Currently I am working on an essay, and researching the literature on "sustainability" in preparation. And in all likelihood you could put most of that literature into the paper shredder, and delete most of its electronic files, and in the end you would be endangering neither the planetary ecosystems nor the people who live within them one bit.

Why?

Most of the literature on "sustainability" accepts as a given the axioms of neoclassical economics. It suggests that the "carbon neutral" future will be just like the present, except with an additional layer of bureaucracy and a few more electric cars and solar panels/ wind farms. Buy a photovoltaic panel or two and some carbon offsets, and you're good to go! The literature discusses "behavioral incentives" without the least reference to the behavioral incentives which control actors in everyday life. You know, the ones which tell you you need to "do business" if you are to pay the rent and loans and bills? The ones which tell you you must participate in market economics rather than saving the planet (which is what you'd rather be doing)?

What is wrong with neoclassical economics then?

1) People are defined as "utility maximizers." We are to spend our lives as consumers according to someone's formula of "utility maximization." There's a song about this:

2) People are imagined to be "rational actors" measurable through rational choice theory. Except, of course, that they're not any such things, which is why the urban and mass-media landscapes are blanketed by advertising. Blanket advertising is because people have to be coerced into being the consumers the system's guardians want them to be, and the economist stands by and blesses it all with the name of "rationality."

3) The neoclassical economists have an ideal picture of humanity defined by the "perfect market." The problem with this whole idea is especially apparent in light of deep consideration of the planetary threat of climate change. Upon further examination we may come up with the idea that we'd be better off with imperfect markets. Think, for instance, of the extent to which planet Earth has been sacrificed to create markets everywhere. Global networks of transportation fueled by vast quantities of coal, oil, natural gas, wilderness turned into uniform fields for monocrop agriculture poisoned by pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, oceans turned into dumping grounds, forests chopped down for wood and paper, and so on. Now think of the sacrifices humanity has made to participate in a social reality dominated by markets -- much of the working class droning away at repetitive factory labor, bottom 1/3 of humanity completely locked out of the system, narcissists competing for status in an employment hierarchy.

Okay, now this stuff has infiltrated the rest of the academy. It's not just confined to departments of economics. Case in point: Michael Grubb's (2014) Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change, and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development. I'm just engaging this one because it's got all of the popular buzzwords; there are dozens like it on your college library's stacks and in its electronic files.

To be sure, Grubb considers other fields of economic inquiry than neoclassical economics, but neoclassical economics is the one that matters to Grubb. His "three pillars" are: 1) standards and engagement for smarter choices (here are the "behavioral incentives"), 2) markets and prices for cleaner products and processes (here are the public relations pitches for "green business"), and 3) strategic investment for innovation and infrastructure (which will turn out in the end to be investment to maximize profits).

In the end, all these "sustainability" analyses do is nurture the fantasy that capitalist business, nudged by proper fiscal policy, can solve the environment problem all by itself when the real purpose of capitalist business is to gobble up the planet and spit it back out in a nice cellophane-wrapped package to be sold for profit. Next year I will have a paper in publication in a journal called Knowledge Cultures, titled "Climate Change Mitigation in Fantasy and Reality," which will offer a further exploration of this fantasy.

So what, in my opinion, should replace neoclassical economics? Two ideas:

a) World-ecology -- world-ecology starts from the idea that one finds in Marx's Capital, that capitalist political economy tends to create people who care mainly about the world for its market value, and suggests that what we really ought to care about is the integrity of our outer environmental and inner human natures. One place to start with world-ecology would be the writings of Jason W. Moore --

and

b) Institutional economics, which starts with the thought of Thorstein Veblen and continues through John Kenneth Galbraith and beyond. Institutionalism takes a significantly anthropological take on human beings.

Generally what we need is an educational system, and eventually a whole world, centered not upon mechanics, but rather upon ecology. But the first step has to be to undo the hegemonic role of neoclassical economics in deciding what people are to make of their lives.

Perhaps we could create a college of our own in which ideas of neoclassical economics have been significantly debunked. The primary text for doing this debunking would be Kees van der Pijl's A Survey of Global Political Economy, which describes neoclassical economics as fundamentally "axiomatic" (i.e. something you must take on faith if you wish to participate). Or perhaps we could start a "political revolution" think tank which would sponsor services (the word "businesses" has been tainted; what I have in mind is more like Food Not Bombs) and candidates who renounce neoclassical economic thinking.

Your ideas?