time student of climate trends and a renowned city planner.

Climate planning may seem like a stretch when county planners are still struggling with the ongoing issue of sprawl. But it’s worth at least keeping the effects of climate change in mind—whether irritating or devastating—while planning and zoning for hundreds of thousands of new residences.

Rutherford County is at an important turning point. It is concluding a nearly five-year process of developing a comprehensive plan to mitigate threats to the county’s culture, quality of life, and environment. It will need to take steps, however modest, in the right direction to preserve any land for farming, recreation, and natural systems. A lesson for other counties: Keep your county great by being proactive, and downzone sooner rather than later. Otherwise, how will you protect your farms and forests when the GDP bulldozer arrives?

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

The post Struggling Against Sprawl in Rutherford County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.