FEATURE - Get rich with "green" capitalism
Date: 16-Feb-00
Country: UK
But a book showing how greed can be good for the planet is exciting both
energy experts and policy makers. President Bill Clinton, for one, is
urging business audiences to read it.
And no, the book - "Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution"
- has nothing to do with the current market darlings of e-commerce,
biotechnology or the Internet.
Instead, it shows how innovative businesses can reap big productivity
gains by behaving as if living systems, such as the supply of oxygen by
green plants, were properly valued.
"Humankind has inherited a 3.8 billion year store of natural capital,"
say energy gurus Amory and Hunter Lovins and co-author Paul Hawken.
SAVED ENERGY MEANS BIG BUCKS
"At present rates of use and degradation, there will be little left by
the end of the next century."
The book teems with practical business examples of how industrial
processes can be redesigned to cut waste and pollution and sharply boost
productivity and energy efficiency.
Natural capital should be stewarded as prudently as money by the
trustees of financial capital since environmental damage cannot be
repaired by conventional business wisdom, the authors argue.
"That theology treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance,
several billion years design experience as casually discardable and the
future as worthless."
Their new industrialism would consist of a huge rise in the use of
recycling, remanufacturing, leasing and emerging technologies that mimic
natural processes. Some examples:
- Ultra-light hydrogen fuel cell-powered hypercars. The world's biggest
car companies are already racing to invest hundreds of millions of
dollars in development.
"How clean a car would you buy if its exhaust pipe, instead of being
aimed at pedestrians, fed directly into the passenger compartment?" ask
the authors.
- Engineers have already designed cars that act as plug-in electric
generators when they are parked and could become the small scale power
plants of the future.
BUILDINGS THAT NEED NO AIR CONDITIONING
- The world's supply of lumber and pulp could be grown in an area the
size of Iowa if deprintable and reprintable papers and inks, plus
innovative ways to use fibre, are adopted fully.
- Houses so design efficient no air conditioning is needed.
- Goods, like carpets or cars, are leased rather than sold, then
returned to the manufacturers when they need replacing.
- Building technologies already exist that can make oxygen, generate
solar power and produce drinking water, helping owners pay the mortgage
while they inhabit them.
- Making markets in saved resources like energy, water, fibres, minerals
or land, where arbitrageurs exploit the spread between the cost of used
materials and saved materials.
Natural capital is defined as the familiar resources used by humanity -
water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil and air.
It also means living systems - wetlands, savannahs, forests, tundra,
estuaries and ponds, as well as inhabitants like fungi, fish, bacteria,
mammals, amphibians, insects and birds, they say.
For example, a forest provides not only the resource of wood but also
the services of water storage and flood management.
They cite estimates that show biological services flowing directly into
society from nature are worth $36 trillion annually, close to annual
gross world product of $39 trillion.
But some services have no known substitute at any price: For example a
healthy environment automatically supplies not only clean air and
rainfall but also regeneration of the atmosphere.
The three thinkers estimate that more than 90 percent of the global flow
of physical materials used in industrial processes - some 500 billion
tonnes per year - ends up as waste.
"For all the world to live as an American or Canadian, we would need two
more earths to satisfy everyone and three more if population should
double,"
