figure 26 figure 27 figure 28 figure 29 figure 30
Figure 26 Steel has been a fairly clumsy kind of material. I was learning from Ryoichi Yamamoto. Ryoichi Yamamoto visited Dusseldorf, Germany, in May and he gave me a number of nice pictures of modern Japanese steel being at least a factor of 4 better in resource productivity than conventional steel. Figure 27 If you eat winter tomatoes from greenhouses in Holland today, for each Kcal that you put into your mouth some 100 Kcal have been invested beforehand. It's a huge waste of energy. A fairly similar story can be told about feeder cattle, and if you compare that with essentially organic farming you end up with at least a factor of 4 better. In the case of vegetables it is a factor of 100. Figure 28 Stefanie Boge at the Wuppertal Institute once studied the transport intensity of manufacturing strawberry yogurt in Germany and ended up finding that for each cup of strawberry yogurt lorried across central Europe, roughly 8,000 kilometers are driven by these lorries to end up finally with a cup of strawberry yogurt on one's table. Evidently, you can do at least four times better. I believe this is more or less the entire story that I wanted to show you. Clearly, not only strawberry yogurt journeys can be rationalized. Many business trips can be saved using videoconferences, and letters and manuscripts don't always need airmail from Japan to Europe. Much can be sent by e-mail, saving a factor of 100 or 1,000 in resource use. I am fully aware that substituting electronic dispatch for air transport is a bit difficult in the case of tourism or award ceremonies. Besides, people like coming to Tokyo from overseas and do not want to miss seeing each other, so I'm aware there are always problems of additional journeys stimulated by electronic use of e-mail or videoconferences. There is another important factor 4 chapter to be added, namely total material recycling. No ton of metals or plastic or glass that goes into manufacturing should ever end up in waste bins. This, I understand, is one of the philosophies being developed by Bio and by METI, and I'm very happy to say that people are listening very attentively in Germany to what is happening in Japan with your new Recycling Law. I'm sorry to admit that the German Recycling Law, heralded as opening a new age of reuse and recycling of materials, is not living up to its expectations. After having sketched out to you perhaps the shape of that new universe of factor 4 or 10 technologies, I should like to turn to some economic and political questions. What can we do to make this technology shift profitable? Fortunately, a reasonable part of the eco-efficiency measures are already profitable, and this is particularly true in developing countries. Figure 29 During my last journey to China, I saw a brochure on the question of how much money you will have to spend for reducing carbon dioxide by one ton. I already found it quite a good message - quite a good surprise for me that solar energy would make it so cheap, less than 20 US dollars per ton. But this is still, of course, much too much for the Chinese economy. Figure 30 So perhaps the best advice the Chinese are taking with regard to carbon dioxide reduction is industrial renewal. It's simply modernization as we have done in East Germany, but there is one option that is still better. It is energy efficiency and combined heat and power. There, for each ton of carbon dioxide reduced, you earn 20 dollars. You become richer by 20 dollars, so this is eco-efficiency that is already profitable. But it is only one segment. In many regards, as Bio has quite clearly said, the increase of resource productivity or the decrease of resource intensity is not profitable yet. Nevertheless, all in all, it seems that the sustainable development stocks fare better on stock markets than the international benchmark index - the Morgan Stanley Capital International. Let me go a few steps further. This is, of course, an encouraging piece of news, but we can go still further, namely in the Netherlands, as an example, investments in green portfolios enjoy a tax advantage over ordinary funds, and this serves as an important signal to the capital markets and leads to a situation in which ecological start-up firms find it much easier to access capital from the capital markets. It can be seen as a perfectly legitimate objective for the state and for the international community to create an atmosphere that is favorable for redirecting technological progress.