This essay shows the difficulties and contradictory processes to achieve energy security by transiting towards a new and secure energy system with a lower share of fossil fuels with far-reaching political, economic, and effects not sufficiently analyzed. The energy transition entails privatizing wind, sun, water, and land to transform them into electricity; additionally, it implies the consumption of minerals, which will expand extractivism. The paper points out Mexico’s slow progress in green energy with two purposely designed energy indices: Energy Diversification Index EDI and the Energy Transition Index ETI. It points out the structural limits of the energy transition in this oil-rich country and, in general, for most resource-rich countries. Finally, it presents some policy options for reducing the effects of energy extractivism and the transition to environmentally and socially secure and equitable energy.

1960s’ and 1970s’ Latin American development policies were guided by economic purposes, but there were strong utopias beneath them: a full-employment economy with social protection and accelerated technological progress. An expected trend towards social equality was not uncommon. At the beginning, there was even a belief on a sort of developmentalist spill-over: growth and industrialization would lead to universal well-being. After 30 years of undisputed neoliberalism a new developmentalist era arose. Social protection, economic development, and industrialization returned. But were the utopias the same as before? In this paper we argue that despite economic similarities, social utopias were very different.

In this article I argue that the economic success of “underdeveloped” and “static” societies should be reconsidered from the perspective of a generalized and updated theory of Asiatic mode of production (G-AMP). I claim that the nation states in Asiatic societies have played a unique role in the emergence of digital economies. Digital technologies and the Internet in China and India (partially in Russia and Indonesia as well) are the primary forces leading to high rates of growth (and sometimes social welfare). I also argue that digital economies provide countries such as Turkey and Iran with opportunities for economic growth and development.

Environmental problems like global warming, biodiversity loss, the danger of depletion of natural resources and environmental pollution affect the whole globe in different levels. It is an undeniable fact that environmental problems appeared in the 19th century with the emergence of industrialization and rapid economic growth. The economics as a science has questioned the environmental problems in the last thirty years through “environmental economics” which was constructed on the assumptions and the methods of the mainstream economics. Towards the end of the 1980s, from “Seveso” to “Chernobyl”, as a result of the recurrent environmental disasters in our world, a new economic movement came into existence with the doubts arose on the market mechanism’s ability to solve these environmental issues: “Ecological Economics”. The purpose of the Ecological Economics is not to consider the economy as a closed system which consists of the infinite cyclical streams in the frame of production-exchange-consumption like the mainstream economics assume, but to define as an integrated open subset of the earth (biosphere) system which it is bound to. According to mainstream economics, an endless economic growth will be maintained by supplying a strong substitute to the market. The Ecological Economics makes the most important objection to this ideology by the second law of thermodynamics; “entropy”, which implies the finiteness of the natural resources. In analyzing the environmental problems the Ecological Economics asserts “strong sustainability” which takes the “entropy” into account against the Environmental Economy’s “weak sustainability” notion.