<x-charset ISO-8859-1>http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/issues/lovins213.htm
Technology Natural Economy Design as if nature matters. Amory Lovins from Resurgence issue 213 July / August 2002 In the 1950s, the Dayak people of Borneo had malaria. The World Health Organization thought they had a solution: spray large amounts of DDT over the countryside to kill the mosquitoes. However, the DDT also killed a tiny parasitic wasp that had previously controlled thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps, the caterpillars ate the thatched roofs, causing the roofs to cave in. Moreover, DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats. Eventually, the cats started to die, and the rats multiplied, threatening potential outbreaks of typhus and plague. The World Health Organization, therefore, engaged a Singapore squadron of the British Royal Air Force to parachute 14,000 live cats into Borneo! This story has become well-known worldwide as a splendid example of how - if one doesn't understand hidden connections - the cause of problems can often be solutions. What my fifty colleagues and I try to do at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is to understand and harness those hidden connections so that we can solve or avoid a problem without making new ones. Let's take energy as an example. Energy is connected to just about everything. Improving energy-efficiency is far more sensible and provides higher-quality services than simply supplying more energy. Energy-efficiency is the fastest-growing major energy source in the us, increasing by more than 3% a year. The big surprise about saving energy and other resources is that we can now make very large savings cost less than small or no savings. My own house is an interesting example. It's 7,100 feet up in the Rockies, where temperatures can drop to -47ˆÄ. Frost can occur any day of the year, and we can get thirty-nine days of continuous mid-winter cloud. So, not a terribly nice climate. Nevertheless, coming in from a snowstorm, one can be right in the middle of a jungle of jasmine, bougainvillea and frogs; we've harvested twenty-seven banana crops in the greenhouse. Yet, we don't have a heating system - because we don't need one. Now, if you were to ask an engineer how much insulation you should have in your house in a very cold climate, you'd be told, "Just as much as will pay for itself over the years from the saved heating bill." That sounds logical. But that logic is wrong because it leaves out something rather important: the capital cost of the heating system. A furnace, pipes, pumps, ducts, fans, wires, fuel source, controls, etc. are needed to provide heat. It turns out that construction costs are lower up-front by not having to install any of that stuff; rather, by installing superinsulation and superwindows to trap heat, and air-to-air heat recovery systems for ventilation, the whole house gets cheaper to build. The saved construction budget can then be spent in other ways to produce more efficiency, and ultimately savings, throughout the house: in our case, saving half the water, 99% of the water-heating energy, and 90% of the household electricity, for which the bill for 4,000 square feet is five dollars a month. (We actually make five or six times that much electricity with solar power and sell the rest back to the utility at the same price.) The house uses only as much electricity as one ordinary light bulb. All of those savings paid for themselves in ten months with 1983 technology. Today we can do a lot better. BIG ENERGY and resource savings would, of course, happen faster if each of the sixty or eighty specific known obstacles to buying energy efficiency were turned into a business opportunity. For example, wouldn't it be a neat idea to pay architects and engineers for what they save, not for what they spend? We tried that in five experiments, and it works very well. Or how about rewarding your electric or gas utility for cutting your bill, not for selling you more energy? In designing our house, we were optimizing the house as a system, rather than just as a collection of separate components. We paid more for the windows than for ordinary windows, and we'd paid for components that weren't ordinarily there, like recovering heat from the outgoing air to pre-heat the incoming air. But we'd saved a lot more cost than that by getting rid of the heating system. So we were optimizing the whole house for multiple benefits, saving energy costs and capital costs, not just energy. The car - the highest expression of the Iron Age - is another example of optimizing whole systems. The car has been around for over one hundred years and is really a remarkable machine. It does difficult things quite well. Yet it uses only 1% of its fuel energy to move the driver. We can do better than that. Ten years ago, I figured out how: make the car three times lighter by using carbon fibre, instead of steel; make it very low in drag, thereby requiring only a third as much power to make it move; convert it to hybrid-electric drive (meaning you run the wheels with electric motors but generate the electricity onboard from fuel). This way the car gets even lighter, simpler and cheaper. It's ideally suited for the most efficient, reliable and clean power source we know, namely a hydrogen fuel cell, which changes hydrogen into electricity, hot water, and nothing else. I like the idea of just hot-water emissions so much that I am thinking of mounting a coffee machine in the dashboard! I've been having a lot of fun with this idea of an ultralight, ultra-low-drag, hybrid-electric car with highly integrated and radically simplified software-rich design. It's called a HypercarTM. In 1991-1993, I explored with General Motors and other auto-makers whether the concept would actually work and be a good idea. It did show promise, but I didn't much like the idea of patenting and auctioning the intellectual property in the hope that a single buyer would succeed with it - and not sit on it, which they'd have every reason to do. Therefore, in 1993, I put the work in the public domain so that nobody could patent it, which caused everyone to fight over it, for fear their competitors would do it first. By the end of 2000, about $10 billion had been committed by the automotive industry to this general line of development. In 1998 seventeen industrial partners joined RMI in funding a feasibility study at Lotus Engineering in the UK. That turned out well. So in 1999, RMI did its fourth for-profit spin-off, called Hypercar, Inc. I never expected to be chairing a car company, but life's full of surprises. Hypercar, Inc. has designed a mid-size sport-utility vehicle (SUV) that will hold five adults and up to sixty-nine cubic feet of cargo. It will haul a half-ton payload up a 44% gradient; it travels zero to sixty mph in 8.2 seconds. All with very little energy - equivalent to 2.38 litres of petrol per 100 km (99 miles per US gallon) - because it weighs less than half as much as a similar, normal-construction vehicle. It can cruise at 55 miles an hour on the same energy that a normal SUV uses just for its air conditioner. This makes it ideal for a hydrogen fuel cell because the fuel cell becomes small enough to afford, and the hydrogen tanks become small enough to fit. Therefore, such a vehicle can drive for 330 miles on just 71Ž2 pounds of hydrogen. When such cars are widespread - and they could enter volume production in 2005 or 2006 - they will ultimately save as much oil as OPEC now sells. They will decouple driving from climate and smog, although not from congestion. They can also be designed so that when they are parked - cars are typically parked 96% of the time - they can be plugged into a building as a power-plant-on-wheels. In other words, the electricity generated onboard the car can be sold back to the utility, earning back much of the cost of owning the car. It doesn't take many of us doing this to put the coal and nuclear plants out of business: a full fleet of such Hypercar vehicles will ultimately have about six to twelve times as much generating capacity as all the electricity companies now own. This approach can deal profitably with roughly two-thirds of the climate problem - one-third from road-vehicle emissions, and another third from power-plant emissions. It's an interesting example of how consequential a change in design can be. A lot of our work at Rocky Mountain Institute is about a different way of doing business, so that nature and people are properly valued. What we call 'natural capitalism' is the productive use of and reinvestment in capital; but recognizing rather than only two forms of capital - money and goods - it also harnesses the other two kinds of capital - people and nature. In the first Industrial Revolution, the relative scarcity of people was limiting progress in exploiting seemingly boundless nature; it made sense to use people a hundred times more productively, and we did - a previously unknown concept. Today, we have the opposite pattern of scarcity: we have abundant people and scarce nature. Now it makes sense to work with nature ten or a hundred times more productively. This radically-improved resource productivity is the first of four operational principles of natural capitalism: it does much more - and better - with less for longer. The second principle of natural capitalism is a shift to biologically-inspired production models (biomimicry), i.e. closed loops with no waste and no toxicity. The third principle is to adopt a business model that actually rewards both the provider and the customer for following the first two principles. It's called the 'Solutions Economy'. Fourthly, capitalism reinvests profits into productive capital. Typically, the most productive place to reinvest is in the capital we're shortest of. Let's reinvest in nature. Let me give you an example of how these principles come together. Interface, an Atlanta-based worldleader in interior finishes, furnishings and fabrics, has added $165 million to its bottom line by minimizing waste. Interface is systematically eliminating everything it sends to landfill, or up a stack, or out through a pipe. The idea is eventually to have no stacks, no pipes, no landfill. Not just less, but none. No waste, full stop. This provides 27% of the firm's operating profit. When Interface adopted the other principles, the story gets even more interesting. For example, the firm designed a new kind of floor covering called Solenium‡žthat contains nothing toxic. Since there's no chlorine in Solenium, there's no risk of the release of toxic fumes in a fire. There are no endocrine disrupters, either. It doesn't stain; it doesn't mildew; it feels good underfoot; it has good aesthetics and acoustics; and it also lasts four times longer than regular carpet, yet takes 35% less material per square metre - a seven-fold reduction in the amount of material needed to cover a certain area for a year. Solenium is also designed to be completely remade into an identical product with no loss of quality, so it permits a novel business model. Currently, when an office is recarpeted, it closes down, furniture is moved out, a big roll of carpet is installed using toxic glues; furniture is put back; and employees move back in, often getting sick from the glue fumes. After a decade or so, it looks worn and has to be replaced all over again, sending all of the old carpet, worn or not, to the rubbish-tip for 10,000-20,000 years. This is an especially odd way to use oil because you never even wanted to own a carpet in the first place: all you wanted to do was walk on it and look at it. Interface is therefore starting to lease floor-covering services, rather than selling carpet. Every month its little elves come in the night: they inspect your floor; they take away the worn carpet tiles; and they install fresh ones to areas as needed. Generally about a fifth of the area in the office actually gets traffic; carpeting under furniture doesn't need to be replaced as often as does carpeting for the walked-on areas, so that's a total 35-fold, or 97%, reduction in the flow of materials across your floor. The result: better service, which is tax-deductible as an operating lease. Incidentally, when enough carpet tiles come back to the factory, they are remanufactured for a 99.9% saving in materials. How are competitors going to fare against a carpet company that uses a thousandth as much material and a tenth of the capital to produce a better service at a higher profit but a lower cost and tax-deductible to the customer? They're not! This is an example of the kind of stunning competitive advantage that natural capitalists get. The fourth principle of natural capitalism is to reinvest in natural and social capital. At Interface, this is already under way. The petroleum-based ingredients in the recipe for Solenium will be substituted with corn stover. The corn will come from low-income farmers using organic practices that restore the soil and who also get paid for taking carbon out of the air and putting it back in the topsoil where it belongs. In other words, reinvesting in natural and social capital. That will be, I think, the further development of the natural capitalism story. In the first four years on this path, Interface more than doubled its revenues, more than tripled its operating profits, and nearly doubled its employment all the while - substituting abundant people for scarce nature. Its workers get really excited about this because they feel that there's no longer any contradiction between what they're doing on the job and what they want for their families when they go home. When you run a business that way, there's an incredible outpouring of energy, initiative and enthusiasm at all levels of the company; and neither the managers nor the competitors can keep up. On that basis we actually spread natural capitalism as a kind of beneficial social virus. We use competition to do our outreach. It's really very simple. We just work with early-adopting companies and help them achieve such conspicuous success as natural capitalists that their rivals are forced to decide whether they want to lose market share or follow the example. It really works. Extracts from a lecture given at the Resurgence/Omega conference in New York, September 2001. Amory Lovins is Director of Rocky Mountain Institute,1739 Snowmass Creek Road, Snowmass, Colorado 81654, USA. He is author of Natural Capitalism. For more information visit the following websites: www.rmi.org, www.natcap.org and www.hypercar.com. from Resurgence issue 213 Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/index.php?list=biofuel Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ </x-charset>
