For those who share my concern for environment and sustainable development; here is a quote that I copy-pasted from the slide of the environmental governance class I am taking. The class is one of the best classes I took, so rich in content, and for a change, no academic psycho-bubble. Everything I learned I can relate to real world:

Throughput is roughly equivalent to GDP, the annual flow of new production. It is the cost of maintaining the stocks of final goods and services by continually importing high quality matter and energy resources from the environment and exporting waste matter and low quality heat energy back to the environment. Currently we try to maximize the growth of the GDP, but the reasoning just given suggests that we should relabel it gross national cost or GNC. We should minimize it, subject to maintaining stocks of essential items.... To maximize GDP throughput for its own sake is absurd.

The Steady–State Economy in Outline, Herman L. Daly