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What Will Turn the Tide Towards Sustainability?
Alan AtKisson, WorldChanging
The October 13 edition of The Economist has a fascinating special report on innovation — fascinating and disturbing, if one is concerned with the prospects for sustainability. Fascinating and hope-inducing, if one is looking for mechanisms by which to change the world.
In short, a revolution is well under way in the way the world’s companies manage innovation. IBM has embraced Linux and “Open Innovation.” “Fast failure” is the new mantra for many firms. The cost of starting a new car company has dropped by one or two orders of magnitude, from billions to mere hundred millions.
The latter, for example, inspires both hope and despair, since this change in how cars are sourced and made means both that Tesla Motors’ new electric sports cars are possible … and that cheap petrol-driven cars for India and China’s billions are also possible.
Theoretically, this change in the way innovation works in Corporate Earth (one used to refer to Corporate America) has opened up space for big thinking on sustainability.
(18 October 2007)
Labor of Lovins
Tracie Mcmillan, Plenty Magazine
The cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute talks about America’s path to becoming more energy efficient
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Amory Lovins might not be a household name, but the ideas he’s put forth for the past 30 years have affected virtually every household in America. Increasing energy efficiency, supporting small and local power generation from renewable sources, and building smart rather than big are just a few of the concepts he’s promoted. Lovins started when he was 29, using the energy crisis of the late ’70s to reach President Carter’s ear. This year, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the nonprofit organization devoted to energy research he founded with his wife, celebrated its 25th anniversary with a forum attended by luminaries such as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Majora Carter of the nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx. Plenty stole a few minutes of Lovins’s time to discuss ultralight cars, an indoor banana garden, and why efficiency is the best alternative fuel we’ve got.
…Q: A lot of traditional environmental work has focused on pushing for greater government regulation, but you argued early on that it’s more effective to show businesses that they could save money by going green.
A: I think most of the changes we need in the world will come from innovative technology and design rather than regulations. There are three main loci of power and influence in our society: business, civil leadership, and government-generally in decreasing order of effectiveness. Because we at the Rocky Mountain Institute want to get things done, we work almost entirely with the private sector and very little with government.
Q: You like to make the point that living efficiently doesn’t have to take sacrifice, that we can keep our creature comforts. But don’t we need to use fewer resources?
A: Efficiency is already our biggest energy resource by far-and we have barely scratched the surface of how much it’s worth. With today’s better technologies, if we fully applied them, we could save over half our oil at a fifth of its price, three-quarters of our natural gas at an eighth of its price, and three-quarters of our electricity at an eighth of its price. That is enormously bigger than what we’ve done so far.
(18 October 2007)
The good points that Mr. Lovins makes are increasingly overshadowed by his corporate-cornucopianism. He’s had 30 years, and his beguiling vision has yet to make a significant dent in energy usage. -BA
Morgan Stanley Sees US$1 Trillion Green Mkt by 2030
Timothy Gardner and Emma Graham-Harrison, Reuters
NEW YORK – Global sales from clean energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal power and biofuels could grow to as much as US$1 trillion a year by 2030, US bank Morgan Stanley has estimated.
Global population growth and soaring prices for fossil fuels are driving the market, along with dropping costs in clean energy and concern about energy security and climate change, the bank said in a research note issued on Wednesday.
On the market’s upside, revenues could reach US$505 billion in 2020, or nearly nine times the level in 2005, and hit US$1.02 trillion 10 years later, the bank said.
As a comparison, the gross domestic product of the the United States, the world’s largest economy, hit US$13.2 trillion last year.
(19 October 2007)
