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So far Bert de Vries has created 49 blog entries.

The idea of ‘waste’

What is waste? A friend once took me to the urban waste treatment plant in Kolkata and I had the strange experience of looking into the stomach and intestines of a huge organism. Across an enormous field, human beings were processing from the right to the left the urban garbage stream in a kind of digestive [...]

By |2024-02-25T23:34:44+00:00November 28th, 2023|Chapter 18, Featured|0 Comments

Chinese Worldviews

In the book Sustainability Science, I have argued that the location of sustainability is in the center of worldview space, where the balance is found between individual and collective and between material and immaterial (§6.3). The notion of two opposite forces in dynamic equilibrium provides an ingenious description of what is called worldview dynamics in [...]

By |2024-03-12T09:52:37+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 19, Chapter 6|0 Comments

Decision Making in Politics

Can you please stop telling me 'all people are different'? A textbook on sustainable development should address public decision making and politics. Politics can be described as the area in society where issues transcending mere individual needs and activities are debated and decided and where disagreement is legitimate. It has its own rules and rites. [...]

By |2024-02-06T11:24:24+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 7|0 Comments

[Modelling] Economic Growth

What is the essence of the neoclassical growth model? What is the role of technology? And what is needed to make macro-economic (growth) theory relevant in the 21st century? The economic system Real-world economic (growth) dynamics is far too complex to conceptualise in a single scheme. Nevertheless, following the system dynamics approach, I offer an [...]

By |2024-02-17T15:38:35+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 19, Chapter 4|0 Comments

Materials Transition

Conceptual framework The gradual change from mining ores to mining in-use-stocks can be considered a materials transition. The ratios between metal in the lithosphere, in in-use stocks and in end-of-lifetime stocks are indicators of the degree to which human use of the metal is progressing from virgin ore only to recycled material only. It can [...]

By |2024-01-16T19:35:37+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 18|0 Comments

Energy Economics

Energy use: economics of energy saving The dynamics behind the changes in energy intensity is an important topic in energy economics. Goods and services are produced with a variety of inputs and a so-called production function has been proposed to describe it. Engineers prefer to construct it on the basis of physical flows (engineering production [...]

By |2024-01-15T15:37:32+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 17|0 Comments

Desalinization: a necessary option?

A technology to supply water in relevant amounts is desalinization of seawater. It is at the intersection of water, food and energy issues, because the water for drinking and food is a necessity of life but its production from seawater requires lots of electricity. It competes with other technologies such as extracting water from air. [...]

By |2024-01-24T15:38:40+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 16|0 Comments

Food Price Elasticity

Estimating food demand Past food demand equals use by definition and is determined from historical measures and correlations. To estimate long-term future food demand, populations at country level are segmented by income group and by urban versus rural (Bijl et al. 2018). Food quality is implemented by assessing food categories on the basis of end-use [...]

By |2023-12-09T16:57:52+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 15|0 Comments

Input-Output Methodology

Input-Output methodology Measuring monetary flows: I-O matrices National economic models have usually more sectors than the economic growth models discussed so far. Such sectoral disaggregation is based on a table or matrix of the intersectoral flows, or intermediate deliveries, between economic sectors: the input-output (I-O) table. They offer a bridge between the empirical data on [...]

By |2024-02-15T12:10:57+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 10|0 Comments

Catastrophe Theory

Modelling catastrophic change The simplest mathematical equation that represents bifurcations and catastrophic change is a first order differential equation of the form: (eqn. 1)   Solving for the attractors (dX/dt = 0), it is seen that one root is X = 0 and it represents a globally unstable attractor and the other two roots are [...]

By |2024-02-06T11:19:45+00:00July 2nd, 2023|Chapter 13, Chapter 8, Chapter 9|0 Comments
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