This Element is an excerpt from Crossing the Energy Divide (ISBN: 9780137015443) by Robert U. Ayres and Edward H. Ayres. Available in print and digital formats.Finally: a coherent, integrated energy strategy based on techniques and technologies that have already been proven in the real world!We envision a national energy strategy with eight main components. One (increased energy efficiency of consumer products, including automobiles) has received serious media atte...

Why the global economy has become increasingly unstable, and how financial “de-carbonization” could break the pattern of bubble-driven wealth destruction.The global economy has become increasingly, perhaps chronically, unstable. Since 2008, we have heard about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, banks “too big to fail,” financial regulation (or the lack of it), and the European debt crisis. Wall Street has discovered that it is more profitable to make money fro...

The purpose of this book is three-fold. The first purpose is to posit that the fundamental substance of the universe is energy, and that energy is required (consumed) for any material transformation, or information transmission. The labor theory of value, articulated by the physiocrats and elaborated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.B. Say and Karl Marx was a rough first approximation of the value creation process, in the 17th and 18th centuries, but is now obsolete. Labor is now (mostly) p...

Capitalism is under attack. Defenders say that capitalism has raised billions of people from poverty. But a central activity of capitalism today, Wall Street style, is speculation (gambling), using other people’s money, and privatizing the profits while socializing the debts. Skeptics argue that capitalism has redistributed the wealth of the planet in favor of a very few, meanwhile leaving the planet in bad shape and leaving billions of people out in the cold. Wealth is now extremely mal-d...

Eminent physicist and economist, Robert Ayres, examines the history of technology as a change agent in society, focusing on societal roots rather than technology as an autonomous, self-perpetuating phenomenon. With rare exceptions, technology is developed in response to societal needs that have evolutionary roots and causes. In our genus Homo, language evolved in response to a need for our ancestors to communicate, both in the moment, and to posterity. A band of hunters had no cha...

In this volume, a group of distinguished international scholars provides a fresh investigation of the most fundamental issues involved in our dependence on natural resources. In Scarcity and Growth (RFF, 1963) and Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (RFF, 1979), researchers considered the long-term implications of resource scarcity for economic growth and human well-being. Scarcity and Growth Revisited examines these implications with 25 years of new learning and experience. It finds that con...

This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary "progress." The massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels. In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts according to physical laws, and usually after some part of ...

This text discusses the current basis of economic growth, concluding that it is is failing to deliver, and is actually harming our prospects for future security. Further arguments propose a possible long-term strategy for economic revival - eco-restructuring. This strategy involves a shifting away from production of goods to production of services, closing material cycles and eliminating reliance on non-renewable resources.

Praise for Somewhere I Have Never Traveled Th is fourth volume of Robert Ayres Carters autobiography takes the reader back to the 1970s. From the outside, Carters life seems conventional: he was an executive in the world of publishing and advertising, commuting between Long Island and Manhattan. Setting this work apart from the ordinariness of that sort of life is the clarity of his unfl inching revelation of his private aff airs, emotions, and thoughts. His struggles to become a writer of...

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Nobody Yet Knows Who I Am: A Personal History: 1943 - 1953 is the second volume in Robert Ayres Carters memoir. The first volume, Sundays Child, was published in 2005 by Xlibris. This volume opens with the authors military service as an enlisted man in the United States Army in World War II, highlighted by a tour of duty in the China- Burma Theater. Returning to the States in 1946, Mr. Carters story then resumes with his career as a book salesman, a student in New York City, a Fulbright Sc...