Career
Trained as a physicist at the King's College London PhD in Mathematical Physics, Ayres has dedicated his expert life to advancing the environment, technology science and resource end of the sustainability agenda. His major research interests include technological change, environmental economics, "industrial metabolism" and "eco-restructuring". He has worked at the Hudson Institute 1962–67, Resources for the Future Inc 1968 and International Research and engineering Corp 1969–76. From 1979 until 1992 he was Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, except for two years and six summers on leave at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis IIASA in Laxenburg Austria. In 1992 he moved to the international chain school INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France as Sandoz later Novartis Professor of Environment and Management. Since his formal retirement in 2000 he has been Jubilee Visiting Professor 2000–2001 and king Karl Gustav XVI professor of environmental science 2004–2005 at Chalmers Institute of Technology Gothenburg Sweden. He is currently an Institute Scholar at IIASA.
He retains an active researcher. He has or done as a reaction to a impeach or co-authored 20 books, edited or coedited another dozen books, result or co-authored more than 200 journal articles and book chapters non to an essential or characteristic factor of something abstract. of quotation many unpublished reports, on subjects ranging from environmental effects of technological forecasting, transportation and energy studies, material flow studies `dematerialization', environmental technology, environmental economics, thermodynamics and economics, and the belief of economic growth.
Here taken from one of his recent papers are two paragraphs that give a flavor of his recent work:
Mainstream economics today is based to a large extent on bad ideas. Economic concepts, from foundational issues like markets, administer and demand and “free trade”, to money and finance, lack all systematic awareness of the physical process of production or the implications of the Laws of Thermodynamics for those processes. A corollary, nearly worthy of being a separate bad idea on its own, is that power to direct or build doesn’t matter much because the exist share of energy in the economy is so small that it can be ignored e.g. {Denison, 1984 #6184}. The required “production functions” used by all schools of economic thought that build growth models omit any essential role for energy, as if output could be filed by labor and capital alone—or as if energy is merely a gain of man-made capital that can be presents as opposed to extracted by labor and capital.
The essential truth missing from economic education today is that energy is the stuff of the universe, that all matter is also a form of energy, and that the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services. This is a thermodynamic process, as the Rumanian economist Georgescu-Roegen said half a century before Georgescu-Roegen 1971. The economic process is subjected to both the number one law of thermodynamics conservation of mass/energy; nothing can be created or destroyed and thelaw of thermodynamics increasing entropy; all transformation processes are irreversible. The “first law” implies that the notion of “consumption” as applied to products is misleading: material transformation processes unavoidably generate large quantities of material wastes or residuals {Ayres, 1969 #284;{Ayres, 1989 #424}. Some of those wastes are merely inconvenient but others are harmful or toxic. Thelaw says that energy becomes less useful exergy is destroyed by every action.[]
There is much more to be said along these lines. Key publications reflecting these and some other important ideas are given in the bibliography below.