[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Towards a Steady-State Economy
Bill Totten
shimogamo at attglobal.net
Sat Oct 18 06:59:42 MDT 2008
by Herman Daly
Posted by Nate Hagens
www.theoildrum.com (May 05 2008)
On theoildrum.com, we discuss the particulars of our energy
supply/consumption situation. Less frequently do we have content
outlining potential macro solutions that may be necessary to mitigate
problems facing human systems. This is such a post - adapted from a
paper from last week's Sustainable Development Commission written by
Herman Daly, who popularized the term "Steady State Economy" over three
decades ago. While it doesn't discuss energy per se, it does get at the
heart of how we value and use energy - for growth - and the systems
underlying this growth.
It is doubtful we can adequately inform energy policy without addressing
the linkages between equity, the environment, finance, and our end
goals. I post this on theoildrum not only because Herman is one of my
tribal elders but because his eloquence, courage and foresight on these
issues have historically been, and continue to be, ahead of the curve.
During his resignation speech from the World Bank, Herman recommended
the Bank take "a few antacids and laxatives to cure the combination of
managerial flatulence and organizational constipation giving rise to
such a high-pressure internal environment". To improve interactions with
the external world he prescribed "new eyeglasses and a hearing aid".
Nearly fifteen years later, here is Professor Daly's current synopsis of
the state of economics and his prescriptions for change.
A Steady-State Economy
Sustainable Development Commission, UK (April 24 2008)
A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy {1} are not the same
thing; they are the very different alternatives we face. The Earth as a
whole is approximately a steady state. Neither the surface nor the mass
of the earth is growing or shrinking; the inflow of radiant energy to
the Earth is equal to the outflow; and material imports from space are
roughly equal to exports (both negligible). None of this means that the
earth is static - a great deal of qualitative change can happen inside a
steady state, and certainly has happened on Earth. The most important
change in recent times has been the enormous growth of one subsystem of
the Earth, namely the economy, relative to the total system, the
ecosphere. This huge shift from an "empty" to a "full" world is truly
"something new under the sun" {2} as historian J R McNeil calls it in
his book of that title. The closer the economy approaches the scale of
the whole Earth the more it will have to conform to the physical
behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state - a
system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate
quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is
the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff). The
remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and
sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing
oversized economy - much less a growing one.
Economists have focused too much on the economy's circulatory system and
have neglected to study its digestive tract. Throughput {3} growth means
pushing more of the same food through an ever larger digestive tract;
development means eating better food and digesting it more thoroughly.
Clearly the economy must conform to the rules of a steady state - seek
qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth. GDP
increase conflates these two very different things.
We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy {4}. That makes it hard
to imagine what a steady-state economy would be like, even though for
most of our history mankind has lived in an economy in which annual
growth was negligible. Some think a steady-state economy would mean
freezing in the dark under communist tyranny. Some say that huge
improvements in technology (energy efficiency, recycling) are so easy
that it will make the adjustment both profitable and fun.
Regardless of whether it will be hard or easy we have to attempt a
steady-state economy because we cannot continue growing, and in fact
so-called "economic" growth already has become uneconomic. The growth
economy is failing. In other words, the quantitative expansion of the
economic subsystem increases environmental and social costs faster than
production benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high
consumption countries. Given the laws of diminishing marginal utility
{5} and increasing marginal costs {6} this should not have been
unexpected. And even new technology sometimes makes it worse. For
example, tetraethyl lead {7} provided the benefit of reducing engine
knock, but at the cost spreading a toxic heavy metal into the biosphere;
chlorofluorocarbons {8] gave us the benefit of a nontoxic propellant and
refrigerant, but at the cost of creating a hole in the ozone layer and a
resulting increase in ultraviolet radiation. It is hard to know for sure
that growth now increases costs faster than benefits since we do not
bother to separate costs from benefits in our national accounts. Instead
we lump them together as "activity" in the calculation of GDP.
Ecological economists have offered empirical evidence that growth is
already uneconomic {9} in high consumption countries (see ISEW, GPI,
Ecological Footprint {10}, Happy Planet Index {11}). Since neoclassical
economists are unable to demonstrate that growth, either in throughput
or GDP, is currently making us better off rather than worse off, it is
blind arrogance on their part to continue preaching aggregate growth as
the solution to our problems. Yes, most of our problems (poverty,
unemployment, environmental degradation) would be easier to solve if we
were richer - that is not the issue. The issue is: Does growth in GDP
any longer really make us richer? Or is it now making us poorer?
For poor countries GDP growth still increases welfare, at least if
reasonably distributed. The question is, What is the best thing for rich
countries to do to help the poor countries? The World Bank's answer is
that the rich should continue to grow as rapidly as possible to provide
markets for the poor and to accumulate capital to invest in poor
countries. The steady state answer is that the rich should reduce their
throughput growth to free up resources and ecological space for use by
the poor, while focusing their domestic efforts on development,
technical and social improvements, that can be freely shared with poor
countries.
The classical steady state takes the biophysical dimensions -
population and capital stock (all durable producer and consumer goods) -
as given and adapts technology and tastes to these objective
conditions. The neoclassical "steady state" (proportional growth of
capital stock and population) takes tastes and technology as given and
adapts by growth in biophysical dimensions, since it considers wants as
unlimited, and technology as powerful enough to make the world
effectively infinite. At a more profound level the classical view is
that man is a creature who must ultimately adapt to the limits
(finitude, entropy, ecological interdependence) of the Creation of which
he is a part. The neoclassical view is that man, the creator, will
surpass all limits and remake Creation to suit his subjective
individualistic preferences, which are considered the root of all value.
In the end economics is religion.
Accepting the necessity of a steady-state economy, along with John
Stuart Mill and the other classical economists, let us imagine what it
might look like. First a caution - a steady-state economy is not a
failed growth economy. An airplane is designed for forward motion. If it
tries to hover it crashes. It is not fruitful to conceive of a
helicopter as an airplane that fails to move forward. It is a different
thing designed to hover. Likewise a steady-state economy is not designed
to grow.
Following Mill we might define a steady-state economy as an economy with
constant population and constant stock of capital, maintained by a low
rate of throughput that is within the regenerative and assimilative
capacities of the ecosystem. This means low birth equal to low death
rates, and low production equal to low depreciation rates. Low
throughput means high life expectancy for people and high durability for
goods. Alternatively, and more operationally, we might define the
steady-state economy in terms of a constant flow of throughput at a
sustainable (low) level, with population and capital stock free to
adjust to whatever size can be maintained by the constant throughput
that begins with depletion of low-entropy resources and ends with
pollution by high-entropy wastes.
How could we limit throughput, and thus indirectly limit stocks of
capital and people in a steady-state economy? Since depletion is
spatially more concentrated than pollution the main controls should be
at the depletion or input end. Raising resource prices at the depletion
end will indirectly limit pollution, and force greater efficiency at all
upstream stages of production. A cap-auction-trade system for depletion
of basic resources, especially fossil fuels, could accomplish a lot, as
could ecological tax reform, about which more later.
If we must stop aggregate growth because it is uneconomic, then how do
we deal with poverty in the steady-state economy? The simple answer is
by redistribution - by limits to the range of permissible inequality, by
a minimum income and a maximum income. What is the proper range of
inequality - one that rewards real differences and contributions rather
than just multiplying privilege? Plato thought it was a factor of four.
Universities, civil services and the military seem to manage with a
factor of ten to twenty. In the US corporate sector it is over 500. As a
first step could we not try to lower the overall range to a factor of,
say, one hundred? Remember, we are no longer trying to provide massive
incentives to stimulate (uneconomic) growth! Also, since we are not
trying to stimulate aggregate growth, we no longer need to spend
billions on advertising. Instead of treating advertising as a
tax-deductible cost of production we should tax it heavily as a public
nuisance. If economists really believe that the consumer is sovereign
then she should be obeyed rather than manipulated, cajoled, badgered,
and lied to.
Free trade would not be feasible for a steady-state economy, since its
producers would necessarily count many costs to the environment and the
future that foreign firms located in growth economies are allowed to
ignore. The foreign firms would win in competition, not because they
were more efficient, but simply because they did not pay the cost of
sustainability. Regulated international trade under rules that
compensated for these differences (compensating tariffs) could exist, as
could "free trade" among nations that were equally committed to
sustainability in their domestic cost accounting. One might expect the
IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO to be working toward such regulations.
Instead they vigorously push both free trade and free capital mobility
(that is, deregulation of international commerce). Protecting an
efficient national policy of cost internalization is very different from
protecting an inefficient firm.
The case for guaranteed mutual benefit in international trade, and hence
the reason for leaving it "free", is based on Ricardo's comparative
advantage {12} argument. A country is supposed to produce the goods that
it can produce more cheaply relative to other goods, than is the case in
other countries. By specializing according to their comparative
advantage both trading partners gain, regardless of absolute costs (one
country could produce all goods more cheaply, but it would still benefit
by specializing in what it produced relatively more cheaply and trading
for other goods). This is logical, but like all logical arguments
comparative advantage is based on premises. The key premise is that
while capital (and other factors) moves freely between industries within
a nation, it does not move between nations. If capital could move abroad
it would have no reason to be content with a mere comparative advantage
at home, but would seek absolute advantage - the absolutely lowest cost
of production anywhere in the world. Why not? With free trade the
product could be sold anywhere in the world, including the nation the
capital just left. While there are certainly global gains from trade
under absolute advantage there is no guarantee of mutual benefit. Some
countries could lose.
Now comes the problem. The IMF preaches free trade based on comparative
advantage, and has done so for a long time. More recently the IMF has
started preaching the gospel of globalization, which, in addition to
free trade, means free capital mobility internationally - exactly what
comparative advantage forbids! When confronted with this contradiction
the IMF waves its hands, suggests that you might be a xenophobe, and
changes the subject.
The IMF-WB-WTO (Washington Consensus) contradict themselves in service
to the interests of transnational corporations. International capital
mobility, coupled with free trade, allows corporations to escape from
national regulation in the public interest, playing one nation off
against another. Since there is no global government they are in effect
uncontrolled. The nearest thing we have to a global government
(IMF-WB-WTO) has shown no interest in regulating transnational capital
for the common good. Their goal is to help these corporations grow,
because growth is presumed good for all - end of story. If the IMF
wanted to limit international capital mobility to keep the world safe
for comparative advantage, there are several things they could do. They
could promote minimum residence times for foreign investment to limit
capital flight and speculation, and they could propose a small tax on
all foreign exchange transactions (Tobin tax). Most of all they could
revive Keynes' proposal for an international multilateral clearing union
that would directly penalize persistent imbalances in current account
(both deficit and surplus), and thereby indirectly promote balance in
the compensating capital account, reducing international capital movements.
One problem for the steady-state economy already raised by the
demographic transition to a non growing population is that it
necessarily results in an increase in the average age of the population
- more retirees relative to workers. Adjustment requires either higher
taxes, older retirement age, or reduced retirement pensions. The system
is hardly in "crisis", but these adjustments are surely needed to
achieve sustainability. For many countries net immigration has become a
larger source of population growth than natural increase. Immigration
may temporarily ease the age structure problem, but the steady-state
population requires that births plus in-migrants equal deaths plus
out-migrants. It is hard to say which is more politically incorrect,
birth limits or immigration limits? Many prefer denial of arithmetic to
facing either one.
The steady-state economy will also require a "demographic transition" in
populations of products towards longer-lived, more durable goods,
maintained by lower rates of throughput. A population of 1000 cars that
last ten years requires new production of 100 cars per year. If more
durable cars are made to last twenty years then we need new production
of only fifty cars per year. To see the latter as in improvement
requires a change in perspective from emphasizing production as benefit
to emphasizing production as a cost of maintenance. Consider that if we
can maintain 1000 cars and the transportation services thereof by
replacing only fifty cars per year rather than 100 we are surely better
off - the same capital stock yielding the same service with half the
throughput. Yet the idea that production is a maintenance cost to be
minimized is strange to most economists. Shifting taxes from value added
to throughput would promote this minimizing effort. One adaptation in
this direction is the service contract that leases the service of
equipment (ranging from carpets to copying machines), which the
lessor/owner maintains, reclaims, and recycles at the end of its useful
life.
Although the main thrust of reforms for the steady-state economy is to
bring newly scarce and truly rival natural capital and services under
the market discipline, we should not overlook the opposite problem,
namely, freeing truly non rival goods from their artificial enclosure by
the market. There are some goods that are by nature non-rival {13}, and
should be freed from illegitimate enclosure by the price system. I refer
especially to knowledge. Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in
the sharing, but multiplied. Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost
of sharing it is zero and its allocative price should be zero.
International development aid should more and more take the form of
freely and actively shared knowledge, along with small grants, and less
and less the form of large interest-bearing loans. Sharing knowledge
costs little, does not create unrepayable debts, and it increases the
productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of production.
Existing knowledge is the most important input to the production of new
knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse.
Patent monopolies (aka "intellectual property rights") should be given
for fewer "inventions", and for fewer years.
What would happen to the interest rate in a steady-state economy? Would
it not fall to zero without growth? Not likely, because capital would
still be scarce, there would still be a positive time preference, and
the value of total production may still increase without growth in
physical throughput - as a result of qualitative development. Investment
in qualitative improvement may yield a value increase out of which
interest could be paid. However, the productivity of capital would
surely be less without throughput growth, so one would expect low
interest rates in a steady-state economy, though not a zero rate.
Would it be possible to have qualitative improvement (for example
increasing efficiency) forever, resulting in GDP growth forever? GDP
would become ever less material-intensive. Environmentalists would be
happy because throughput is not growing; economists would be happy
because GDP is growing. I think this should be pushed as far as it will
go, but how far is that likely to be? Consider that sectors of the
economy generally thought to be more qualitative, such as information
technology, turn out on closer inspection to have a substantial physical
base, including a number of toxic metals.
Also, if expansion is to be mainly for the sake of the poor it must be
comprised of goods the poor need - clothing, shelter, and food on the
plate, not ten thousand recipes on the Internet. In addition, as a
larger proportion of GDP becomes less material-intensive, the terms of
trade between more and less material-intensive goods will move against
the less material-intensive, limiting incentive to produce them. Even
providers of information services spend most of their income on cars,
houses, and trips, rather than the immaterial product of other symbol
manipulators.
Can a steady-state economy maintain full employment? A tough question,
but in fairness one must also ask if full employment is achievable in a
growth economy driven by free trade, off-shoring practices, easy
immigration of cheap labor, and widespread automation? In a steady-state
economy maintenance and repair become more important. Being more labor
intensive than new production and relatively protected from off-shoring,
these services may provide more employment. Yet a more radical
rethinking of how people earn income may be required. If automation and
off-shoring of jobs increase profits but not wages, then the principle
of distributing income through jobs becomes less tenable. A practical
solution (in addition to slowing automation and off-shoring) may be to
have wider participation in the ownership of businesses, so that
individuals earn income through their share of the business instead of
through fulltime employment. Also the gains from technical progress
should be taken in the form of more leisure rather than more production
- a long expected but under-realized possibility.
What sort of tax system would best fit a steady-state economy?
Ecological tax reform, already mentioned, suggests shifting the tax base
away from value added (income earned by labor and capital), and on to
"that to which value is added", namely the throughput flow, preferably
at the depletion end (at the mine-mouth or well-head, the point of
"severance" from the ground). Many states have severance taxes. Taxing
the origin and narrowest point in the throughput flow induces more
efficient resource use in production as well as consumption, and
facilitates monitoring and collection. Taxing what we want less of
(depletion and pollution), and ceasing to tax what we want more of
(income, value added) would seem reasonable - as the bumper sticker puts
it, "tax bads, not goods". The shift could be revenue neutral and
gradual. Begin for example by forgoing $x revenue from the worst income
tax we have. Simultaneously collect $x from the best resource severance
tax we could devise. Next period get rid of the second worst income tax,
and substitute the second best resource tax, et cetera. Such a policy
would raise resource prices and induce efficiency in resource use. The
regressivity of such a consumption tax could be offset by spending the
proceeds progressively, by the limited range of inequality already
mentioned, and by the fact that the mafia and other former income tax
cheaters would have to pay it. Cap-auction–trade systems will also
increase government revenue, and auction revenue can be distributed
progressively.
Could a steady-state economy support the enormous superstructure of
finance built around future growth expectations? Probably not, since
interest rates and growth rates would be low. Investment would be mainly
for replacement and qualitative improvement. There would likely be a
healthy shrinkage of the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously
balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash. Additionally the
steady-state economy could benefit from a move away from our fractional
reserve banking system toward 100% reserve requirements.
One hundred percent reserves would put our money supply back under the
control of the government rather than the private banking sector. Money
would be a true public utility, rather than the by-product of commercial
lending and borrowing in pursuit of growth. Under the existing
fractional reserve system the money supply expands during a boom, and
contracts during a slump, reinforcing the cyclical tendency of the
economy. The profit (seigniorage) from creating (at negligible cost) and
being the first to spend new money and receive its full exchange value,
would accrue to the public rather than the private sector. The reserve
requirement, something the Central Bank manipulates anyway, could be
raised from current very low levels gradually to 100%. Commercial banks
would make their income by financial intermediation (lending savers'
money for them) as well as by service charges on checking accounts,
rather than by lending at interest money they create out of nothing.
Lending only money that has actually been saved by someone reestablishes
the classical balance between abstinence and investment. This extra
discipline in lending and borrowing likely would prevent such debacles
as the current "sub-prime mortgage" crisis. 100% reserves would both
stabilize the economy and slow down the Ponzi-like credit leveraging.
A steady-state economy should not have a system of national income
accounts, GDP, in which nothing is ever subtracted. Ideally we should
have two accounts, one that measures the benefits of physical growth in
scale, and one that measures the costs of that growth. Our policy should
be to stop growing where marginal costs equal marginal benefits. Or if
we want to maintain the single national income concept we should adopt
Nobel laureate economist J R Hicks' concept of income, namely, the
maximum amount that a community can consume in a year, and still be able
to produce and consume the same amount next year. In other words, income
is the maximum that can be consumed while keeping productive capacity
(capital) intact. Any consumption of capital, manmade or natural, must
be subtracted in the calculation of income. Also we must stop the
asymmetry of adding to GDP the production of anti-bads without first
having subtracted the generation of the bads that made the anti-bads
necessary. Note that Hicks' conception of income is sustainable by
definition. National accounts in a sustainable economy should try to
approximate Hicksian income and abandon GDP. Correcting GDP to measure
income is less ambitious than converting it into a measure of welfare,
discussed earlier.
The logic of the steady-state economy is reinforced by the recent
finding of economists and psychologists that the correlation between
absolute income and happiness extends only up to some threshold of
"sufficiency", and beyond that point only relative income influences
self-evaluated happiness. This result seems to hold both for
cross-section data (comparing rich to poor countries at a given date),
and for time series (comparing a single country before and after
significant growth in income). Growth cannot increase everyone's
relative income. The welfare gain of people whose relative income
increases as a result of further growth would be offset by the loss of
others whose relative income falls. And if everyone's income increases
proportionally, no one's relative income would rise and no one would
feel happier. Growth becomes like an arms race in which the two sides
cancel each other's gains. A happy corollary is that for societies that
have reached sufficiency, moving to a steady-state economy may cost
little in terms of forgone happiness. The "political impossibility" of a
steady-state economy may be less than it previously appeared.
Nevertheless it is one thing to imagine the possibility of a
steady-state economy, but something else to chart a transition thereto
from a failed growth economy. Can one transform an airplane into a
helicopter without first landing, or perhaps crashing? In order even to
take such a task seriously one has to realize that the growth economy is
heading for a big crash. Whether the measures suggested above are
sufficient to convert the growth airplane to a steady-state helicopter
is hard to say, but I do think they are probably necessary, and at a
minimum would be useful guides for reconstruction after the crash. They
also may prove capable of being applied gradually in mid air. For
example, a cap-auction-trade system could begin with a generous cap
followed by a gradual pre-announced schedule of tightening. The limits
to income inequality could begin far apart, and be gradually tightened.
Ecological tax reform could substitute at first only the worst value
added taxes by the best throughput taxes, as mentioned earlier.
Compensatory tariffs to protect national cost-internalization policies
could be imposed and raised gradually. Reserve requirements for banks
could be raised gradually to one hundred percent. Patent monopolies
could be gradually reduced and knowledge gradually restored to its
proper status as a non rival good. Downsizing of the IMF-WB- WTO from a
servant of global integration in the interests of transnational
capitalist growth to something closer to Keynes' nation-based
multilateral clearing union for international payments - this would be
more difficult to do gradually. But nations may begin individually to
withdraw from these institutions as it becomes more evident that they
have abandoned the federated internationalist nature of their Bretton
Woods Charter in favor of an economically integrated globalist vision of
capital-dominated growth, and are as yet incapable of conceiving the
possibility, much less recognizing the reality, of uneconomic growth.
While these transitional policies will appear radical to many, it is
worth remembering that, in addition to being amenable to gradual
application, they are based on the conservative institutions of private
property and decentralized market allocation. They simply recognize that
private property loses its legitimacy if too unequally distributed, and
that markets lose their legitimacy if prices do not tell the whole truth
about costs. In addition, the macro-economy becomes an absurdity if its
scale is structurally required to grow beyond the biophysical limits of
the Earth. And well before that radical physical limit we are
encountering the conservative economic limit in which extra costs of
growth become greater than the extra benefits.
Ten Point Policy Summary
1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources. Cap limits to
biophysical scale according to source or sink constraint, whichever is
more stringent. Auction captures scarcity rents for equitable
redistribution. Trade allows efficient allocation to highest uses.
2. Ecological tax reform - shift tax base from value added (labor and
capital) and on to "that to which value is added", namely the entropic
throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), through the
economy, and back to nature (pollution). Internalizes external costs as
well as raises revenue more equitably. Prices the scarce but previously
unpriced contribution of nature.
3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution - a minimum
income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction
requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited
inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to inequality.
4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year - allow greater
option for leisure or personal work. Full-time external employment for
all is hard to provide without growth.
5. Re-regulate international commerce - move away from free trade, free
capital mobility and globalization, adopt compensating tariffs to
protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from
standards-lowering competition from other countries.
6. Downgrade the IMF-WB-WTO to something like Keynes' plan for a
multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus
as well as deficit balances - seek balance on current account, avoid
large capital transfers and foreign debts.
7. Move to 100% reserve requirements instead of fractional reserve
banking. Put control of money supply and seigniorage in hands of the
government rather than private banks.
8. Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital in public
trusts, and price it, while freeing from private enclosure and prices
the non rival commonwealth of knowledge and information. Stop treating
the scarce as if it were non scarce, and the non scarce as if it were
scarce.
9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus
in-migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
10. Reform national accounts - separate GDP into a cost account and a
benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop growing when marginal
costs equal marginal benefits. Never add the two accounts.
Links:
1 http://www.eoearth.org/article/Steady_state_economy
2 http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring01/032183.htm
3 http://www.sustainableeconomics.org/Vocabulary.htm#Throughput
4
http://www.mkbergman.com/wp-content/themes/ai3/images/2006Posts/060727a_HistoricalGDPGrowth.gif
5 http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
7 http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/ethylwar/
8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#Chloro_fluoro_compounds_.28CFC.2C_HCFC.29
9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth
10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalrous
Herman E Daly
School of Public Policy
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland 20742 USA
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941
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