35 Sustainable Environmental Performance

To end our discussion of specific macro-economic field theory we take a look at the environmental performance of economies. Although such statements are not a standard option of macroeconomic forecasts. However, it is due to the fact that the total population of men with soon 8 billion inhabitants on our planet and thus the limits of ecological carrying capacity of the planet has been reached, appropriate for simulations of the global economy is at least to bring a blanket and approximate consideration of sustainability in.

The prosperity of an economy is based in principle on the average available goods and services, mostly national GDP, for the averga citizen of the society. All these products require raw materials and energy to their deployment. The immediate resource commodities, energy and labor is offset by the indirect resource equity. Capital is not a direct source of wealth, but to distribute it and to give to the economics cooperators. Money is a technical product and thus a distribution key, a metaressource to the generation and and provision of welfare. But the causal source of all wealth is always the environment. This has as its underlying authority to pay the ultimate price for prosperity. Therefore, the human race benefitting from the environment has to ensure that this main ressource of prosperity must not been ruined. For this we make the following simplified balance sheet accounts, without entering into all the complex details of the many biospheric interactions we must. The terrestrial environment we call here. It provides energy and raw materials available:

    (35.1)

In this case it is the total content of the bound energyof the earth and the total contentof raw materials. In addition to the time energy flows in from the outside, that is the energy of the sun made availableas incident energy. This is generally an effect of the Solar constant

    (35.2)

This is the average per square meter incident energy that can be used not only in solar collectors. It is stored in plant growth, and so on geologically long time, such as in gas and oil. But also the dynamics of the water and the use of water power capability is a direct effect of solar energy. Eventual storage in plants and in the thermal energy of air and water we will call short, because this results in the natural growth, including the so-called renewable resources. The raw material consists of both the balance sheet of the geological past of the earthalready existing resources. These are contrary to the internal consumption, but can be reduced through recycling activitiesin order to reverse. The overall balance should be positive as possible, ie the temporal change of (34.1) as greater than or equal to zero:

(35.3)

The constantsandderived from the geological past ar constants that fall away in the differentiation and there will remain only the variable sizes:

    (35.4)

Next we can change the equation by bringing the natural and economic resources to opposing sides

    (35.6)

with

   and        (35.7)

with the sum of consumption and recycling capabilitiesof the i world economies. Carrying out the differentiation on the right brings:

The last approximation results from the fact that the values of the coefficients changewith time is small, in any case less than the rates of changeof the GDP's. So we finally arrive at the inequality

    (35.8)

The coefficientof the global environmental sustainability consumption should be possible less than 1, or should be held at least only slightly above 1, to be sustainable. Otherwise the global economy cuts their most important resource beyond the medium to long term itself. The individual components are to be calculated in energy equivalents for a single economy, and i describes the national sustainability coefficient

    (35.9)

as the proportionate effect of the nation i. Conversely, an economyis sustainable if their percentage growthdoes not exceed the maximum sustainable growth:

    (35.10)

The determination of the individual components is not easy, especially since some variables are mutually dependent.