Sustainable Government Solutions – Page 3

Growth Versus Consumerism

Posted on 19 August 2010 | by Jay Kimball | 1 Comment

Keywords: growth, consumption, GDP, global economy, China, India, consumerism

Robert Reich wrote a thoughtful article on Why Growth is Good. Highlights of the article are below. In it, he differentiates between growth and consumption.

Growth is really about the capacity of a nation to produce everything that’s wanted and needed by its inhabitants. That includes better stewardship of the environment as well as improved public health and better schools.

A couple years ago I wrote an article – Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz on Sustainability and Growth – in which Stiglitz talked about the idea that “we grow what we measure.” Here’s an exerpt from the end of that article that I think is relevant to Reich’s article:

For me, what Stiglitz is getting at is: We grow what we measure (GDP), and because we are measuring the wrong stuff, we are growing wrong. It seems to be in our DNA to want to “grow,” but like a garden, don’t we have a choice about what we grow? Are there ways we can grow our economy that restore abundance rather than consume it? What are the essential things to measure so that we are growing good things?

Using ecological footprint data from Global Footprint Network we can see the current state of consumption for North America and the rest of the world. American per capita consumption is legend. China and India are adopting their own versions of American-style consumerism. All nations are bumping up against the limits of the earth to provide what is needed for growth. We are collectively challenged to find new ways to grow, more lightly, in ways that restore rather than deplete.

N.B. The width of bar proportional to population in associated region. Ecological Footprint accounts estimate how many Earths were needed to meet the resource requirements of humanity for each year since 1961, when complete UN statistics became available. Resource demand (Ecological Footprint) for the world as a whole is the product of population times per capita consumption, and reflects both the level of consumption and the efficiency with which resources are turned into consumption products. Resource supply (biocapacity) varies each year with ecosystem management, agricultural practices (such as fertilizer use and irrigation), ecosystem degradation, and weather.   This global assessment shows how the size of the human enterprise compared to the biosphere, and to what extent humanity is in ecological overshoot. Overshoot is possible in the short-term because humanity can liquidate its ecological capital rather than living off annual yields.

Highlights from Robert Reich’s Why Growth is Good

Economic growth is slowing in the United States. It’s also slowing in Japan, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Canada. It’s even slowing in China. And it’s likely to be slowing soon in Germany.

If governments keep hacking away at their budgets while consumers almost everywhere are becoming more cautious about spending, global demand will shrink to the point where a worldwide dip is inevitable.

You might ask yourself: So what? Why do we need more economic growth anyway? Aren’t we ruining the planet with all this growth — destroying forests, polluting oceans and rivers, and spewing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate that’s already causing climate chaos? Let’s just stop filling our homes with so much stuff.

The answer is economic growth isn’t just about more stuff. Growth is different from consumerism. Growth is really about the capacity of a nation to produce everything that’s wanted and needed by its inhabitants. That includes better stewardship of the environment as well as improved public health and better schools. (The Gross Domestic Product is a crude way of gauging this but it’s a guide. Nations with high and growing GDPs have more overall capacity; those with low or slowing GDPs have less.)

Poorer countries tend to be more polluted than richer ones because they don’t have the capacity both to keep their people fed and clothed and also to keep their land, air and water clean. Infant mortality is higher and life spans shorter because they don’t have enough to immunize against diseases, prevent them from spreading, and cure the sick.

In their quest for resources rich nations (and corporations) have too often devastated poor ones – destroying their forests, eroding their land, and fouling their water. This is intolerable, but it isn’t an indictment of growth itself. Growth doesn’t depend on plunder. Rich nations have the capacity to extract resources responsibly. That they don’t is a measure of their irresponsibility and the weakness of international law.

How a nation chooses to use its productive capacity – how it defines its needs and wants — is a different matter. As China becomes a richer nation it can devote more of its capacity to its environment and to its own consumers, for example.

The United States has the largest capacity in the world. But relative to other rich nations it chooses to devote a larger proportion of that capacity to consumer goods, health care, and the military. And it uses comparatively less to support people who are unemployed or destitute, pay for non-carbon fuels, keep people healthy, and provide aid to the rest of the world. Slower growth will mean even more competition among these goals.

Faster growth greases the way toward more equal opportunity and a wider distribution of gains. The wealthy more easily accept a smaller share of the gains because they can still come out ahead of where they were before. Simultaneously, the middle class more willingly pays taxes to support public improvements like a cleaner environment and stronger safety nets. It’s a virtuous cycle. We had one during the Great Prosperity the lasted from 1947 to the early 1970s.

Slower growth has the reverse effect. Because economic gains are small, the wealthy fight harder to maintain their share. The middle class, already burdened by high unemployment and flat or dropping wages, fights ever more furiously against any additional burdens, including tax increases to support public improvements. The poor are left worse off than before. It’s a vicious cycle. We’ve been in one most of the last thirty years.

No one should celebrate slow growth. If we’re entering into a period of even slower growth, the consequences could be worse.

For some excellent reading on this subject, check out the Recommended Reading section on Sustainable Business, Government, and Community. I especially found useful Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 and Jeffrey Sachs’ Common Wealth.

Using Water Heaters to Store Excess Wind Energy

Posted on 13 August 2010 | by Jay Kimball | 14 Comments

Keywords: energy management, energy storage, smart grid, wind energy, renewable energy

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is recruiting one hundred homeowners in Washington for an experiment on how to store surplus wind energy. The BPA is testing a promising smart-grid concept that would use residential water heaters to help manage the fluctuations of wind energy generation.

The project will address two problems experienced on the grid: shortage of power during peak times and surges of power during windy periods, when the energy isn’t needed.

The BPA, working with Mason County Public Utility District Number 3, will install special devices on water heaters that will communicate with the electrical grid and tell the water heaters to turn on or off, based on grid conditions and the amount of renewable energy that’s available.

While homeowners will be able to override the control device at any time, it’s unlikely that they would even notice a change in temperature.

The water heaters in effect become energy storage devices — turning on to absorb excess power and shutting down when demand ramps up —leveling out the peaks and valleys of energy use. Benefits include:

no need for expensive and toxic battery storage
no need for fossil fuel burning power plants to fill in low wind energy gaps
water heaters provide distributed storage, avoiding point loads on grid
smart water heaters can be manufactured economically, for just a few dollars more.

Wind power is the fastest growing source of renewable energy, accounting for about 3 percent of US electric generation. About 53 million homes in the United States, or 42 percent of the total, use electric hot water heaters. Added up, they account for 13 percent to 17 percent of nationwide residential electricity use.

In the Pacific Northwest, home of the BPA, it’s estimated that there are 4.3 million water heaters that can store 2,600 megawatt-hours by allowing the storage temperature to vary by five degrees. (NB: For a detailed analysis see the Northwest Power and Conservation Council report prepared by Ken Corum.)

The Northwest Energy Coalition does a nice job detailing the background, and benefits of this approach to storing excess wind energy. Highlights of their article, Using simple smart water heaters to integrate intermittent renewables, are below.

Highlights of Using simple smart water heaters to integrate intermittent renewables

Background

Wind-generated power is clean, relatively cheap and available in large quantities. But the wind itself is quite unpredictable, so much so that for each average megawatt (aMW) of wind power we need, we must erect about 3 megawatts of turbine capacity, since actual output could be anywhere from 0 to 3 megawatts at any instant.

Suppose our region, which consumes about 21,000 average MW of electricity each year, wants to get a third of its power from wind. We’d have to build about 21,000 megawatts (MW) of turbine capacity to get 7,000 average MW of electricity. Given weather variability and the geographical spacing of wind projects, over time the actual production of those 21,000 megawatts of turbines will vary from about 1,000 MW to 15,000 MW due to weather fronts and daily warming patterns. Problematic 3,000- to 4,000-megawatt swings can occur in as little as 10-30 minutes.

To deal with large variations in wind, grid operators use some expensive tools now at their disposal, generally limited to ramping natural gas-fired combustion turbines and/or hydro generation up and down. Ramping up is fairly easy; today’s grid has ample reserve capacity on which to draw.

Ramping down is another matter. When wind generation suddenly spikes during periods of low demand (at night or during mild weather hours), the system can have less flexible generation on-line (nuclear and coal plants) that cannot be cut back to make room for the wind. The region’s inflexible “baseload” coal plants and one nuclear plant, which together provide more than a quarter of our electricity, cannot be economically ramped up and down in response to wind variability.

Previous Transformers and NW Energy Coalition’s Bright Future report have addressed wind-integration issues, noting – in particular – that the problems will lessen as we progressively eliminate coal-fueled power from the Northwest grid, as renewable projects grow and become more diverse and geographical dispersed, and as “smart grid” deployment provides a new back-up resource.

Smart grid to the rescue

In a Feb. 10, 2009, presentation to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, Council staff member Ken Corum provided a powerful example of how one relatively simple smart grid innovation – using electric water heaters as temporary storage devices — could help the grid integrate large amounts of wind power at very low cost. We expand on Corum’s example below.

The Northwest power system serves about 4.3 million electric water heaters. If all were running at once, their loads would total more than 19,000 MW. Of course, they don’t all run at the same time. Actual demand might be just a few hundred megawatts in the middle of the night, surging to more than 5,000 MW around 8 a.m. when people take their showers. Use drops during the day, and then peaks again at about 3,500 MW around 8 p.m. as people come home and wash dishes, clothes, etc.

Now imagine that as part of the smart grid, each water heater contains a chip that can receive signals from grid operators to raise or lower the water temperature by a few degrees. As wind generation picks up, the grid operator slightly raises the temperature set points on millions of water heater thermostats, thus “storing” the wind power for later use. Should the wind suddenly drop, the operator lowers the temperature points, causing many water heater elements to click off for a time.

Most people won’t even notice the small temperature changes. But spread over millions of water heaters, those few degrees of difference are enough to avoid ramping fossil-fuel and hydro generation up and down, thus improving system-wide fuel efficiency and leaving more water in the river for migrating salmon.

Once the infrastructure — smart meters that can communicate with both the utility and home appliances — is in place, manufacturers could start installing computer chips, adding perhaps $5-10 to the cost of a water heater, Given the system savings the water heater controls would generate, utilities could afford to cover the additional cost, and/or offer customers a rate discount or other incentive in exchange for limited control of their water heaters.

Currently, for example, Idaho Power pays residential customers $7 per month to participate in its A/C Cool Credit Program, which slightly backs down air conditioning power during peak demand periods.

Water heaters are a great choice for smart grid applications because of their relatively short life spans. Over about 12 years, the current stock could be totally replaced with smart water heaters.

Shifting peaks – and keeping the lights on

Aside from facilitating the integration of thousands of megawatts of wind power, controllable water heaters (and other appliances and equipment that draw electricity 24/7) provide two other benefits:

1. Reliability. Major power lines and generating plants occasionally suffer sudden outages due to fires, ice, wind or equipment failure. Turning down a few million water heaters could quickly shave demand enough to cover the power loss and avoid a major blackout. In fact, the chips discussed above can be made to automatically and instantaneously detect frequency changes in the electricity they use without any operator intervention. The chip reacts to a sudden change from the standard 60 cycles per second by instantly turning the heater on or off to keep the grid stable.

2. Money. Utilities spend a lot of money following the daily peaks and valleys of human activity. Thirty to 40% of their generation capacity sits idle for much of each 24-hour day. Another 5-10% come on only during very extreme weather — the hottest or coldest days. But utilities must cover the capital and maintenance costs of all these resources, no matter how little used.

Controllable water heaters would rarely go on during system peaks and could help utilities respond to system emergencies … at huge cost savings. Utilities would be able to spread demand more evenly throughout the day, increasing power line and substation efficiency and avoiding the costs of some mostly idle generation resources. These actions could lower bills substantially and/or provide savings to fund additional smart grid investment.

And that’s just one example

Though this article has focused on electric water heaters, similar controls can be installed in freezers, air conditioners and electric furnaces. Electric and hybrid-electric vehicles are other examples. Their charging rates can be altered while the vehicles are plugged into the grid. The opportunities are only starting to reveal themselves.

Allowing grid operators access to our appliance controls raises issues of cybersecurity, privacy and the potential for short-circuiting due process (e.g., automatic shutoff for non-payment of bills). Those issues must be adequately addressed. But the smart grid can help move the Northwest quickly and affordably to a bright energy future.

Rethinking the Measure of Growth

Posted on 19 July 2010 | by Jay Kimball | 1 Comment

Lat year I posted an article (Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz on Sustainability and Growth) about an interview with economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz at the Asia Society in New York City. Stiglitz talked about how “what we measure determines what we grow” and the dramatic negative side-effects a metric like GDP can have on societal well-being.

Today, Wayne Arnold at The New York TImes builds on this idea in his article Rethinking the Measure of Growth.

Highlights from NY Times Article

The quest for more plentiful and less expensive oil for fast-growing Asian economies has also brought a wave of offshore drilling from India and the Gulf of Thailand, to Vietnam and Bohai Bay, on the northeast coast of China.
In considering this risk and the increasing evidence of the toll that rapid economic development is already taking on Asia’s environment, economists and other experts in Asia have taken up the call to re-examine the prominence of economic growth as a measure of policy success, particularly the use of gross domestic product.
Asian governments have become particularly enthralled with gross domestic product (GDP) statistics for validation, becoming what Vishakha Desai, the president and chief executive of the Asia Society in New York, has called “G.D.P. junkies.”

For local officials in China, gross domestic product was, until recently, more than just a barometer for gauging policies, it was the measuring stick against which their futures in the ruling Communist Party were determined. Economic growth still ranks as one of the chief criteria for determining party promotions, according to Tan Kong Yam, an economics professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who offers a course for mayors from China.

For such officials, “there is an enormous incentive to promote investments and industrial production,” he said. “This explains why there’s enormous pollution.”

Gross domestic product has come in for some particularly hard knocks since the global financial crisis, notably after a report last year whose co-author was Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, that said reliance on gross domestic product had blinded governments to the increasing risks in the world economy since 2004.
Overlooking that risk has possibly cost future economic growth, the report said, and has contributed to a looming environmental crisis.

“Market prices are distorted by the fact that there is no charge imposed on carbon emissions,” the report said. “Clearly, measures of economic performance that reflected these environmental costs might look markedly different from standard measures.”

Economists in Asia say the debate about gross domestic product misses the point. Gross domestic product as a statistic is sound, they say; what is wrong is the fascination in government with what it measures — the sum total of a nation’s annual production.

“The problem is not G.D.P.,” said Bhanoji Rao, a visiting economics professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. “The problem is the culture of consumption.”

Mr. Rao is part of a growing body of economists, largely in academia, who question whether rapid economic growth rates in Asia — from the 10.3 percent expansion in giant-but-poor China to an expected 15 percent growth this year in tiny-but-rich Singapore — are necessarily producing a happier, healthier Asia.
Some Asian governments, China’s included, have been trying to recalibrate gross domestic product to include the cost of growth to the environment, creating a green gross domestic product. Such efforts, said Mr. Tan, the Nanyang professor, have been frustrated by the difficulty in determining the future cost of environmental destruction.
What is needed instead, some economists say, is a wholesale re-examination of development’s goals. “There needs to be an internal debate within the developing countries about what is the path of development we want to have,” Mr. Rao said.

Andy Xie, a private economist in Shanghai, has long argued that the 1.3 billion people in China cannot realistically hope to live like Americans.

“That statement is truer than ever,” he said.

Beijing, at least, appears to have gotten the message, if its investments in green technology and public transportation are anything to go by. The Communist Party has also revised the promotion criteria for officials so that environmental conditions are included along with gross domestic product.

But economists like Mr. Xie and Mr. Rao warn that even with greener development, the result may still be the same if the goal remains an American-style standard of living. Asia may instead need to carve out a vastly different vision of prosperity that does not rely on ever-increasing levels of material consumption.

Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business

Posted on 12 July 2010 | by Jay Kimball | 3 Comments

Lloyds of London, the insurance market, and Chatham House have published a white paper on Sustainable Energy Security that details the risks and opportunities for business.

Lloyd’s CEO, Dr. Richard Ward, doesn’t mince words in his foreword to the white paper:

This report, jointly produced by Lloyd’s 360 Risk Insight programme and Chatham House, should cause all risk managers to pause. What it outlines, in stark detail, is that we have entered a period of deep uncertainty in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility, and how much we will have to pay for it.

Is this any different from the normal volatility of the oil or gas markets? Yes, it is. Today, a number of pressures are combining: constraints on ‘easy to access’ oil; the environmental and political urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions; and a sharp rise in energy demand from the Asian economies, particularly China.

All of this means that the current generation of business leaders – and their successors – are going to have to find a new energy paradigm. Expect dramatic changes:

Prices are likely to rise, with some commentators suggesting oil may reach $200 a barrel.

Regulations on carbon emissions will intensify.

Reputations will be won or lost as the public demands that businesses reduce their environmental footprint.

The growing demand for energy will require an estimated $26 trillion in investment by 2030. Energy companies will face hard choices in deciding how to deploy these funds in an uncertain market with mixed policy messages. The recent Deepwater oil spill shows all too clearly the hazards of moving into ever more unpredictable terrain to extract energy resources. And the rapid deployment of cleaner energy technologies will radically alter the risk landscape. At this precise point in time we are in a period akin to a phony war. We keep hearing of difficulties to come, but with oil, gas and coal still broadly accessible – and largely capable of being distributed where they are needed – the bad times have not yet hit. The primary purpose of this report is to remind the reader that all businesses, not just the energy sector, need to consider how they, their suppliers and their customers will be affected by energy supplies which are less reliable and more expensive.

The failure of the Copenhagen Summit has not helped to instil a sense of urgency and it has hampered the ability of businesses – particularly those in the energy sector – to plan ahead and to make critical new investments in energy infrastructure. I call on governments to identify a clear path towards sustainable energy which businesses can follow.

Independently of what happens in UN negotiating rooms, businesses can take action. We can plan our energy needs, we can make every effort to reduce consumption, and we can aim for a mix of different energy sources. The transformation of the energy environment from carbon to clean energy sources creates an extraordinary risk management challenge for businesses. Traditional models that focus on annual profits and, at best, medium term strategies may struggle. Parts of this report talk about what might happen in 2030 or even 2050 and I make no apology for this. Energy security requires a long term view and it is the companies who grasp this who will trade on into the second half of this century.

Executive Summary

Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper – failure to do so could be catastrophic.
Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources.
China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike.
Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments.
Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans.
To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption.
Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of ‘just-in-time’ models.
Investment in renewable energy and ‘intelligent’ infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships.

A change in the energy market balance between East and West

Advanced economies remain the biggest consumers of primary energy per person but by 2008 non-OECD countries led by China and India had outstripped them in terms of the share of world demand. This shift began in the 1990s, partly because manufacturing shifted eastwards. Meanwhile, lower population growth, de- industrialisation, greater efficiency, higher fuel prices and a concern for the environment are lowering demand for oil-based fuels and coal in the OECD.

These consumption trajectories mean there is likely to be a tipping point in 2015 when countries in Asia-Pacific need more imported oil in total than the Middle East (including Sudan) can export.

Middle East oil surplus vs Asia-Pacific deficit (Source: John Mitchell, Chatham House 2010)

The white paper goes on to detail market forces, energy trends, risk and opportunity. This is recommended reading for business and government leaders and risk managers.

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz on Sustainability and Growth

Posted on 22 June 2009 | by Jay Kimball | 8 Comments

My wife and I live on an island in the Pacific Northwest. We are in a county that has the lowest working wages in the state. As you can imagine, there is a lot of belt tightening going on as the economy craters.

In a future blog post I’ll talk about how our community is finding ways to innovate in tough times, but for now, what I am thinking about is something Joseph Stiglitz said last year in an interview at the Asia Society in New York City. Stiglitz is a Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at Columbia University.

Toward the end of the interview, talking about GDP, he describes the dramatic negative side-effects a metric like GDP can have on societal well-being. In short, something as simple as a measurement can lift a society up, or crush it.

Here is what Professor Stiglitz said:

What We Measure Affects Our Behavior

Joseph Stiglitz during 2008 Asia Society interview

Accounting frameworks affect behavior. More generally, information affects behavior. What we gather our information about, and how we describe success, affects what we strive for. If GDP is what we think is success, people will strive for growing GDP. Politicians, for example, will then describe how they increased GDP x%, creating a sense of importance to the measure. By doing that though, they focus policies on things that will increase GDP.

We have identified a lot of ways in which GDP is not a good measure of economic performance or societal well-being. So we are working with others to try and focus a global conversation about alternative measures, and also come up with some summary accounting frameworks and statistics that more effectively represent the economic realities on the ground.

Measuring the Middle Class

For example, GDP doesn’t tell you about what happens to the typical citizen. This is an increasing problem because when you have growing inequality in society, you can have GDP going up, as it has in the US, but most people are getting worse off. Not just poverty going up, but the median income – 50% or more of people getting worse off.

We ought to know what’s happening to the median person. It’s very hard to find statistics about that.

Green GDP

There needs to be a focus on what we call “Green GDP” – taking account of environmental degradation and resource depletion. This is particularly important in developing countries that may, for example, be growing by cutting down their forests. But once they cut down the forests, there’s nothing there. And so unless they do something, it’s not sustainable. GDP tells you nothing about sustainability. Another example – the IMF thought Argentina was doing great in the early 1990s. In looking at the data though, in a more fine grained way, we found that their growth was not sustainable. If you only looked at GDP, you would not have realized that.

There are ways that you can adjust for depletion of natural resources and degradation of the environment. If you do that, China’s growth, for example, gets significantly lowered. It’s still doing well, but it is much lower than it otherwise would have been.

Special Interests – The Invisible Hand

Here’s an interesting story about the role of special interests: When we tried to push for this (Green GDP), and people in the Department of Commerce were excited about doing this, the coal industry basically threatened to pass a proviso to take away funding for any research that would support these alternative measures. Because they new that Green GDP would not be good for the coal industry. That reinforced our belief on why it is important to measure these things.

GDP and GNP

Here’s another example… the difference between GDP and GNP. Those of you who are older may remember GNP and around 1990 they switched to GDP. Well, everybody said it’s just a little bit of difference. It turns out that it makes a great deal of difference for many countries. And I am sure somebody is going to write an article about whether there was a political context to the switch. GDP looks at the output within the country. GNP looks at the income of the people, in the country. When you started privatizing a great deal, you had economic activity within the country, but the income from that economic activity more and more was going to people outside the country. So you have a mine, for example, somebody taking [resources] out of the mine, leaving behind environmental degradation, getting royalties in some cases of 1 or 2 percent, so almost none for the income from the mine goes to people in the country. So GDP is going up, but any measure of Green GNP would show the country going down. There are some really dramatic examples like in Papua New Guinea, where this actually is true.

GDP, Prisons and Healthcare

Two dramatic examples – The US has about 10 times as many people per capita in prison as other advanced industrial countries. That contributes to our GDP, because we have to spend money incarcerating them. In some states, we are spending as much on building prisons as we are on universities. That’s good for GDP, but any measure of societal well-being says it’s not good to have so many people in prison. And it’s a symptom of something dysfunctional. We can have a long discussion about what it is that’s dysfunctional, but the point is, it’s not positive.

Another example – We spend more on healthcare than any other country, as a percentage of GDP, yet our health outcomes are much lower than in other advanced industrial countries, and actually, lower than many developing countries. Well, the extra money we spent on healthcare shows up as a contribution to GDP. If we got more efficient our GDP could go down. But that is clearly not… you don’t want to… You’re looking at the wrong thing.

END OF INTERVIEW

You can watch the GDP portion of the interview video here.

For me, what Stiglitz is getting at is: We grow what we measure (GDP), and because we are measuring the wrong stuff, we are growing wrong.

It seems to be in our DNA to want to “grow,” but like a garden, don’t we have a choice about what we grow? Are there ways we can grow our economy that restore abundance rather than consume it? What are the essential things to measure so that we are growing good things?

What do you think? What would you like to see grow? What should we be measuring?