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In this article, we claim that recent developments in climate science and renewable energy should prompt a reframing of debates surrounding climate change mitigation. Taken together, we argue that these developments suggest (1) global climate collapse in this century is a non-negligible risk, (2) mitigation offers substantial benefits to current generations, and (3) mitigation by some can generate social tipping dynamics that could ultimately make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. We explain how these claims undermine familiar framings of climate change, wherein mitigation is understood as self-sacrifice that individuals and governments must be morally persuaded or incentivized to undertake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marco P. Vianna Franco and Antoine Missemer's book, "A History of Ecological Economic Thought," provides a comprehensive exploration of the history of ecological economic thought from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The authors define ecological economic thought as having three key characteristics: embeddedness, interdisciplinarity, and pluralism. The book covers a wide range of ecological economic thinkers and topics, including ecological utopianism, early Soviet ecology, land economics, and the land ethic. While the distinctiveness of ecological economic thought is questioned, the book is highly recommended for those interested in the history of ecological economic thought. [Extracted from the article]

Abstract: This paper has three main objectives: (i) to investigate whether the four-quadrant approach introduced by J.S. Maini reveals a useful typology for grouping countries by gross domestic product (GDP) [...]

The concept of natural capital denotes a rich variety of natural processes, such as ecosystems, that produce economically valuable goods and services. The Anthropocene signals a diminished state of nature, however, with some scholars claiming that no part of the Earth's surface remains untouched. What are ecological economists to make of natural capital during the Anthropocene? Is natural capital still a coherent concept? What is the conceptual relationship between nature and natural capital? This article wrestles with John Stuart Mill's two concepts of nature and argues that during the Anthropocene, natural capital should be understood as denoting economically valuable processes that are not absolutely--but relatively--detached from intentional human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some environmental ethicists and economists argue that attributinginfinite valueto the environment is a good way to represent an absolute obligation to protect it. Others argue against modelling the value of the environment in this way: the assignment of infinite value leads to immense technical and philosophical difficulties that undermine the environmentalist project. First, there is a problem of discrimination: saving a large region of habitat is better than saving a small region; yet if both outcomes have infinite value, then decision theory prescribes indifference. Second, there is a problem of swamping probabilities: an act with a small but positive probability of saving an endangered species appears to be on par with an act that has a high probability of achieving this outcome, since both have infinite expected value. Our paper shows that arelative(rather than absolute) concept of infinite value can be meaningfully defined, and provides a good model for securing the priority of the natural environment while avoiding the failures noted by sceptics about infinite value. Our claim is not that the relative infinity utility model gets every detail correct, but rather that it provides a rigorous philosophical framework for thinking about decisions affecting the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has three main objectives: (i) to investigate whether the four-quadrant approach introduced by J.S. Maini reveals a useful typology for grouping countries by gross domestic product (GDP) and forest cover per capita, (ii) to determine if the framework can enhance our understanding of the relationship between forest cover and GDP per capita, and (iii) to investigate why countries in the four-quadrant world occupy different quadrants and to determine the principal factors affecting country movement across and within the individual quadrants. The examination reveals that countries can be classified into four broad categories and that GDP and forest cover per capita have a low but consistent level of negative association. After regressing economic, institutional, social capital, and other variables on a country’s occupancy and movement in the four-quadrant world, the results suggest that countries in each quadrant share different characteristics and that factors underlying country movement vary according to the quadrant being observed. Overall, countries with less corruption and higher education are likely to experience increases in both forest cover and GDP per capita, while countries exporting a significant proportion of forest products have a reduced probability of increasing both variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of a doctoral thesis on a philosophical approach to the natural capital concept in economics.

Sustainability has become the prevailing paradigm, a model of conduct, and a central theme in social and media discourses within the past decade. However, it is still a marginal development concept in the interdisciplinary research field dealing with sustainability communication, especially with meaning-making processes in relevant communicative, for example, in corporate and industry contexts. This paper focuses on how the idea of sustainability is framed, anchored, and disseminated in energy companies' communication via social media channels and how the linguistic methods used by energy corporations concerning sustainability co-create their symbolic value. Specifically, this study has aimed to understand how the sustainability topic was discussed in the Twitter sphere of the most prominent energy companies in 2020. This study makes a three-fold contribution to sustainable research and practice. First, the study identifies the framing structure of sustainability content in social media communication in the energy sector. Secondly, the study identifies social media data as a viable source of sustainability conceptualization and its understanding through communication. Finally, this study illustrates how text mining and natural language processing (NLP) can be used as a research method for managing big text data and a tool for discovering latent communication structures. Sustainability is present and visible in the communication of the energy industry identified by (1) the semantic construction of phrases in communication that show a future, green, and clean orientation, but it is also strongly declarative, referring to what will be and can be done, and with positive emotions related to the communicated messages; and (2) decoupling from climate change and thus avoiding the industry's responsibility for the impact of global warming but promising clean, sustainable energy transformation and to avoid negative emotional connotation. However, one gets the impression that it takes on the character of a rhetorical art form related to the concept of decorum. In this view, the idea of sustainability is interpreted and shaped through the needs of the industry and as a rhetorical tool in building a positive narrative about companies and is used to gain legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nudges are means to influence the will formation of people to make specific choices more likely. My focus is on nudges that are supposed to improve the health condition of individuals and populations over and above the direct prevention of disease. I point out epistemic and moral problems with these types of nudges, which lead to my conclusion that health-enhancing nudges fail. They fail because we cannot know which choices enhance individual health—properly understood in a holistic way—and because health-enhancing nudges are often themselves bad for our health. They can be bad for our health because they assume inferior agency in their targets and accordingly regularly lead to appropriate resentment and anger—strong emotions which go along with an increased risk of health impairments. Briefly, health-enhancing nudges fail because they are based on persistent ignorance and on a presumptuous attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]