Читать книгу Fundamentals of Sustainable Business - Matthew Tueth - Страница 12
ОглавлениеChapter 2
Selecting a Design Consultant
A daunting challenge ahead of us is the redesign of our commercial systems in a manner that simultaneously provides profitable businesses and enhances the natural and human communities throughout time. Bringing such a bold set of intentions to fruition transports modern man into entirely uncharted waters and requires comprehensive, outside-the-box innovation. In the past, we have operated as if the earth held unlimited resources and a boundless capacity to absorb our potent array of debilitating pollutants. To this point, the focus of business endeavors has been overwhelmingly opportunistic with relatively short planning horizons that focus mostly on near-term financial gain. A sustainable business evolution involves a radical departure from conventionality and necessitates interdisciplinary challenges that were previously never considered.
A number of ideas in this book are outside traditional thought and, as yet, are not common topics of discussion around the proverbial water cooler. Recalling the earlier appeal for open-mindedness, you might find that our next point of discussion will push that request to its limit. I ask that you seriously consider the following proposition, even if it’s out of your comfort zone. Another option is to file it in the “maybe” category for future consideration, keeping in mind that many movement supporters have found it helpful and elucidating.
2.1The Problem with Stewardship
The design task at hand would be less overwhelming if our efforts merely relied on tweaking conventional business theory, adding to current bodies of knowledge, and using our collective human ingenuity. But that formula has been mankind’s approach for advancement in the last several millennia. An examination of the overall results of our “business-as-usual approach” has exposed many serious systemic problems, and therefore, a reconsideration of certain core pivotal concepts is essential. Using the same basic premises and assumptions that have landed us in our current predicament would obviously prove unsuccessful. Our objective to produce extraordinary results requires us to use an extraordinary approach.
At this point, let’s reconsider a key component of the Judeo-Christian ethic that is prevalent throughout the Western society. Many Americans and Europeans believe that the proper environmental role of man is as a wise steward for all biota and regions of the natural world. Our superior intelligence and natural dominance, so the familiar ethic implies, place us in this position of control to skillfully supervise all planetary wildlands and waters. Among other things, this ethic elevates humans above all other species and positions other life forms as part of a provisioning support structure for humanity. The idea of man as a superior and benevolent species wisely managing God’s creation in respectful ways has indeed been embedded and reinforced in the Western society. The message in the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament seems quite clear: God created the world in six days for humans and rested on the seventh day.
Not surprisingly, Western environmentalists have adopted this theme of natural world stewardship as a basic tenet. This position offers an opportunity, perhaps even suggests a duty, for humans to take charge and decide the strategy to remedy the substantial global environmental degradation. This stewardship role has engaged many people, particularly in the past 100 years, in what is thought of as enlightened management of the natural world and no doubt involves many well-intentioned participants today. I suspect numerous readers of this book may subscribe to this belief.
Let’s now review the context of our situation and consider the application of emulating nature’s genius in the sustainable business movement.
2.2Naturally Our Best Foot Forward
Man’s legacy of environmental and social troubles across the globe stemming from past technological choices has been well documented. Our predilection for fossil fuels, landfill-bound materials, natural resource exploitation, soil degradation, and persistent toxic waste is among the deepest failures. Considering our past performance, the expectation of our own cleverness to remedy our systemic industrial problems may not be in our best interests. Relying on our wit and ingenuity alone has produced baleful long-term results in the last few centuries, so expectations for a markedly different outcome of the present-day industrial and social reforms from a similar approach are simply not judicious.
A refreshingly ingenious alternative methodology has been suggested and popularized by the biologist Janine Benyus in her groundbreaking 1997 book, Biomimicry — Innovation Inspired by Nature. Benyus and other biomimics propose the idea that people emulate the genius of the natural world when growing food, harnessing energy, constructing things, conducting business, healing ourselves, processing information, and designing communities. Benyus believes it is in our best interest to “quiet our cleverness” and explore the dominant industry on the planet — nature’s industry — for reliable methods of provisioning for our species. Benyus points out that the natural world has over 3.5 billion years of successful design experience in building durable and diverse life-supporting communities in a wide variety of environmental conditions. She notes that all other life forms on Earth take a very different approach to energy, food, and material production and consumption and to community than humans. She reminds us that past species out of step with natural world process are now present only as cryptic fossils.
For most species, adapting to changing environmental conditions is accomplished by the occasional and random genetic changes in the cellular information of an organism. The acquisition of both genetically enabled physiological changes or genetically driven instinctive behavior can, in rare occasions, benefit subsequent generations of the organism. Humankind, on the other hand, has relied more heavily upon reflective behavioral adaptations during most of our tenure to improve the chances of survival. The development of farming is an example of an enormously significant behavioral adaptation of man. Agriculture emerged within human culture approximately 10,000 years ago and for the first time provided the means for groups of humans to acquire more food than was needed in the short term. Over time, increasingly dependable agricultural food surpluses provided the requisite accumulation of wealth that would enable distinctly different occupations to appear within groups of humans and that made available the free time necessary to develop a variety of other cultural components such as religion, written language, mathematics, political systems, engineering, and trade relationships with other people. Other examples of significant human behavioral adaptations include health care, manufacturing, and building design.
In the long term, however, our intellectual ability to organize complex social processes is ironically contributing to our undoing. Our legacy of technological change has established systems for living that produce quite different results from those systems used by all other biota. Historically, we have viewed our technology as a positive divergence from all other life and as an example of our species’ unique superiority. A close examination of the insidious effects of this prolonged strategy reveals a corresponding steady decline of natural processes and services upon which all life, including man, depend. Fortunately, independent thinkers such as Benyus and others have recognized the critical opportunity to borrow from nature’s wisdom and remodel our industry after the most thoroughly tested life-supporting processes in existence. The genius of the natural world has always been present for us to glean, and finally, some of our contemporary designers have begun to take notice. Here are just a few examples of how designers have used nature to inspire our current products:
•Cockleburs and the fabric fastener VELCRO®.
•Abalone mother-of-pearl and high-tech ceramics.
•Spider silk and stronger-than-steel cord.
•Mussel shell adhesive and in-the-water ship hull repair.
•Fish-shaped and decreased-drag coefficient vehicle design.
•Toe-pads of geckos and strong, dry, and clean adhesives.
•Porcupine quills/bird bones and structural support improvements.
Benyus also identifies large perspective applications of the genius of nature for a sustainable world. She suggests we model our cities after Type III ecosystems such as a redwood forest. Type III ecosystems typically reward diversity and interdependencies, build natural capital, procure locally, cycle all materials, and use the sun as their sole energy source.6 Evidence suggests that these durable Type III natural communities have existed for many millions of years and provide an appropriate touchstone for the redesign of human communities around the world. The next few sections include even more nature-inspired systemic opportunities for sustainable business.
2.3Pernicious Material Processes
Consider that nearly all your possessions will end up in a landfill, a solid waste incinerator, or a junk yard. Some items will reach the end of the line in only a month; others will take years. Clothes, furniture, appliances, vehicles, plastics, cardboard, and construction materials are part of our linear production systems (materials are extracted, processed, sold, used, and discarded). To make matters worse, our material preparation and refinement processes often yield substances that are used only once, are not designed for reprocessing, and have persistent toxins mixed with benign natural materials. Persistent toxins are long lasting, man-made, and not readily decomposed by natural processes. Unfortunately, many of these toxins eventually enter the human body through a variety of pathways, such as by air, water, and food, and disrupt various body systems, cause cancer, and contribute to numerous other serious health problems.
Interior carpeting is an example of a commonly used product that is made of multiple persistent toxins. These contaminants fill the air inside our buildings via the wear and abrasion dust from foot traffic or from harmful vaporizing materials. Common nylon carpet pile material often contains polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), a brominated fire retardant that damages the thyroid gland, the lymph system, and the nervous system. Benzene and p-dichlorobenzene are known carcinogens contained in some carpeting pile. Carpet padding is commonly made of polyvinyl chloride and polyurethane, two other seriously toxic petrochemicals. Carpet adhesives, such as 4-phenylcyclohexene (4-PC), styrene, ethyl benzene, and toluene, add even more to the harmful mix routinely found in carpeted interiors. These persistent toxins tend to be most densely present in the air closest to the carpet: the exact locations of the particularly vulnerable toddlers in our homes.
Nature cannot afford such shortsighted and dangerous linear industrial processes. The natural world, powered by the sun, safely reuses all materials endlessly while using low-energy and low-temperature processes without persistent toxic compounds. The natural world’s approach for material use is universal, durable, and effective. To illustrate this point, let’s examine one of nature’s most common industrial activities — the capture, storage, and use of energy.
2.4Nature’s Path of Production
The sugar maple tree, common in the northeastern parts of the U.S., provides us with a good example of a natural production path that needs to be examined. A wide variety of benign chemical compounds are found in the leaf of a sugar maple tree. In summer, during the daytime, the leaf captures a portion of the sun’s energy that has traveled through space to Earth, while simultaneously reflecting the harmful ultraviolet portion of the solar energy spectrum back into space. Tiny openings in the underside of the leaf called stomata take in carbon dioxide, while a million root tips absorb water. During the night, the leaves of the maple tree convert this stored energy into incalculable chemical bonds of countless simple sugar molecules that become food for the tree. In the late fall, when the maple tree stops its sugar production because of cold weather and reduced daylight, the leaf falls to the ground, and eventually, this former food factory is eaten and broken down by a variety of detritus organisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and insect larva. Suspended in water and percolating through the soil, the dissolved materials gradually move downward, attaching and detaching from soil particles at various depths. During the time when these digested nutrients are in the root zone, root systems absorb and transport the valuable materials (formerly food factories) back into another plant where they will be used again, perhaps for leaf construction.
Natural processes like these routinely and repeatedly cycle vital elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous while using the locally acquired energy from the sun, and produce no persistent harmful materials. Rather, they add tremendous value to their community: green plants discard the only significant source of molecular oxygen on Earth as air emissions during the process of sugar production. Take a moment to consider the contribution of the Plant Kingdom to nature and our own lives. In addition to oxygen, the maple tree offers us delicious maple syrup for our pancakes, the beautiful grain and hue of maple furniture, and the glow and warmth of a fire from logs in our fireplaces.
Some early visionaries have already begun to tackle some of the core deficiencies in our industrial material strategies. In the early 1990s, the German chemist Michael Braungart conceived what he calls the Intelligent Product System, which consists of only three categories of industrial products: consumables, durables, and unmarketables.7 Partnering with the leading architect and designer William McDonough in the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle, he further refined this concept to two product categories. The first type, consumables or products of consumption, would be made only of biodegradable materials. When products of consumption lose their usefulness, they would be broken down in their entirety by detritus organisms of the natural world, and the resulting material would be made available for use by other organisms. Examples of products that might fall into this category are packaging materials, shoes, and ink pens. The second type of product, durables or products of service, would be made of materials toxic to living things, such as heavy metal alloys and some petroleum-based compounds. Products of service would be routinely leased by the customer and owned by the producer, and when they lose their usefulness, they would be returned to the manufacturer (completing the cycle), disassembled safely, and entirely reprocessed into a new generation of products. Kitchen appliances, cell phones, most vehicle components, and personal computers would be examples of this type of product. Incidentally, the term “circular economy” has found its way into movement jargon and refers to an economic system designed to eliminate resource waste and to continually reuse a material. The previously produced unmarketables (unusable toxins, such as nuclear waste) and monstrous hybrids (combined biodegradable and toxic compounds that now make up the vast majority of our manufactured goods) that fall into neither of the previous two categories would be phased out. At the technology levels currently available, these hybrids cannot be cycled or effectively reused, so they remain as bioavailable poisons that time-release their contamination into the biosphere and into our bodies. Clearly, these materials are examples of poor quality design.
In this new materials protocol, sustainable manufacturers would classify each of their merchandise items as a product of service or a product of consumption. Classification of products would be influenced by a number of factors, such as the logistics of a possible takeback system, materials’ composition and abrasion demands, and life expectancy of the product. Let’s apply this strategy to a common retail item — our clothing. How should we classify apparel?
As a product of consumption in this new paradigm, clothing would be made out of a variety of biodegradable materials, conditioners, and dyes. When the clothing items lose their usefulness, a trip to a composter for decomposition and the eventual return of the nutrients to our agricultural fields or gardens would fittingly complete the biological cycle for these materials. In order to eliminate soil degradation, fossil fuel pollution, synthetic pesticide and fertilizer pollution, and possible aquifer overdraft of conventional agriculture, the basic material used in our clothes (possibly cotton or hemp) would be grown via farming practices that use sustainable energy sources, enrich the soil fertility, and employ local workers at a wage that allows them to support their families.
As a product of service, clothing materials would be designed for use, reprocessing, and reuse for an indefinite number of times. With our considerable experience in crude oil-based synthetic textiles, the most expedient polymer-based raw material for apparel cloth would be petroleum; however, this choice carries environmental and social disadvantages that are similar to those presently associated with crude oil. Although thus far the performance of petroleum-based clothing items has exceeded that of bio-based materials, the more sensible and durable long-term raw material might be plant-based materials harvested from organic farming operations. Apparel companies implementing a product-of-service approach would also have to develop a convenient product return system that would transport worn-out clothing items back to the next-generation textile plants for reprocessing and reward customers for getting the outdated garment back to industry.
As this example implies, the initial product type design decision for clothing producers requires considerable thought, planning, and trial and error. Fortunately, a number of apparel companies have already begun the process. The outdoor-clothing company Patagonia, headquartered in Ventura, California, has taken the product-of-service approach with a line of clothing made from a polyester fabric called Capilene®. Patagonia, through its Common Threads program, accepts worn-out and laundered articles made of Capilene® brought into any local Patagonia retail store or mailed to their service center in Reno, Nevada. The company then ships the worn-out clothing items to a plant in Teijin, China on a nearly empty cargo vessel (China imports relatively little from the U.S.) that repolymerizes the crude oil-based material back into the Capilene® fabric. Patagonia is now planning to move the overseas processing to a western state such as Nevada. This innovation, while significantly increasing its domestic cloth and garment manufacturing facilities, would demonstrate an even deeper commitment to the foundational principles of sustainable business. These efforts would establish additional regional operational connections (as in the natural world) and would keep additional monies and jobs within the U.S.
A number of other clothing companies — Nau, Teko, and Wickers — have decided to take the products-of-consumption approach in the design of their materials with a corn-based fabric called Ingeo™. Other forward-thinking manufacturers are producing lines of clothing using soybean oil, wood fiber, coconut oil, and bamboo. Organic cotton-based clothing items would fall into the product-of-consumption category as long as any dyes and fabric conditioners were also made only from biodegradable compounds. These intrepid companies are committing to these technologies in hopes of spearheading a sustainable trend of apparel production. Does the product-of-service or product-of-consumption direction make more sense? Keep in mind that superior performance, durability, attractiveness, and affordability will accompany successful and intelligent product lines. Time will tell, but participants in the emerging sustainable clothing industry will most likely successfully employ both strategies, at least in the first few decades of the transition.
2.5Two Closed-Loops into One
The previous two closed-loop clothing manufacturing strategies indeed incorporate the natural world theme of continuously reusing all life-supporting materials. But a closer biomimicry-based consideration reveals that nature has no technical nutrient cycle with persistent toxins as part of its materials production process. Sequestering persistent toxins inside a technical closed-loop process is quite different from nature’s production system that uses only safe biodegradable materials for all of her material needs. So if our intention is to follow the universally healthy and dependable materials processes of nature, then part of our new production design plan would include intentionally and continually reducing our products of service and replacing them whenever possible with intelligently designed products of consumption.
The technology currently used in smartphones provides a conventional example. This device not only replaces the yesterday’s telephones but also provides the ability to video chat, text, and e-mail. It easily gathers local, national, and international news and topical information via the Internet. Smartphones provide an audio and visual global positioning system and an endless supply of tunes for our cars, homes, and headphones. In the same vein, smart home hubs from Amazon, Google, Apple, and Bose provide a voice-controlled music and video streaming system, dim lights, control household thermostats and security systems, and make hands-free phone calls. These types of multifunctional products produced in a single closed-loop system would drastically reduce the overall amount of technological products and sequestered toxic compounds.
Another way to reduce the number of products of service might be the removal of ubiquitous items from this group, such as clothing, while transitioning to high-performance bio-based textiles produced in sustainable agricultural operations. Yet another illustration might be a city that invests in a dependable, affordable, clean, comfortable, and safe mass transit system that reduces the number of vehicles (products of service) used by urban residents. The same city might have a visionary real estate company that works with city officials to rebuild residential neighborhoods that include restaurants, retail stores, and recreational opportunities within walking distance, thereby further reducing the need for vehicles.
Keeping toxins out of the biosphere in the near term requires the establishment of technical nutrient cycles for all existing products of service. These production cycles include material-processing facilities, manufacturing operations, take-back systems, and disassembly plants. Decreasing both the overall amount of toxins and the different types of dangerous materials inside technical nutrient cycles would be prudent for business, the natural world, and human communities. One direct benefit would be fewer overall toxins that require tracking and holding in closed-loop systems. Fewer industrial toxins mean less chance for these products-of-service materials to contaminate the environment, where they could be ingested or inhaled by organisms, including man, via food, water, or air. We would see a parallel reduction in hazardous working environments for industry employees who reprocess the noxious materials as well as the elimination of selected closed-loop sequestration systems and corresponding expenses for products that provide diminishing advantages over the product-of-consumption system. Lastly, we would discover the wisdom and longterm rewards of mimicking the natural world in using only safe compounds to provision its 10–15 million other species.
In her book Living Downstream, researcher and author Sandra Steingraber skillfully elucidates the widespread and disastrous effects upon human health by industrial processes, both past and present, that contain various types of carcinogens (cancer-causing compounds). Demonstrating critical-thinking skill and citing extensive credible research, Steingraber explains the effects of various carcinogens upon her own health and that of her associates and friends. Steingraber skillfully discusses the undeniable human misery and financial loss that are spawned by the indiscriminate use of our wide range of industrial toxins. This common practice results in a needless tragedy that continues to deteriorate and shorten the productive lives of innumerable innocent adults, adolescents, and children. In fact, if all the externalized costs of carcinogenic pollutants, such as time off from work and hospitalization, were actually paid by the people who received the beneficial part of the toxic production process (in other words, a situation approaching a free-market system), these particularly injurious practices would be priced out of business. And no one has attempted to assign value to the human misery of cancer.
When compared to our current cradle-to-grave materials system, segregating technical toxic stock and biodegradable materials would deliver major advantages for a long time for businesses and communities. This new manufacturing approach would substantially reduce toxic substances in the biosphere, reduce the volume of virgin materials extracted and energy needed to power the process, establish a return system for nutrients to flow back to our agricultural soils, and reduce raw material costs for manufacturers. Not limited to manufacturing, biomimicry-based innovation is available to all business types for numerous improvements in material use and information flows and in energy strategies for transportation, commercial operations, and residential needs. Let’s now consider an intelligent, nature-inspired approach to energy production for our industrial, retail, and residential world.
2.6Nature’s Energy Path
Most developed nations still primarily rely upon fossil fuels to meet both transportation and stationary energy needs. We extract, transport, process, and burn inordinate amounts of crude oil, natural gas, and coal each day in the U.S. alone. In addition to providing the energy that powers our industrial and personal endeavors, depending on fossil fuels is also costing the U.S. dearly in terms of trade deficit, international military actions, human health problems, and climate change. Clearly, Earth’s major ecosystems have a much preferred energy legacy. We will now look at how the natural world meets its energy needs and consider other possible applications of nature’s wisdom for humankind.
Nature has been remarkably single-minded in her procurement of energy for all of life’s activities. Despite the almost incomprehensible diversity of biota on this planet, life depends on an independent nuclear fusion power plant that is located 93 million miles away for nearly all its energy needs. This power plant has been operating for about 5.5 billion years and is expected to last another 5–6 billion years. This boundless source of energy requires no up-front construction cost and no maintenance and does not lead to air, water, or soil pollution. The vast distance separating the earth from the sun protects us from minor malfunctions and irregularities. Countless power plants such as these exist in the universe. Besides providing a free source of energy for billions of years, these stars are also responsible for the synthesis and distribution of all the known elements of the cosmos. The atoms of this book were previously forged inside a star somewhere in the cosmos. Our natural world is so smitten by this energy source that it has evolved completely dependent upon the sun for all energy needs — without a back-up source or secondary power supply. Any species that might have deviated from this strategy is simply not in existence any longer.
How has nature’s single-source energy gamble paid off? Life on Earth has thrived for an extended period of the last 3.8 billion years. Today, millions of different species populate a wide variety of solar-powered natural communities in the oceans, high alpine valleys, equatorial rainforests, hot and cold deserts, and polar tundra. Green plants are the foundation of Earth’s rich biodiversity as they routinely capture, store, and pass along the sun’s energy to all other living things. Interestingly, energy does not continually cycle in the natural world as materials do; rather, the constant daytime input of sunlight powers the diverse and rich ecosystems. The sun’s energy is stored and then passed along from life form to life form, and it is eventually dissipated as heat, a little at a time, at each life level.
During its long tenure, life has tenaciously survived a number of catastrophic global environmental events. Considerable scientific evidence suggests that one such occurrence approximately 250 million years ago extirpated up to 95% of the species that existed — but life continued. Another cataclysm almost 65 million years ago caused an estimated 75% of all species to disappear. Currently, between 10 and 15 million species are estimated to exist and to continue this resilient legacy of diverse, interdependent, sun-powered fecundity. Solar energy is affirmed in the flight of birds, in our woodstove fires, in the force of hurricanes, and even in the taste of a cheeseburger.
2.7Following Nature’s Energy Path
The continuous success of solar-powered life throughout the ages provides a reliable and durable energy design model for our sustainable business. If we follow nature’s lead, this free, local, abundant, and clean energy source will in time replace our current problem-ridden energy choices as a value-laden alternative. Community-procured solar energy for transportation, industrial, and residential needs would provide stable local employment and would dramatically reduce the dollars leaving cities for distant energy sources and thereby build wealth inside local economies. Electricity, cleanly generated and used inside each of our communities, offers additional advantages such as reduced transmission-line infrastructure and maintenance costs, less energy consumed in moving electricity from a regional power plant to the consumer, and reduced vulnerability of power supply to malfunction or sabotage.
Today, many environmentally conscious energy specialists recommend a power distribution system based on a variety of alternative production schemes available from the existing opportunities within a region. Typical scenarios often include a combination of solid waste and biofuels combustion, hydroelectricity, and “clean” coal technology. This multi-source energy strategy may reduce harmful local effects, particularly in the short term, but it also contains significant conceptual long-term liabilities that degrade living conditions in distant locations. Consider all the consequences from each of these alternative energy sources mentioned above.
Waste-to-energy plants burn solid municipal waste to generate electricity, perpetuate the concept of waste, emit dangerous industrial air pollutants, produce concentrated toxic ash, and encourage linear manufacturing systems and natural resource exploitation. Biofuel production primarily relies upon fossil fuel-powered, mechanized agriculture, which continues to degrade soils, put pesticides into our drinking water, decrease food production, and add carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) to the atmosphere. Few new hydroelectric dam sites exist in the U.S. today, and the existing dams destroy irreplaceable riparian habitat, flood fertile bottomland farmland, and obstruct the migration patterns of certain species of fish, including salmon and steelhead. Finally, “clean” coal technology is a misnomer: it is expensive, it only slightly reduces overall pollution, and it concentrates toxicity and moves pollution from one waste stream (air) to another (solids).
If we are to follow nature’s lead and convert to a strategy that would satisfy our energy needs for the millennia to come without negative side effects, then solar energy should be the centerpiece of our energy technology. Nature has ingeniously used solar power for all biotic activities in polar latitudes as well as in cloud-dominated temperate regions of the world. A global commitment to solar technology will provide our species with the available abundant local energy for another 5 billion years with little danger of supply interruption, significant pollution, or climate-changing side effects. Intelligent systems that capture energy from the sun to power our businesses, transportation, and homes will provide lasting and rewarding employment worldwide and will prove worthy of the changeover investment in time and resources. Consider the long-term employment and economic boost from locally capturing, storing, and distributing all the energy needs of your community. Imagine a city with the outsides of all buildings made of windows, vegetative material, or photovoltaic (PV) surfaces (generating electricity from sunlight) that generate both the stationary and personal vehicle energy needs of the occupants. The location of the latitude and the number of sunny days per year will initially determine the need for additional power sources, but constantly improving the technological efficiency of PV systems and the mechanical efficiency of all power-driven devices will continually lower the cost of energy by increasing the percentage of energy provided by the sun.
2.8Other Sun-Powered Opportunities
The fusion nuclear reactor 93 million miles away gives us some additional opportunities for harnessing indirect solar energy in the form of wind, wave, and tidal forces at numerous locations around the globe. Our global wind patterns are powered by the sun’s differential heating of the atmospheric gasses, with coasts and interior flatlands generally providing the best prospects to harvest a reasonably strong and consistent wind supply. However, the intermittent and tumultuous nature of wind proves particularly challenging for the designers of durable and efficient wind power-generating equipment. Wind turbines are quite noticeable on the landscape or shoreline and can pose an aesthetic drawback to some communities. Nevertheless, using the wind to generate electricity may adequately satisfy the definition of sustainable energy — a technology that can meet our energy needs indefinitely without negative effects — and can provide the total power production for some wind-rich regions.
Generating electricity from ocean waves and tidal forces offers us some advantages and disadvantages as well. On the plus side, energy from the ocean offers densely populated coastal areas the opportunity to harness large amounts of sustainable energy where it is needed by many people. On the negative side, quite a few technological challenges remain to be solved before this energy choice is available to power large metropolitan groups. Fortunately, no matter which combination of sustainable energy choices a region selects, other design improvements currently underway, such as intelligent building design, improved mechanical efficiency, and resident-friendly community design, will lower the per-person demand for energy and will help the transition to durable, healthy, and locally run energy supplies.
2.9Envision a Sun-Powered Human Society
A fully transitioned sun-powered U.S. economy will offer quite a contrast from the fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered economic engines of today. Moving toward this nature-inspired ideal will require a mammoth national investment and several decades of infrastructure changeover, but the upside payoff implications are enormous. Gone will be the insidiously injurious air, water, and soil pollution from the extraction, transportation, processing, and combustion of fossil fuels. Our single nuclear power plant will be a safe 93 million miles away, along with all the accompanying dangerous radioactive materials. As the demand for crude oil, coal, and natural gas continually shrinks, greenhouse gas emissions will correspondingly decrease, and our atmosphere will begin to self-regulate its constituency again. Part of the climate change mitigation process will no doubt include massive carbon sequestration efforts from worldwide reforestation programs and site-appropriate solar technology transfers to communities inside developing nations. As we begin to recognize that a sustainable world requires the well-being of all members of all species (including humans), international political relationships will also purposefully evolve and be strengthened.
As the energy transformation continues around the world, the corresponding decrease in crude oil demand will dissolve any remnants of the previously influential Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). “The Age of Fossil Fuels” section in future world history books will be relatively brief with the period comprising less than 400 years. Major oil companies, the economic juggernauts of conventional energy, have the means to follow the early lead of global energy corporations such as British Petroleum (BP) and begin to diversify their operations to small-scale solar-powered energy production systems; these systems would deliver hydrogen from the process of “clean hydrolysis” (the passing of a sustainably generated electric current through water, yielding hydrogen and oxygen) that would be used to supply stationary and vehicle fuel cells and for hydrogen combustion turbines in a variety of regional markets. Rather than resisting the conversion to clean energy, these cash-flush oil corporations have the opportunity to position themselves as early providers of an intelligent energy infrastructure. If major oil companies do indeed reorganize and become sustainable energy providers, the metamorphosis will require considerable effort and capital investment but will prove to be advantageous for their businesses in the long term.
Opportunities also exist to research, develop, and market a plethora of plant-based materials that will replace petrochemicals in many manufacturing applications. Actually, this opportunity will be a resumption of an earlier research emphasis in this field that was started during the pre-World War II years. These plant-based production materials will be part of the products-of-consumption side of the materials equation. Some high-performance petroleum-based polymers will also be used initially for various components in the durable products of service cycle. Forward-thinking diversified energy companies will continue to meet the shrinking petroleum demand but will derive an ever-growing majority of revenues from the expanding demand for clean and healthy energy and material systems.
2.10Cutting Our Nuclear Power Losses
A broad-based commercial and residential commitment to the continued refinement of solar, wind, geothermal, and ocean power technology to generate electricity will help dissolve the lingering consideration for either commissioning new commercial nuclear power plants or refurbishing worn-out units. The current high consumer demand for electrical power in developed nations can be mitigated by significant mechanical efficiency improvements in all sectors of the market as well as stabilizing population growth rates. The savings in electric bills from a lowered demand can help finance the research and development needed for further efficiency gains. Even at the current PV and wind power technology levels and disregarding the serious and long-lasting public safety issues of high-level nuclear waste, the high cost of nuclear power production has effectively priced itself out of the western energy market. Further advances in PV and wind technology will provide even more economic, environmental, and social incentives for sun-powered sources of energy. Some state governments are furthering this effort by adapting aggressive energy portfolio standards that target a specific percentage of commercial energy to be generated by renewable sources, which does include solar and wind power.
Unfortunately, our 60-year ill-advised history of commercial nuclear power now requires an over $70 billion consumer outlay for high-level nuclear waste transportation and storage from our 110 commercial nuclear power plants to the permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. At least four generations of Americans must also assume the considerable risk involved in moving the thousands of tons of this waste across the nation over the next 75 years. And after this monumental logistical task is completed, hundreds of future generations of U.S. citizens must monitor and guard the persistently dangerous radioactive material for tens of thousands of years.
Commercial nuclear power plants have always been a bad idea, particularly considering the risk and life cycle costs that are passed on to posterity. The argument that continued investment in nuclear power is now a necessary part of a climate change avoidance strategy is also flawed and shortsighted. This approach would reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the expense of transferring a large portion of the cost of nuclear power to future generations, as well as making us vulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, and accidents. Transportation and storage costs for the high-level nuclear waste, along with the inevitable decommissioning costs of the power plants themselves, are causing the nuclear power industry to collapse under its own weight. Citizens throughout time are much better served by moving away from commercial nuclear power and fossil fuels and turning to a safe, abundant, clean, durable, and reliable distributed energy. Our only affordable and safe nuclear reactor is the Sun, and its continuous fusion reaction provides more than ample opportunity to meet the energy needs for all the millions of species on Earth for the next few billion years without perpetual risk and exorbitant expense.
2.11The Advantages of Local Energy Production
Another valuable energy lesson the natural world offers us involves the theme of locally captured and distributed energy. As noted earlier, life on Earth is made possible by green plants capturing and storing a small portion of local incoming solar energy in the form of simple sugars. This chemical energy is eventually passed on to all other biota along food webs that end with the detritus feeders consuming the dead plant and animal materials and their waste products. Although the preponderance of natural world energy is procured and distributed locally, this local power concept has not been mirrored in our developed world. On the contrary, large centralized commercial power plants rely on coal, natural gas, and enriched uranium from distant sources, and utilities maintain expansive and expensive electrical grid distribution systems that supply millions of scattered industrial, commercial, and residential customers throughout the developed world. The state of the antiquated U.S. electrical grid system is poor, as illustrated by the series of regional brownouts and complete power failures experienced in the recent past. Transitioning to locally distributed power production makes much more sense in the long run when compared with efforts to maintain a design-flawed and outdated centralized power infrastructure.
