PREVENTING OIL SPILLS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AN ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS PERSPECTIVE

摘要

In the next 20 years, global shipping is expected to triple, with over 90% of all materials moving via ship (G. Miller, U.S. Representative from California, letter to the U.S. Coast Guard, June 8, 1998). With this unprecedented growth in maritime transportation, there will likely be unprecedented growth in the number of oil spills. This increase in global trade, and ultimately pollution, is founded in the belief that an everexpanding economy is both possible and desirable. Today, the majority of policy makers and economists strive to stimulate economic growth and globalization regardless of the long-term implications to the environment. The economic theory used to derive these goals assumes environmental sources and sinks are infinite relative to the economy and the environment is a subset of the economy. From an ecological economics perspective, a policy goal of infinite growth will increase oil spills and ultimately be impossible. The earth is finite. The economy depends on the earth's lowentropy matter and energy, such as oil, natural gas and minerals, to exist. The economy is therefore dependent on the earth and is a subset of the environment. Since the earth's sources and sinks are finite, there are limits to the amount of growth possible. Evidence of these limits is the unprecedented loss in biodiversity and global climate change. The solution to preventing oil spills in the twenty-first century is a paradigm shift that accepts the economy as a subset of the environment and implements economic policies that strive for an optimal macroeconomic scale. According to Daly and Townsend (1993), “an optimal scale is one that is at least sustainable and does not sacrifice ecosystem services that are worth more at the margin than the production benefits derived from the growth in the scale of resource use.” Using the accepted economic theories of Smith and Ricardo, with the steady-state theory of Daly, this paper outlines the roots of the current economic paradigm and offers sustainable political-economic policies to prevent oil spills in the long term.