Categorie: capital
“The EU must invest more, to avoid falling behind”, economists warned this week. “Otherwise, in 50 years we will be the open-air museum for the rest of the world”. Well, if we do, invest more, society might end in a collapse, and in 50 years we will have to go…
The Netherlands is grappling with its land. With its land management and spatial planning. From all sides, there’s a demand for scarce land: by livestock farmers for pasture and spreading manure, they want to expand more and more. But also for construction, roads, and solar parks. And data and distribution…
I have to admit, capitalism has worked, allowing us, at least in our part of the world, to live in luxury. Even the poorer part of society here with us don’t have it as bad as in large parts of the rest of the world. However, the whole system has…
Loss and damage fund, filled by miljonairs…?- COP28 The first result of COP28 seems to be already there, a loss and damage fund for ‘weaker’ countries. However, there was already an agreed-upon investment fund to help those countries get into transition. But that fund is not functioning, still largely empty,…
In projects with students, it regularly clashes between economic and environmental cq climate objectives, and thus also between real estate and building physics tutors. Or between ‘the project developer’ and the ‘energy calculator’. And the battle is fought over the heads of the students ; they have to find a…
Why does someone throw a can of soup against a van Gogh? Everyone was shocked. Either because of the van Gogh, how dare they, or because of the soup, from a multinational company, not an oil company or something, or because of the ‘soup-against-art’. What a strange way to bring…
The newspaper article on Saturday on the front page of the economics section of the NRC national newspaper , opens with the headline: “believing in growth or shrinkage.” With that, I was immediately on the fence. Because it’s not about believing. It’s physics. You can calculate how much energy and…
Time for yet another ‘episode’ in my series on ‘money’. I am trying to ‘understand’ things, that’s how this episode regarding money should be read. A rediscovered old research sheds some light in the darkness. Virtually everything today is expressed in money, and everything is also measured in money: even…
What I feared was confirmed: Bill Gates’ new book is a noncommittal plea for innovation, technology and economic growth. Sold as providing the ultimate solutions to our climate crises, the book doesn’t get much further than measures we already know and many platitudes about what should be done next. As…
It is intriguing how the world fundamentally works, with its cycles, driven mainly by solar energy. Which can be traced back mainly to the yields of land, as I found out earlier. [1,2] (Land that has virtually disappeared from economic theory as a production factor). But yields from land is…
