TRANSCRIPT (1,697 words, slightly
edited for clarity):
How do you see the past ten years since
Rio?
Rio de Janeiro has been the culmination of environmental
thinking world-wide. It was just after the end of the Cold War:
everyone was dreaming of this Peace Dividend now to come by the
billions of dollars. But then after Rio de Janeiro, very soon after,
we have seen a gliding down, a degradation of environmental consciousness
world-wide. And a basic phenomenon to which we can attribute that
is globalisation. Globalisation essentially means that now international
capital has the capacity to allocate wherever on the globe, disregarding
political questions altogether, and triggering an extremely intense
competition for lowering costs for the private sector companies.
The private sector companies then feel forced to put pressure on
the state for reducing taxes on capital, on corporations, on high
income, etc. Because they can now blackmail the state. In a globalised
economy they say "if you in Belgium or you in New Zealand don't
behave as we want, we go to another country!" And that has become
so strong, this pressure, that you have seen the taxation for the
corporate sector or for capital going down systematically during
those last ten years since Rio de Janeiro.
Now you would not expect in this situation for people
to be too much concerned with the environment, because this is a
more of a long-term concern, while economic questions are short-term.
So what we have also been missing is long-term thinking, which can
in the long-term be absolutely disastrous!
How significant is the untapped potential
for resource efficiency?
We realise that people can no longer afford idealistic
environmental policy. You have to ask yourself, is there not perhaps
an avenue available for something that is good for the environment
and good for the economy? I believe the chief answer is eco-efficiency
or the systematic, strategic increase of resource productivity.
So far, people have been thinking of increasing energy productivity
by perhaps a percent, or two, or three in certain operations, and
were very proud of it. But this is not enough: if we assume that
this world is going to double its expectations for human wealth,
welfare, economic output etc - and at the same time, just to stabilise
carbon dioxide concentrations we have to go down by at least a factor
of two in annual CO2 emissions - we see a factor of four looming
large before us which has to be closed again. And the question is
now, can we increase energy productivity - or carbon productivity
for that matter, or other resource productivities - by something
like a factor of four?
Now comes the good news: at the Wuppertal Institute for
Climate, Environment and Energy, we have been working on this question.
So has my friend Amory Lovins from the United States. And together
we have published a book called "Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving
Resource Use" and we feature 50 examples of how that can be done.
[Factor Four: Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource
Use. By Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, and Ernst Ulrich Von Weizsäker.
Earthscan publications, London, 1997. ISBN 1 85383 407 6.]
For instance, air-conditioners that need just 25% of the electricity
typically used today, or cars that do 150 miles a gallon (or a litre
and a half of petrol per 100km), or buildings with essentially no
heating needs any longer, or you can go into food: the transport
intensity of manufacturing strawberry yoghurt, to give just one
example, can be reduced by a factor of 10 or more without any compromise
on quality!
Now, these 50 examples seem to demonstrate that it is
possible to increase resource productivity by a huge amount, and
that is really a great hope for the world. If certain countries
- I suspect it will first be Japan and perhaps certain countries
of Western Europe - go ahead with these factor four technologies,
you are likely to see other countries that so far are hesitant -
including in particular the United States or Canada or Australia
- following suit, perhaps with a time lag of 10 or 20 years, but
nevertheless, they will see this is the new generation of technologies
and the only one compatible with climate protection or anyway environmental
protection.
When I read Factor Four I thought it
was so amazing, I gave copies to all my friends.
It has been translated into 12 languages, including Chinese!
What is your view of the prospect for
the transition to the hydrogen economy?
Many progressive people today speak about hydrogen -
the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is a wonderful energy carrier, an
intermediate energy carrier. But it's no, not a primary energy source.
It has first to be manufactured. But then it's fantastically clean.
The exhaust gases are essentially water, water vapour. And this
is lovely: it doesn't stink, it doesn't pollute, it's wonderful!
But, the question is of course, where do you get the
hydrogen from? If you get it from dirty coal-fired plants, or from
nuclear reactors or so, it is not an improvement: it is only a shifting
the problem from perhaps the densely populated areas to remote areas
in Siberia or Canada, but in the end, regarding the greenhouse effect,
there is no gain at all. And for nuclear waste problems and other
troubles you face with nuclear energy, the improvement is also very
little.
So, let's go for the hydrogen economy but let us be very
critical about the source that provides the energy in the first
place. It could be offshore wind energy; it could be hydro-power
in places where it is ecologically acceptable - that then could
be Siberia or Canada; or it could be biomass in certain places,
that is also absolutely responsible energy production.
From where you're looking and the people
you're talking to, do you feel the petroleum age will end soon and
the hydrogen age will begin, and if so, in what kind of time frame?
It's a good question. Some people say we are already
entering the hydrogen age, and it may take only another 10 or 15
years to become the dominant feature. I for one am slightly hesitant
about this time frame, because hydrogen is going to be very costly
for a fairly long period of time. And anyway, energy efficiency
is just as clean as hydrogen and is available now. So my guess is
that the hydrogen economy may be the dominant feature in 2050.
How much energy which is already available,
in Europe for example, gets wasted in the system?
The factor of four I've been referring to is a sign of
a huge amount of wasting energy. I think there has been a calculation
that only 1 per cent of the petrol - the energy contained in the
petrol - is used to move and accelerate the passengers in a car.
The 99 percent for heating up the air, heating up the street, for
moving metals, for moving all kinds of things; because the car may
weigh a ton and a half, but the people is only 70 kilograms. So
anyway, it's a great waste of energy and that makes it possible
to arrive at something like a factor of four. And in many regards
it's even more. If you add also the losses from the natural gas
in the pipelines in Russia, and the heat lost by poor insulation,.
and the unnecessary transport density in many parts of the economy,
you will see that there is a huge savings potential.
OK now on economics and...
You may have noticed that my factor four answer to the
globalisation challenge is in a sense too euphemistic, it's incomplete.
So perhaps it's better to also say a couple of words about globalisation.
Yes.
Of course it is good to answer the globalisation challenges
with new technologies. But there is another problem involved. This
is the problem globalisation poses to democracy. Democracy has been
invented and further developed for the nation state. Now with a
global economy the capital forces are in a sense stronger than the
nation states' democracy. Capital can give homework to democratic
states, which is sort of turning reality upside down - the reality
of good old democracy, where it's the people that gives the homework
to the government, and not some anonymous international capital!
The question is of course how can we deal with that? Should we go
back into the cosy nation state? And here this road is not available,
because we have global transportation, global information and all
the rest. My suggestion is to establish and strengthen international
democratic forces, from democratic states - who can join hands for
instance on climate protection in the Kyoto Protocol etc, that's
global governance - and joining hands with the civil society which
is also considered part of, or an advocate of public goods, as opposed
to private goods of capital accumulation.
What do you think is the most important
thing that ordinary citizens in Europe and America need to understand
now, in regard to the future?
There is a lovely caricature calculation done by William
Rees from Canada and Mathis Wackernagel
from Switzerland, the so-called ecological footprint, calculating
or estimating the area needed to provide for our lifestyles. And
the result is that an average American would need roughly 8 hectares
continuously to provide for all his goods and services that he or
she is consuming. In Europe it may be 4 hectares. In India it is
so far less than one hectare. But, if we all go for the American
way of life, we - that is 6.2 billion people on this Earth - are
going to need three planets Earth, or four. And they are not available.
We can't purchase new planets! So we just have to reduce the nature
consumption at least in terms of space, but there are many other
things including energy raw materials etc. And this is not something
like a posterity plea, it's an invitation to re-direct technological
progress from just increasing labour productivity - which is a good
thing - to also increasing resource productivity, so that we can
do with much smaller footprints at the same effect of welfare.
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