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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Important Reference, New Ideas, May 18, 2000
The principle conclusion of this text is that economic wealth is a function of natural resource availability. Japan is noted as an exception, but the first printing pre-dated the collapse of the Soviet Union and consequently, the Soviet exception goes unmentioned. It matters little, as their conclusions may be debunked by countless other "exceptions."Nevertheless, the book makes a number of interesting observations and provides data to support them. It anticipates the perspective now termed "industrial ecology" or "industrial "metabolism," but places an emphasis on energy (first-law energy) rather than materials, which the aforementioned perspectives have become preoccupied with. Two new and useful terms are defined: energy subsidy and Energetic Return on Investment (ERI) that draw attention to the authors' viewpoint. The first is a measure of how much energy an organism or economy (the analogue of an ecosystem) can capture from outside its borders. The second computes the energy returned to an organism as a result of some expenditure, e.g., migration to better food sources. Countless graphs, tables and data provide empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that economic growth is attributable to the substitution of fossil fuels for the labor of humans and animals. This element is absent from neoclassical economic thought, which would describe economic growth as principally a function of labor and capital, rather than thermodynamic efficiencies or scale. Although the authors recognize the importance of second law analysis, they make few attempts to take advantage of it. Energy is therefore equated without regard to quality, except for a few instances or examples. References are copious. Among the contemporary authors cited are David Pimentel, the agricultural energy analyst at Cornell, Herman Daly and Robert Costanza, ecological economists from the Univ. of Maryland.
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