figure 16 figure 17 figure 18 figure 19 figure 20 figure 21 figure 22 figure 23 figure 24 figure 25
Figure 16 Let me turn to solutions. What could be the solution? It is quite clear that we are going to need technology improvements at least as large as a factor of 4 to solve the problem. We have to reduce the overall rucksacks at least by a factor of 2, and if we want to make people happy in places like Calcutta or Lagos or Manila, the least we have to promise them is a doubling of wealth. Figure 17 At the Wuppertal Institute we have been working on this question, and I joined hands with my American friend Amory Lovins to collect examples of factor of 4 improvements in resource productivity, and we were able to collect 50 examples easily. We could have collected 200 examples demonstrating that a factor of 4 at least is available. I'm going to introduce you in a moment to that new universe of technologies and, indeed, fortunately for us, this book has been translated into many other languages, including Japanese and also Chinese, both complex characters and simplified characters. I believe it is now the 12th edition. Figure 18 Figure 19 When introducing you to this "Universe," as I call it, I'm going to use the following kind of picture. Today we have a low energy or material efficiency and tomorrow we are going to have at least a quadrupled resource efficiency, and for this I am going to give you a few examples. Let me start off with just ordinary apartment buildings as you would see them today in Europe, and tomorrow it could be "passive houses." This one happens to be one using one-tenth of the heating energy and roughly one-fourth of the electricity. Figure 20 The next is a similar thing. This is Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute which, according to him, is "energy sufficient" throughout the year, although six months of the year it is embedded in ice and snow. But the main difference here between this and another building, in this case Alpine House, is it hasn't got a chimney because there is nothing to burn. Jokingly, when you ask him how he is heating his Institute and home, he says: Oh, this is what my staff are doing because they are all stoves of 37 degrees Centigrade, and that's enough to heat the house. But, admittedly, for the very cold winter days, he allows himself to clandestinely burn some wood from his garden. Figure 21 It is not only the management of energy. It is also the question of construction materials, and there you see if you use wood and look into the energy consumption used for manufacturing the construction materials, you see wood being roughly a factor of 4 better than the typical mix of aluminum, concrete, steel and glass. But, of course, the balance is even better if you look at the carbon dioxide side because when growing, wood absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. Figure 22 Figure 23 Everybody knows, of course, the light bulb story. I don't have to dwell on that. This is a story also from Bio Schmidt-Bleek's team at the Wuppertal Institute. Rupert Tishner has worked on an alternative to a free standing refrigerator in your kitchen and has replaced it by a cooling chamber built into the wall facing north. It is, all in all, roughly a factor of 4 better with regard to both energy and materials. Figure 24 This is Amory Lovins' favorite example these days. It's a hypercar which is meant to travel roughly 150 miles per gallon or uses a liter and a half of petrol or diesel per 100 kilometers. Of course, it is totally redesigned. It is ultra light. It has got a hybrid engine. It has a small battery-electric kind of engine plus a small internal combustion engine to cooperate in an optimized manner. I'm not going into technical details now. If Amory were here he would tell you 60 minutes about that. Figure 25 We found a textile manufacturer in Germany, Hess Natur, who claims that in the life history of his clothes only one-quarter of the resources, notably water, is used as compared to conventional clothes. Water, of course, as you all know, is one of the scarcest resources of this earth and we have examples in factor 4 of water rationalization in paper manufacturing, in households, including in the toilet system, in agriculture, etc. It is one of the most fascinating fields of technological advances.