Current macroeconomic policy promotes continuous economic growth. Unemployment, poverty and debt are associated with insufficient growth. Economic activity depends upon the transformation of natural materials, ultimately returning to the environment as waste. Current levels of economic throughput exceed the planet’s carrying capacity. As a result of poorly constructed economic institutions, society faces the unacceptable choice between ecological catastrophe and human misery. A transition to a steady-state economy is required, characterized by a rate of throughput compatible with planetary boundaries. This paper contributes to the development of a steady-state economy by addressing US monetary and fiscal policies. A steady-state monetary policy would support counter-cyclical, debt-free vertical money creation through the public sector, in ways that contribute to sustainable well-being. The implication for a steady-state fiscal policy is that any lending or spending requires a careful balance of recovery of money, not as a means of revenue, but as an economic imperative to meet monetary policy goals. A steady-state fiscal policy would prioritize targeted public goods investments, taxation of ecological “bads” and economic rent and implementation of progressive tax structures. Institutional innovations are considered, including common asset trusts, to regulate throughput, and a public monetary trust, to strictly regulate money supply.

Efforts to achieve an energy transition often neglect to account for the levelling of benefits realizable with higher levels of energy use, despite knowledge of a saturation effect and recognition of increasing harms of use. This research examines energy sufficiency as a maximum quantity of energy associated with improvements in human well-being to inform a recalibration of energy targets among high-energy societies. A systematic review of recent research was performed to identify the point at which increasing levels of energy use no longer correlate with meaningful increases in well-being. For selected studies (n = 18), energy sufficiency values range from 60–221 gigajoules per capita per year with a mean of 132 gigajoules per capita per year for associated measures of well-being. The review finds agreement in a pattern of saturation and provides a range of values for energy sufficiency maximums, suggesting that a relatively modest amount and a diverse quality of energy is needed to support high levels of human well-being. Beyond the conventional emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy, energy sufficiency therefore offers a necessary and complementary approach for supporting just and ecological energy transitions.