Sustainable Development, Renewable Resources and Technological Progress

Sustainable Development, Renewable Resources and Technological Progress

Conflicts between optimality and sustainability are typical in the literature on sustainable development. Using the ‘‘capital-resource’’ growth model, Pezzey and Withagen (1998, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 100 (2), 513–527) have proved that if natural resources are exhaustible, the time-path of consumption is single-peaked, declining from some point in time onwards. This paper extends the...

Technological Progress Towards Sustainable Development

Technological progress and sustainable development: what about the rebound effect?

Sustainability concepts that rest on the idea of resourceor energy-efficiency improvements due to technological progress tend to overestimate the potential saving effects because they frequently ignore the behavioral responses evoked by technological improvements. Efficiency improvements also affect the demand for resources and energy, and often an increase in efficiency by 1% will cause a redu...

Cultural Resources for Coping with Technological Progress

One of the most important factors affecting the future of mankind is the progress at technology. In my paper I shall ask how far human values are endangered by technological development and, conversely, how far certain restrictions placed on technology by these human values can be justified. It seems to me, however, that to specify such values and to legitimise certain restrictions on technolog...

Science, Technological Innovation and Sustainable Development

First of all we discuss the different conceptual interpretations of sustainable development among the scientific community. Afterwards we use the epistemological concept of research traditions in order to explain this diversity of interpretations and its impacts on the prospects for technological development. As a third step we develop an approach to sustainable technology and show why such an ...