Jack Santa Barbara, PhD is a retired CEO, academic, philanthropist, author, and environmental and peace activist. Jack has long been writing and educating on environmental and energy issues and the consequent impacts on people and the planet.
Here Jack discusses the current predicament we find ourselves in regarding energy use and our limits to growth. We have within reach an opportunity to carve a new and better path forward and Jack argues that for our future to be truly sustainable our thinking needs to be bigger and bolder…but that our economy should not be. To seriously engage with the overshoot issue, we need to think differently.
In this episode we discuss:
• Jack’s background - from conflict resolution to business to ecological economics
• Reconceptualising economics to acknowledge biophysical limits to growth
• The role of fossil fuels in the development of our civilisations and economies
• The importance of understanding net energy and the changing net energy return of our current energy sources
• Our carbon ‘tunnel vision’ with a tendency to overlook other aspects of living sustainably within planetary boundaries
• The pros and cons of current renewable energy options
• The framing of needs vs wants in a lower energy future
• Individual and community actions to accelerate change
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