APRIL 12, 2011, 8:30 PM
How to Save a Trillion Dollars
By MARK BITTMAN
The New York Times
In the scheme of things, saving the 38 billion bucks that Congress seems poised to agree upon is not a big deal. A big deal is saving a trillion bucks. And we could do that by preventing disease instead of treating it.
For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.
But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.
This isn’t just me talking. In a recent issue of the magazine Circulation, the American Heart Association editorial board stated flatly that costs in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death here and in much of the rest of the world — will triple by 2030, to more than $800 billion annually. Throw in about $276 billion of what they call “real indirect costs,” like productivity, and you have over a trillion. Enough over, in fact, to make $38 billion in budget cuts seem like a rounding error.
Similarly, Type 2 diabetes is projected to cost us $500 billion a year come 2020, when half of all Americans will have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Need I remind you that Type 2 diabetes is virtually entirely preventable? Ten billion dollars invested now might save a couple of hundred billion annually 10 years from now. And: hypertension, many cancers, diverticulitis and more are treated by a health care (better termed “disease care”) system that costs us about $2.3 trillion annually now — before costs double and triple.
It’s worth noting that the Federal budget will absorb its usual 60 percent of that cost. We can save some of that money, though, if an alliance of insurers, government, individuals — maybe even Big Food, if it’s pushed hard enough — moves us towards better eating.
The many numbers all point in the same direction. Look at heart disease: The INTERHEART study of 30,000 men and women in 52 countries showed that at least 90 percent of heart disease is lifestyle related; a European study of more than 23,000 Germans showed that people with healthier lifestyles had an 81 percent lower risk.
And those estimates might be on the low side. Dean Ornish, the San Francisco-based doctor who probably knows more about diet and heart disease than anyone, says, “My colleagues and I have found that more intensive diets than those studies used can reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease.”
In his latest book, “The Spectrum,” Ornish recommends that people at risk eat stricter diets (more plants, higher fiber, lower saturated fats and so on) than those who are generally healthy, but it’s not all or nothing — the more you change your diet and lifestyle, the healthier you are. “What matters most,” he says, “is your overall way of eating and living. If you indulge yourself one day, eat healthier the next.” I’ve been preaching similarly for years. But the trillion-dollar question is, “How do we get people to eat that way?”
I don’t have an easy answer; no one does. But it for sure will take an investment: it’s a situation in which you must spend money to make or save money. (Yes, taxes will go up, but whose taxes?) Some number of billions of dollars — something in the rounding error area — should be spent on research to figure out exactly how to turn this ship around. (The NIH, which pegs obesity-related costs at about $150 billion, just announced a new billion-dollar investment. Good, but not enough.)
Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. Some other billions of dollars must go to public health. Again: we built sewage systems; we built water supplies; we showed that we could get people to eat anything we marketed. Now all we have to do is build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that.
Experts without vested interests in the status quo come to much the same conclusion: Only a massive public health effort can save both our health and our budget.
Can we afford it? Sure. Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard-affiliated pediatrician and the author of “Ending the Food Fight,” says, “The magnitude of the deficit is small when you consider costs of nutrition-related disease; the $4 trillion that the Republicans want cut over a decade is about the same as the projected costs of diabetes over that same period.”
In last week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Ludwig made a number of concrete suggestions, like restructuring subsidies, regulating the marketing of food to children and adequately funding school lunch programs.
His most novel ideas use existing and future technologies to help the food industry retain profits while producing less junky products: devising a method of preserving polyunsaturated fats, for example (dangerous trans-fats are widely used simply because they are stable) or making bread with real whole grains instead of refined ones. (His research demonstrates that people who eat ultra-processed grains rather than whole grains for breakfast go on to consume 600 to 700 calories more than other people each day.) “I’m not arguing that the food industry should be philanthropic,” he says. “Its purpose is to make money. But the goal of the government should be to encourage industry to make money by producing more rather than less healthful foods.”
The best way to combat diet-related diseases is to change what we eat. And if our thinking is along the lines of diet improved = deficit reduced, so much the better. If a better diet were to result only in a 10 percent decrease in heart disease (way lower than Ludwig believes possible), that’s $100 billion project savings per year by 2030.
This isn’t just fiscal responsibility, but social responsibility as well. And the alternative is not only fiscal catastrophe but millions of premature deaths.
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Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Amory Lovins has a vision: The U.S. economy keeps going and going and going - without any oil
The Energizer - Amory Lovins
Amory Lovins has a vision: The U.S. economy keeps going and going and going - without any oil
By Cal Fussman
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 02 | February 2006 | Environment
AMORY LOVINS is a physicist, economist, inventor, automobile designer, consultant to 18 heads of state, author of 29 books, and cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. most of all, he's a man who takes pride in saving energy. The electricity bill at his 4,000-square-foot home in Old Snowmass, Colorado, is five dollars a month, and he's convinced he can do the same for all of us. His book winning the oil endgame shows how the United States can save as much oil as it gets from the Persian gulf by 2015 and how all oil imports can be eliminated by 2040. And that's just for starters.
As told to Cal Fussman
When I give talks about energy, the audience already knows about the problems. That's not what they've come to hear. So I don't talk about problems, only solutions. But after a while, during the question period, someone in the back will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things that are happening—most of which are basically true. There's only one way I've found to deal with that. After this person calms down, I gently ask whether feeling that way makes him more effective.
As René Dubos, the famous biologist, once said, "Despair is a sin."
ENERGY
I used to work for Edwin Land, the father of Polaroid photography. Land said that invention was the sudden cessation of stupidity. He also said that people who seem to have had a new idea often have just stopped having an old idea. So I suppose if I bring something unusual to this business, it's that maybe I find it easier to stop having old ideas.
I can't point to any one moment in particular from my past that made me who I am. It's been more like seeing the world through an evolving lens. Gradually, I've learned to ask different questions and look at problems from different angles than most people.
I'm probably best known for having redefined the energy problem in 1976 with a Foreign Affairs article titled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"
Until then, the energy problem was generally considered to be: Where do we get more energy? People were preoccupied with where we could get more energy of any kind, from any sources, for any price—as if all our needs were the same. I started instead at the other end of the problem: What do we want the energy for?
You don't generally want lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo. You want comfort, illumination, mobility, baked bread, and so on. And for each of these end uses we should ask: How much energy, of what quality, at what scale, from what source will do the job in the cheapest way? That's now called the end-use/least-cost approach, and a lot of the work we do at Rocky Mountain Institute involves applying it to a wide range of situations.
End-use/least-cost analysis begins with a simple question: What are you really trying to do? If you go to the hardware store looking for a drill, chances are what you really want is not a drill but a hole. And then there's a reason you want the hole. If you ask enough layers of "Why?"—as Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota production system, told us—you typically get to the root of the problem.
OIL
Let's start with one basic problem. Saudi Arabia has a quarter of the world's oil reserves. It is the sole swing producer with significant capacity to increase output, and therefore it controls the world price.
Two-thirds of Saudi oil flows through one processing plant and two terminals that are in the crosshairs of terrorists. That stuff could go down any day for a long time. And that would presumably crash both the House of Saud and the Western economy. So for the bad guys it's a twofer. They would love to do that, and they've already had a couple of cracks at it.
Now, this should make you uncomfortable. But we don't have to continue on our current path. We can go a different way.
Let's look at oil through a historic analogy. Around 1850, the biggest or second-biggest industry in America was whaling. Most buildings were lit with whale oil. But in the nine years before Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Pennsylvania and made kerosene ubiquitous, at least five-sixths of the whale oil–lighting market had already been lost to competing products made from coal. This was elicited by the relatively high price of whale oil as the whales got shy and scarce.
The whalers were astounded that they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. They didn't see this coming because they hadn't added up the competitors. Oil fields can be like this today.
The United States today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975. With even more advanced technologies, we can double oil efficiency all over again at a cost averaging $12 a barrel. We can replace the rest of our oil needs with advanced biofuels and saved natural gas at a cost averaging $18 a barrel. Combined, these two approaches average out at a cost of $15 a barrel. That's a lot cheaper than the $61 per barrel oil was the other day or even the $26 that's officially forecast for the year 2025.
How much cheaper than $26 a barrel? Well, about $70 billion a year, plus a million jobs, mostly in rural and small-town America. Plus a million saved jobs now at risk, mainly in the automaking states.
We've got a choice: Either we're going to continue importing efficient cars to help replace foreign oil, or we're going to employ our own people to make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the car—which sounds like a better idea.
WEIGHT
A modern car, after 120 years of devoted engineering effort since Gottlieb Daimler built the first gasoline-powered vehicle, uses less than 1 percent of its fuel to move the driver. How does that happen?
Well, only an eighth of the fuel energy reaches the wheels. The rest of it is lost in the engine, drivetrain, and accessories, or wasted while the car is idling. Of the one-eighth that reaches the wheels, over half heats the tires on the road or the air that the car pushes aside. So only 6 percent of the original fuel energy accelerates the car. But remember, about 95 percent of the mass being accelerated is the car—not the driver. Hence, less than 1 percent of the fuel energy moves the driver. This is not very gratifying.
Well, the solution is equally inherent in the basic physics I just described. Three-quarters of the fuel usage is caused by the car's weight. Every unit of energy you save at the wheels by making the car a lot lighter will save an additional seven units of fuel that you don't need to waste getting it to the wheels.
So you can get this roughly eightfold leverage (three- to fourfold in the case of a hybrid) from the wheels back to the fuel tank by starting with the physics of the car, making it lighter and with lower drag. And indeed you can make the car radically lighter. We've figured out a cost-effective way to do that so you can end up with a 66-mile-per-gallon uncompromised SUV that has half the normal weight, has a third the normal fuel use, is safer, and repays the extra cost that comes with being a hybrid in less than two years.
PLASTIC
Henry Ford said you don't need weight for strength. If you did need weight for strength, your bicycle helmet would be made of steel, not carbon fiber. And if you want to know how strong a very light material can be, try eating an Atlantic lobster with no tools.
The auto industry needs to move toward ultralight, ultrastrong carbon-fiber composites, almost certainly using thermoplastics that flow when heated and that can be easily molded—instead of the more brittle, expensive thermosets that need chemistry, baking, or some other change to set the resin into its final hard form. Thermoplastics are incredibly tough. They can absorb 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. So even though your car will be only half as heavy as it was before, it will still be safer when whacked by a heavier one.
With such materials, you can decouple size from weight. You can make the car big—protected and comfortable. But it won't be heavy—hostile and inefficient. This can save oil and lives at the same time, and it turns out you can greatly improve the economics of making the car because you might have in a carbon SUV only 14 body parts—instead of 140 to 280 in a steel auto body—each needing one low-pressure die set, instead of an average of four high-pressure steel-stamping die sets in the steel body. The parts snap together precisely in the right positions for gluing, like assembling a kid's toy, so you don't need all those jigs and robots. You basically get rid of the body shop this way, and then by laying color in the mold, you get rid of the paint shop too. There go the two hardest and costliest parts of making the car.
New jobs come partly by having a vibrantly competitive car industry rather than a failing one and partly due to the logical evolution of the auto industry toward computerization. Imagine the aftermarket for improved and customized software. The industry structure would be different, but we don't think there would be a net loss of jobs. The jobs would be safer, healthier, and better distributed. And the same revolution that's coming to automaking from advanced materials also applies to anything else that moves.
HYDROGEN
Many automakers are starting to understand that whoever goes ultralight first will take the lead in the hydrogen fuel-cell race.
The winning strategy will be improving the physics of the car. They still need to make a cheap, durable fuel cell. But if they can reduce the fuel cell and the hydrogen storage volume by three times, the cost reduces threefold.
That said, superefficient cars need hydrogen a lot less than hydrogen needs superefficient cars. If you have, say, an ultralight hybrid SUV burning gasoline at 66 miles per gallon, that isn't so bad—at least not compared to a similar one getting 18.5 miles per gallon on the road today.
If you then combine that with E85 fuel, which is 15 percent gasoline and 85 percent ethanol, you just got a 320-mile-per-gallon SUV because the efficiency times the biofuel saving of oil multiplies.
For that matter, if every car or light truck on the road in 2025 is only as efficient as the best hybrid cars and SUVs now in the showrooms, that would save twice as much oil as we currently import from the Persian Gulf. So it's not a very ambitious goal—and it doesn't even involve making vehicles ultralight.
Very efficient vehicles can get most of the same benefits without hydrogen by using today's gasoline/hybrid propulsion. However, once you have such vehicles, there is a robust business case for running them on hydrogen. Until you have those efficient vehicles, that business case is not very convincing.
I think hydrogen will be an important if not dominant energy carrier by 2050. In Winning the Oil Endgame, the comprehensive strategy we've developed at Rocky Mountain Institute for ending oil dependence, we see hydrogen as an optional add-on. It would be the most profitable and efficient way to use and save natural gas. But it's not necessary to get the country off oil at a profit; it's just icing on the cake.
ELECTRICITY
A question I ask a lot is, What's the right size for the job? I have a book called Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size. It points out 207 benefits of distributed resources, such as solar and wind power. When I begin to describe them, you'll find them really obvious:
Renewables, such as wind energy, have less financial risk from volatile fuel prices than fossil-fuel power plants because they don't need any fuel.
Small resources like solar cells or wind turbines have less financial risk than giant power plants that take many years to build.
Portable resources like solar panels have less financial risk than stationary power plants, because if the system evolves differently than you'd expected and you'd rather put it somewhere else, you simply stick it on a truck and move it.
This is all blindingly obvious, yet it hasn't been taken into account by the utility industry while buying its half trillion dollars' worth of assets.
Here's what happened: For the first century of the electricity business, the power plants were costlier and less reliable than the grid, so it made sense to build a bunch of big power plants backing each other up through the grid. Well—surprise—over the last 20 years, power plants have become cheaper and more reliable than the grid. Ninety-nine percent of our power failures originate in the grid—mostly in distribution. So now if you want to deliver reliable, affordable electricity, you need to make it at or near the customer's location.
Many people didn't notice this happening. But despite the market's not yet recognizing the benefits, the decentralized low- or no-carbon generators turn out to be greater in capacity and output than nuclear power worldwide. David already beat Goliath, but nobody noticed.
The nuclear advocates frequently state that only nuclear is big and fast enough to deal with global warming. Well, five years from now the official industry forecast suggests that decentralized low- and no-carbon generators will be adding 160 times as much capacity as nuclear will add up to that year. So those who think that the decentralized generators are small, slow, and futuristic or have an unacceptable risk of not being adopted at scale in the market have some serious explaining to do.
WIND
If I could do just one thing to solve our energy problems, I would allow energy to compete fairly at honest prices regardless of which kind it is, what technology it uses, how big it is, or who owns it. If we did that, we wouldn't have an oil problem, a climate problem, or a nuclear proliferation problem. Those are all artifacts of public policies that have distorted the market into buying things it wouldn't otherwise have bought because they were turkeys.
We have more than enough cost-effective wind power just on available land in the Dakotas to meet the United States' electricity needs. We wouldn't necessarily want to do it all in two states, and there are cheaper combinations of other technologies to do the whole job, but it's an enormous resource.
Germany and Spain each install over 2,000 megawatts of wind power every year. That figure exceeds the average global net addition of nuclear power every year in this decade. Denmark is now one-fifth wind powered; Germany, about a tenth.
Wind power is doubling every three years worldwide and solar power every two, and not because some countries subsidize it strongly. In fact, the subsidies are being phased out slowly in Germany and rapidly in Japan because they have achieved their purpose of creating world-class industries that will be able to make it on their own.
If everything competed solely on merit, wind energy in the United States would be a lot better off. It gets subsidized less than its competitors, and its subsidies are temporary, while its competitors' are permanent. In other words, the fossil and nuclear subsidies—nuclear being the biggest—are permanent, while renewable subsidies are temporary.
Congress's brief and irregular renewals of the tax credit for wind power have several times bankrupted wind-turbine manufacturers in the United States. Similar misguided policies have diminished the solar-cell industry. Half of the solar cells sold in the United States a decade ago were domestically made. Now that figure is only 8 percent.
DEFENSE
A major player in our energy future will be the Pentagon. Here's why: Trailing behind every half-mile-a-gallon Abrams tank—a peerless fighting machine if you can get it there—are two unarmored fuel trucks. Guess what the bad guys shoot at?
This is a very teachable moment—when the Pentagon becomes acutely aware of the cost and the risk of delivering fuel on the battlefield. They obviously need much lighter, more agile, radically more fuel-efficient forces.
A military transformation will have a much bigger payoff, in exactly the same way the Pentagon's research and development created the Internet, global positioning systems, the modern microchip industry, and advanced aero engines.
If you align military science and technology investments to capture this enormous improvement at a tactical, operational, and strategic level, guess what? You thereby transform the car, truck, and plane industries to get the country off oil, so we won't need to fight over the oil because we won't be using it. Mission unnecessary.
BANANAS
When we designed the research facilities at Rocky Mountain Institute, we didn't plan on having a banana farm inside. We're up 7,100 feet in the Rockies, and it has gotten as low as –47 degrees in the winter.
We planned about 900 square feet of jungle space with five different kinds of energy collection: heat, hot air, hot water, light, and photosynthesis. The arch that holds it up has 12 different functions, but I paid for it only once. The whole building exemplifies design integration: getting multiple benefits from single expenditures. It saves about 99 percent of the normal need for space- and water-heating energy, about 90 percent of the household electricity, and half the water. All that efficiency paid for itself in 10 months—and that's with 1983 technology! Now we can do a lot better.
Anyway, we weren't planning on growing bananas here, but somebody who owed me something gave me a banana tree to settle the obligation. He said it would grow to six feet and never fruit—but he forgot to tell the tree. When it got 12-year-old horse manure, it went bananas, grew to 25 feet, put out nine crops in the first year and a half, and tried to go through the roof. Then it tried to eat the fishpond.
I was afraid of a hydraulic disaster, so we chopped it down, dug it up, and put a steel fence between what was left of the root-ball and the fishpond. But it grew back and put out another 18 crops. Eventually, a few years ago, it wore out at twice its designed life, so we took it out for good and put in a variety of young banana trees. We've also done mangoes, grapes, papayas, and passion fruit—here in the Rocky Mountains.
The tangled tale of the banana tree offers a very simple lesson: Be open to possibilities.
Read at the original source
Amory Lovins has a vision: The U.S. economy keeps going and going and going - without any oil
By Cal Fussman
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 02 | February 2006 | Environment
AMORY LOVINS is a physicist, economist, inventor, automobile designer, consultant to 18 heads of state, author of 29 books, and cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. most of all, he's a man who takes pride in saving energy. The electricity bill at his 4,000-square-foot home in Old Snowmass, Colorado, is five dollars a month, and he's convinced he can do the same for all of us. His book winning the oil endgame shows how the United States can save as much oil as it gets from the Persian gulf by 2015 and how all oil imports can be eliminated by 2040. And that's just for starters.
As told to Cal Fussman
When I give talks about energy, the audience already knows about the problems. That's not what they've come to hear. So I don't talk about problems, only solutions. But after a while, during the question period, someone in the back will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things that are happening—most of which are basically true. There's only one way I've found to deal with that. After this person calms down, I gently ask whether feeling that way makes him more effective.
As René Dubos, the famous biologist, once said, "Despair is a sin."
ENERGY
I used to work for Edwin Land, the father of Polaroid photography. Land said that invention was the sudden cessation of stupidity. He also said that people who seem to have had a new idea often have just stopped having an old idea. So I suppose if I bring something unusual to this business, it's that maybe I find it easier to stop having old ideas.
I can't point to any one moment in particular from my past that made me who I am. It's been more like seeing the world through an evolving lens. Gradually, I've learned to ask different questions and look at problems from different angles than most people.
I'm probably best known for having redefined the energy problem in 1976 with a Foreign Affairs article titled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"
Until then, the energy problem was generally considered to be: Where do we get more energy? People were preoccupied with where we could get more energy of any kind, from any sources, for any price—as if all our needs were the same. I started instead at the other end of the problem: What do we want the energy for?
You don't generally want lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo. You want comfort, illumination, mobility, baked bread, and so on. And for each of these end uses we should ask: How much energy, of what quality, at what scale, from what source will do the job in the cheapest way? That's now called the end-use/least-cost approach, and a lot of the work we do at Rocky Mountain Institute involves applying it to a wide range of situations.
End-use/least-cost analysis begins with a simple question: What are you really trying to do? If you go to the hardware store looking for a drill, chances are what you really want is not a drill but a hole. And then there's a reason you want the hole. If you ask enough layers of "Why?"—as Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota production system, told us—you typically get to the root of the problem.
OIL
Let's start with one basic problem. Saudi Arabia has a quarter of the world's oil reserves. It is the sole swing producer with significant capacity to increase output, and therefore it controls the world price.
Two-thirds of Saudi oil flows through one processing plant and two terminals that are in the crosshairs of terrorists. That stuff could go down any day for a long time. And that would presumably crash both the House of Saud and the Western economy. So for the bad guys it's a twofer. They would love to do that, and they've already had a couple of cracks at it.
Now, this should make you uncomfortable. But we don't have to continue on our current path. We can go a different way.
Let's look at oil through a historic analogy. Around 1850, the biggest or second-biggest industry in America was whaling. Most buildings were lit with whale oil. But in the nine years before Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Pennsylvania and made kerosene ubiquitous, at least five-sixths of the whale oil–lighting market had already been lost to competing products made from coal. This was elicited by the relatively high price of whale oil as the whales got shy and scarce.
The whalers were astounded that they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. They didn't see this coming because they hadn't added up the competitors. Oil fields can be like this today.
The United States today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975. With even more advanced technologies, we can double oil efficiency all over again at a cost averaging $12 a barrel. We can replace the rest of our oil needs with advanced biofuels and saved natural gas at a cost averaging $18 a barrel. Combined, these two approaches average out at a cost of $15 a barrel. That's a lot cheaper than the $61 per barrel oil was the other day or even the $26 that's officially forecast for the year 2025.
How much cheaper than $26 a barrel? Well, about $70 billion a year, plus a million jobs, mostly in rural and small-town America. Plus a million saved jobs now at risk, mainly in the automaking states.
We've got a choice: Either we're going to continue importing efficient cars to help replace foreign oil, or we're going to employ our own people to make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the car—which sounds like a better idea.
WEIGHT
A modern car, after 120 years of devoted engineering effort since Gottlieb Daimler built the first gasoline-powered vehicle, uses less than 1 percent of its fuel to move the driver. How does that happen?
Well, only an eighth of the fuel energy reaches the wheels. The rest of it is lost in the engine, drivetrain, and accessories, or wasted while the car is idling. Of the one-eighth that reaches the wheels, over half heats the tires on the road or the air that the car pushes aside. So only 6 percent of the original fuel energy accelerates the car. But remember, about 95 percent of the mass being accelerated is the car—not the driver. Hence, less than 1 percent of the fuel energy moves the driver. This is not very gratifying.
Well, the solution is equally inherent in the basic physics I just described. Three-quarters of the fuel usage is caused by the car's weight. Every unit of energy you save at the wheels by making the car a lot lighter will save an additional seven units of fuel that you don't need to waste getting it to the wheels.
So you can get this roughly eightfold leverage (three- to fourfold in the case of a hybrid) from the wheels back to the fuel tank by starting with the physics of the car, making it lighter and with lower drag. And indeed you can make the car radically lighter. We've figured out a cost-effective way to do that so you can end up with a 66-mile-per-gallon uncompromised SUV that has half the normal weight, has a third the normal fuel use, is safer, and repays the extra cost that comes with being a hybrid in less than two years.
PLASTIC
Henry Ford said you don't need weight for strength. If you did need weight for strength, your bicycle helmet would be made of steel, not carbon fiber. And if you want to know how strong a very light material can be, try eating an Atlantic lobster with no tools.
The auto industry needs to move toward ultralight, ultrastrong carbon-fiber composites, almost certainly using thermoplastics that flow when heated and that can be easily molded—instead of the more brittle, expensive thermosets that need chemistry, baking, or some other change to set the resin into its final hard form. Thermoplastics are incredibly tough. They can absorb 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. So even though your car will be only half as heavy as it was before, it will still be safer when whacked by a heavier one.
With such materials, you can decouple size from weight. You can make the car big—protected and comfortable. But it won't be heavy—hostile and inefficient. This can save oil and lives at the same time, and it turns out you can greatly improve the economics of making the car because you might have in a carbon SUV only 14 body parts—instead of 140 to 280 in a steel auto body—each needing one low-pressure die set, instead of an average of four high-pressure steel-stamping die sets in the steel body. The parts snap together precisely in the right positions for gluing, like assembling a kid's toy, so you don't need all those jigs and robots. You basically get rid of the body shop this way, and then by laying color in the mold, you get rid of the paint shop too. There go the two hardest and costliest parts of making the car.
New jobs come partly by having a vibrantly competitive car industry rather than a failing one and partly due to the logical evolution of the auto industry toward computerization. Imagine the aftermarket for improved and customized software. The industry structure would be different, but we don't think there would be a net loss of jobs. The jobs would be safer, healthier, and better distributed. And the same revolution that's coming to automaking from advanced materials also applies to anything else that moves.
HYDROGEN
Many automakers are starting to understand that whoever goes ultralight first will take the lead in the hydrogen fuel-cell race.
The winning strategy will be improving the physics of the car. They still need to make a cheap, durable fuel cell. But if they can reduce the fuel cell and the hydrogen storage volume by three times, the cost reduces threefold.
That said, superefficient cars need hydrogen a lot less than hydrogen needs superefficient cars. If you have, say, an ultralight hybrid SUV burning gasoline at 66 miles per gallon, that isn't so bad—at least not compared to a similar one getting 18.5 miles per gallon on the road today.
If you then combine that with E85 fuel, which is 15 percent gasoline and 85 percent ethanol, you just got a 320-mile-per-gallon SUV because the efficiency times the biofuel saving of oil multiplies.
For that matter, if every car or light truck on the road in 2025 is only as efficient as the best hybrid cars and SUVs now in the showrooms, that would save twice as much oil as we currently import from the Persian Gulf. So it's not a very ambitious goal—and it doesn't even involve making vehicles ultralight.
Very efficient vehicles can get most of the same benefits without hydrogen by using today's gasoline/hybrid propulsion. However, once you have such vehicles, there is a robust business case for running them on hydrogen. Until you have those efficient vehicles, that business case is not very convincing.
I think hydrogen will be an important if not dominant energy carrier by 2050. In Winning the Oil Endgame, the comprehensive strategy we've developed at Rocky Mountain Institute for ending oil dependence, we see hydrogen as an optional add-on. It would be the most profitable and efficient way to use and save natural gas. But it's not necessary to get the country off oil at a profit; it's just icing on the cake.
ELECTRICITY
A question I ask a lot is, What's the right size for the job? I have a book called Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size. It points out 207 benefits of distributed resources, such as solar and wind power. When I begin to describe them, you'll find them really obvious:
Renewables, such as wind energy, have less financial risk from volatile fuel prices than fossil-fuel power plants because they don't need any fuel.
Small resources like solar cells or wind turbines have less financial risk than giant power plants that take many years to build.
Portable resources like solar panels have less financial risk than stationary power plants, because if the system evolves differently than you'd expected and you'd rather put it somewhere else, you simply stick it on a truck and move it.
This is all blindingly obvious, yet it hasn't been taken into account by the utility industry while buying its half trillion dollars' worth of assets.
Here's what happened: For the first century of the electricity business, the power plants were costlier and less reliable than the grid, so it made sense to build a bunch of big power plants backing each other up through the grid. Well—surprise—over the last 20 years, power plants have become cheaper and more reliable than the grid. Ninety-nine percent of our power failures originate in the grid—mostly in distribution. So now if you want to deliver reliable, affordable electricity, you need to make it at or near the customer's location.
Many people didn't notice this happening. But despite the market's not yet recognizing the benefits, the decentralized low- or no-carbon generators turn out to be greater in capacity and output than nuclear power worldwide. David already beat Goliath, but nobody noticed.
The nuclear advocates frequently state that only nuclear is big and fast enough to deal with global warming. Well, five years from now the official industry forecast suggests that decentralized low- and no-carbon generators will be adding 160 times as much capacity as nuclear will add up to that year. So those who think that the decentralized generators are small, slow, and futuristic or have an unacceptable risk of not being adopted at scale in the market have some serious explaining to do.
WIND
If I could do just one thing to solve our energy problems, I would allow energy to compete fairly at honest prices regardless of which kind it is, what technology it uses, how big it is, or who owns it. If we did that, we wouldn't have an oil problem, a climate problem, or a nuclear proliferation problem. Those are all artifacts of public policies that have distorted the market into buying things it wouldn't otherwise have bought because they were turkeys.
We have more than enough cost-effective wind power just on available land in the Dakotas to meet the United States' electricity needs. We wouldn't necessarily want to do it all in two states, and there are cheaper combinations of other technologies to do the whole job, but it's an enormous resource.
Germany and Spain each install over 2,000 megawatts of wind power every year. That figure exceeds the average global net addition of nuclear power every year in this decade. Denmark is now one-fifth wind powered; Germany, about a tenth.
Wind power is doubling every three years worldwide and solar power every two, and not because some countries subsidize it strongly. In fact, the subsidies are being phased out slowly in Germany and rapidly in Japan because they have achieved their purpose of creating world-class industries that will be able to make it on their own.
If everything competed solely on merit, wind energy in the United States would be a lot better off. It gets subsidized less than its competitors, and its subsidies are temporary, while its competitors' are permanent. In other words, the fossil and nuclear subsidies—nuclear being the biggest—are permanent, while renewable subsidies are temporary.
Congress's brief and irregular renewals of the tax credit for wind power have several times bankrupted wind-turbine manufacturers in the United States. Similar misguided policies have diminished the solar-cell industry. Half of the solar cells sold in the United States a decade ago were domestically made. Now that figure is only 8 percent.
DEFENSE
A major player in our energy future will be the Pentagon. Here's why: Trailing behind every half-mile-a-gallon Abrams tank—a peerless fighting machine if you can get it there—are two unarmored fuel trucks. Guess what the bad guys shoot at?
This is a very teachable moment—when the Pentagon becomes acutely aware of the cost and the risk of delivering fuel on the battlefield. They obviously need much lighter, more agile, radically more fuel-efficient forces.
A military transformation will have a much bigger payoff, in exactly the same way the Pentagon's research and development created the Internet, global positioning systems, the modern microchip industry, and advanced aero engines.
If you align military science and technology investments to capture this enormous improvement at a tactical, operational, and strategic level, guess what? You thereby transform the car, truck, and plane industries to get the country off oil, so we won't need to fight over the oil because we won't be using it. Mission unnecessary.
BANANAS
When we designed the research facilities at Rocky Mountain Institute, we didn't plan on having a banana farm inside. We're up 7,100 feet in the Rockies, and it has gotten as low as –47 degrees in the winter.
We planned about 900 square feet of jungle space with five different kinds of energy collection: heat, hot air, hot water, light, and photosynthesis. The arch that holds it up has 12 different functions, but I paid for it only once. The whole building exemplifies design integration: getting multiple benefits from single expenditures. It saves about 99 percent of the normal need for space- and water-heating energy, about 90 percent of the household electricity, and half the water. All that efficiency paid for itself in 10 months—and that's with 1983 technology! Now we can do a lot better.
Anyway, we weren't planning on growing bananas here, but somebody who owed me something gave me a banana tree to settle the obligation. He said it would grow to six feet and never fruit—but he forgot to tell the tree. When it got 12-year-old horse manure, it went bananas, grew to 25 feet, put out nine crops in the first year and a half, and tried to go through the roof. Then it tried to eat the fishpond.
I was afraid of a hydraulic disaster, so we chopped it down, dug it up, and put a steel fence between what was left of the root-ball and the fishpond. But it grew back and put out another 18 crops. Eventually, a few years ago, it wore out at twice its designed life, so we took it out for good and put in a variety of young banana trees. We've also done mangoes, grapes, papayas, and passion fruit—here in the Rocky Mountains.
The tangled tale of the banana tree offers a very simple lesson: Be open to possibilities.
Read at the original source
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine
Caffeine - the world's most popular psychoactive drug
Caffeine
By T.R. Reid, National Geographic, January 2005
Slurped in black coffee or sipped in green tea, gulped down in a soda or knocked back in a headache pill, caffeine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug.
It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.
"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."
Czeisler, who rarely consumes any caffeine, is a bundle of wide-awake energy in his white lab coat, racing around his lab at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, grabbing journal articles from the shelves and digging through charts to find the key data points. "Caffeine is what's called a wake-promoting therapeutic," he says.
"Caffeine helps people try to wrest control away from the human circadian rhythm that is hardwired in all of us," says Czeisler. But then a shadow crosses the doctor's sunny face, and his tone changes sharply. "On the other hand," he says solemnly, "there is a heavy, heavy price that has been paid for all this extra wakefulness." Without adequate sleep—the conventional eight hours out of each 24 is about right—the human body will not function at its best, physically, mentally, or emotionally, the doctor says. "As a society, we are tremendously sleep deprived."
In fact, the professor goes on, there is a sort of catch-22 at the heart of the modern craving for caffeine. "The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness," Czeisler says. "But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine."
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic
Caffeine
By T.R. Reid, National Geographic, January 2005
Slurped in black coffee or sipped in green tea, gulped down in a soda or knocked back in a headache pill, caffeine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug.
It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.
"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."
Czeisler, who rarely consumes any caffeine, is a bundle of wide-awake energy in his white lab coat, racing around his lab at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, grabbing journal articles from the shelves and digging through charts to find the key data points. "Caffeine is what's called a wake-promoting therapeutic," he says.
"Caffeine helps people try to wrest control away from the human circadian rhythm that is hardwired in all of us," says Czeisler. But then a shadow crosses the doctor's sunny face, and his tone changes sharply. "On the other hand," he says solemnly, "there is a heavy, heavy price that has been paid for all this extra wakefulness." Without adequate sleep—the conventional eight hours out of each 24 is about right—the human body will not function at its best, physically, mentally, or emotionally, the doctor says. "As a society, we are tremendously sleep deprived."
In fact, the professor goes on, there is a sort of catch-22 at the heart of the modern craving for caffeine. "The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness," Czeisler says. "But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine."
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Leaders Who Won't Choose - Fiscal Irresponsibility
Leaders Who Won't Choose by Fareed Zakaria
"Leaders Who Won't Choose
In Washington, it's business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, September 26, 2005
"Adversity builds character," goes the old adage. Except that in America today we seem to be following the opposite principle. The worse things get, the more frivolous our response. President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget."
This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts—in fact, he expanded them—and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare.
Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.
People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.
Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs has pointed out that previous presidents acted differently. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt cut nonwar spending by more than 20 percent, in addition to raising taxes to finance the war effort. During the Korean War, President Truman cut non-defense spending 28 percent and raised taxes to pay the bills. In both cases these presidents were often slashing cherished New Deal programs that they had created. The only period—other than the current one—when the United States avoided hard choices was Vietnam: spending increased on all fronts. The results eventually were deficits, high interest rates and low growth‹stagflation.
Bush is not the only one to blame. Congressional spending is now completely out of control. The federal coffers are being looted for congressional patronage, and it is being done openly and without any guilt. The highway bill of 1982 had 10 "earmarked" projects—the code word for pork. The 2005 one has 6,371. The bill, written by the House transportation committee, is called the Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, or TEA-LU (in honor of chairman Don Young's wife, Lu). This use of public office for private whims would seem more appropriate in Saudi Arabia than America. Perhaps next year's bill will include a necklace for Mrs. Young.
The U.S. Congress is a national embarrasment, except that no one is embarrassed. There are a few men of conscience left, like John McCain, but McCain's pleas against pork seem to have absolutely no effect. They are beginning to have the feel of a quaint hobby, like collecting exotic stamps.
Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right.
Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call. It is time to get serious. We need to secure the homeland, fight terrorism and have an effective foreign policy to advance our interests and our ideals. We also need a world-class education system, a great infrastructure and advancement in science and technology.
For all its virtues, the private sector cannot accomplish all this. Wal-Mart and Federal Express cannot devise a national energy policy for the United States. For that and for much else, we need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get our money's worth?
Read at the original source
"Leaders Who Won't Choose
In Washington, it's business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, September 26, 2005
"Adversity builds character," goes the old adage. Except that in America today we seem to be following the opposite principle. The worse things get, the more frivolous our response. President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget."
This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts—in fact, he expanded them—and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare.
Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.
People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.
Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs has pointed out that previous presidents acted differently. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt cut nonwar spending by more than 20 percent, in addition to raising taxes to finance the war effort. During the Korean War, President Truman cut non-defense spending 28 percent and raised taxes to pay the bills. In both cases these presidents were often slashing cherished New Deal programs that they had created. The only period—other than the current one—when the United States avoided hard choices was Vietnam: spending increased on all fronts. The results eventually were deficits, high interest rates and low growth‹stagflation.
Bush is not the only one to blame. Congressional spending is now completely out of control. The federal coffers are being looted for congressional patronage, and it is being done openly and without any guilt. The highway bill of 1982 had 10 "earmarked" projects—the code word for pork. The 2005 one has 6,371. The bill, written by the House transportation committee, is called the Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, or TEA-LU (in honor of chairman Don Young's wife, Lu). This use of public office for private whims would seem more appropriate in Saudi Arabia than America. Perhaps next year's bill will include a necklace for Mrs. Young.
The U.S. Congress is a national embarrasment, except that no one is embarrassed. There are a few men of conscience left, like John McCain, but McCain's pleas against pork seem to have absolutely no effect. They are beginning to have the feel of a quaint hobby, like collecting exotic stamps.
Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right.
Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call. It is time to get serious. We need to secure the homeland, fight terrorism and have an effective foreign policy to advance our interests and our ideals. We also need a world-class education system, a great infrastructure and advancement in science and technology.
For all its virtues, the private sector cannot accomplish all this. Wal-Mart and Federal Express cannot devise a national energy policy for the United States. For that and for much else, we need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get our money's worth?
Read at the original source
Monday, September 19, 2005
Building in Green - William McDonough
Building in Green
"Building in Green
Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening.
By Sarah Schafer and Anne Underwood, Newsweek International, Sept. 26 - Oct. 3, 2005
When American architect and industrial designer William McDonough visited the dusty Chinese village of Huangbaiyu, the villagers greeted him and his entourage of U.S. executives with a marching band, red carpet and fake red flowers to pin on their lapels. One anxious county official wearing a new blue dress shirt, still creased from the packaging, ordered volunteers to
hold up an inflatable rainbow arch that had begun to sag. Foreign delegations often swing through rural towns, but McDonough is not just another big shot looking for a glimpse of "ordinary Chinese life." He's co-chair—together with Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Nan—of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. And he plans to change life in Huangbaiyu—and, for that matter, across China. "We hope whatever we do will make you happy," he announced to the curious crowd.
Huangbaiyu is set to become an experiment in ecologically balanced living, and McDonough is the visionary behind it. He and a team of Chinese and Americans have been charged with turning the village into a model of environmentally sound living. The team has begun construction on the first two demonstration homes and expect to build about 50 more by November to house some of the town's 400 families. If all goes as planned, families will move into a town center, increasing the amount of land available for farming, rather than live scattered about as they are now.
It's a challenge, to say the least. McDonough's team can spend only $3,500 per house. To pull it off, they're using local labor and local materials, all of which will either biodegrade safely or be completely recyclable. To avoid the pollution that is released during the firing of bricks, the walls are made of pressed-earth blocks. Between the blocks is straw, a byproduct of the local rice harvest that would otherwise go to waste. Walls are a half-meter thick, so houses are well insulated and won't need a lot of heating. Solar panels on the rooftops provide electricity and heated water. "We're doing everything with nothing," McDonough says.
China has a lot riding on the Huangbaiyu experiment—and so does the rest of the world. Beijing is now orchestrating an industrial revolution, hoping to telescope into a few decades what it took Western countries a century or two to accomplish. The plan is to move 400 million people—about half the rural population—into urban centers by 2030. Doing so will require expanding towns into cities and even building new metropolises from scratch. That also means creating education, security and economic policies to help the masses adjust to the speedy transition from an agrarian to an urban society. How China manages this transformation will have a huge impact on the country's—indeed, the world's—environment, and its social stability. McDonough's projects in the village of Huangbaiyu and six major cities are China's biggest experiment in ecologically sound development. If all goes well, his brand of ecodesign could serve as a model for China's new urbanism. "China wasted 200 years already," says Nie Meisheng, president of the China Housing Industry Association. "We have to catch up."
It's too early, of course, to say whether the plan will succeed or fail. McDonough has completed designs for the six new districts in cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou plus the village, but he's so far built mainly parks, waterways and roads. The goal is to have the first of the city sites ready for habitation in a few years. Although his plan has won the support of China's leaders—President Hu Jintao likes to repeat phrases from the Chinese translation of McDonough's book, "Cradle to Cradle"—the project relies on funding that is being raised by local governments and is not assured. And McDonough must first overcome a thousand gritty realities of life in China that could sidetrack his vision.
It makes a certain sense that China is turning to McDonough for an urban design vision. He believes that industrial cities could be far more efficient than they are now if they were designed from the ground up with ecological principles in mind instead of taking shape piecemeal. This notion would be impractical in most countries but could work in China, where the government has the wherewithal to impose its plans on citizens.
Efficiency is also key to relieving one of China's biggest roadblocks to modernization—its demand for energy. The Chinese use three times more energy per square meter to heat and cool buildings than Europeans and Americans, according to professor Yuan Bin at Beijing's Tsinghua University school of architecture. China is already the second largest energy consumer in the world, after the United States. Although only 23 million Chinese own cars, China produces 16 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions and is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO2 within 30 years. If each person in China used as much energy as an average American, they would swallow up the world's entire current supply of petroleum. "China cannot consume energy like the U.S. because we have 1.3 billion people," says Yuan Bin.
If McDonough's method could be summed up in a phrase, it might be to leave nothing to chance. In each of the six cities, he is starting with a thorough examination of the land to be developed. He figures out how rainwater runs off and enters aquifers, how animals migrate, what plants grow where. He studies sunlight angles and wind patterns. Then he sketches in parks, which interconnect so citizens can walk or ride bicycles from one to the next and wildlife can carry on without disruption. Next comes the plan for the infrastructure, beginning with the angle of the streets. He slants them at a 15-degree angle to the winds in order to break up cold winter blasts and help keep city air clean. And orienting them on a diagonal rather than a rigid east-west grid also maximizes the sunlight that reaches apartments year-round. The cities are zoned for mixed residential, commercial and industrial use to ensure that transportation connects residences to the workplaces. Shops will be on the ground floor, residences above, and the rooftops will have farm plots. Bridges over the streets will connect the plots. The farmers will live downstairs.
Energy efficiency will be maximized through new types of building materials and a solar-powered energy grid. McDonough has begun by developing a polystyrene made by BASF without ozone-depleting chloro-fluorocarbons but with excellent insulating qualities. "Buildings can be heated and cooled for next to nothing," he says. "And they'll be silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them." He's also working on new toilet bowls that are so slippery you can flush them with a light mist. Bamboo wetlands nearby would purify the waste, and the bamboo could be harvested and used for wood.
McDonough would like to see China's cities powered chiefly by solar panels. China, he says, is uniquely qualified to get solar power off the ground by virtue of its scale. "We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs," he says. "Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them."
McDonough's ideas have worked well, albeit on a smaller scale, in the United States. He's designed green developments for communities and corporations, including the Gap and Ford. The headquarters for the clothing retailer the Gap in California has a roof with vegetation on it, a raised floor for better heating and cooling, and makes good use of daylight. The building exceeds California's energy requirements by 30 percent; Pacific Gas and Electric named it the second most energy-efficient building in the state.
In China, McDonough's plans for all six city districts have passed the government's standards test; three have gotten the green light. In Zhejiang province, the group has integrated the city of Ningbo's water system, creating wetlands that help conserve rainwater and protect animal and plant life. In Jinan, McDonough and his team are trying to clean up land contaminated by toxins from a steel plant. Outside Chengdu, in Sichuan province, they're trying to preserve an ancient landscape with old trees that would otherwise be leveled to make room for buildings and roads. "We're just at the beginning," McDonough said. "If you really want to see something, give us a few years."
Many prominent companies have gotten involved. Vermeer Manufacturing Co. of Iowa contributed an earth-block press for Huangbaiyu. Hewlett-Packard is donating computers for the schools. BP has given solar collectors. Intel is sponsoring an American anthropology Ph.D. student, Shannon May, to live in the model village for 14 months. May will study local habits and report back to Intel so it can figure out how to design products for rural Chinese. She'll also work on her dissertation, which will explore "the dissonances between what the Americans hope to accomplish here and what actually happens on the ground." The whole world will be eager to see the results.
Read article at the original source
"Building in Green
Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening.
By Sarah Schafer and Anne Underwood, Newsweek International, Sept. 26 - Oct. 3, 2005
When American architect and industrial designer William McDonough visited the dusty Chinese village of Huangbaiyu, the villagers greeted him and his entourage of U.S. executives with a marching band, red carpet and fake red flowers to pin on their lapels. One anxious county official wearing a new blue dress shirt, still creased from the packaging, ordered volunteers to
hold up an inflatable rainbow arch that had begun to sag. Foreign delegations often swing through rural towns, but McDonough is not just another big shot looking for a glimpse of "ordinary Chinese life." He's co-chair—together with Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Nan—of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. And he plans to change life in Huangbaiyu—and, for that matter, across China. "We hope whatever we do will make you happy," he announced to the curious crowd.
Huangbaiyu is set to become an experiment in ecologically balanced living, and McDonough is the visionary behind it. He and a team of Chinese and Americans have been charged with turning the village into a model of environmentally sound living. The team has begun construction on the first two demonstration homes and expect to build about 50 more by November to house some of the town's 400 families. If all goes as planned, families will move into a town center, increasing the amount of land available for farming, rather than live scattered about as they are now.
It's a challenge, to say the least. McDonough's team can spend only $3,500 per house. To pull it off, they're using local labor and local materials, all of which will either biodegrade safely or be completely recyclable. To avoid the pollution that is released during the firing of bricks, the walls are made of pressed-earth blocks. Between the blocks is straw, a byproduct of the local rice harvest that would otherwise go to waste. Walls are a half-meter thick, so houses are well insulated and won't need a lot of heating. Solar panels on the rooftops provide electricity and heated water. "We're doing everything with nothing," McDonough says.
China has a lot riding on the Huangbaiyu experiment—and so does the rest of the world. Beijing is now orchestrating an industrial revolution, hoping to telescope into a few decades what it took Western countries a century or two to accomplish. The plan is to move 400 million people—about half the rural population—into urban centers by 2030. Doing so will require expanding towns into cities and even building new metropolises from scratch. That also means creating education, security and economic policies to help the masses adjust to the speedy transition from an agrarian to an urban society. How China manages this transformation will have a huge impact on the country's—indeed, the world's—environment, and its social stability. McDonough's projects in the village of Huangbaiyu and six major cities are China's biggest experiment in ecologically sound development. If all goes well, his brand of ecodesign could serve as a model for China's new urbanism. "China wasted 200 years already," says Nie Meisheng, president of the China Housing Industry Association. "We have to catch up."
It's too early, of course, to say whether the plan will succeed or fail. McDonough has completed designs for the six new districts in cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou plus the village, but he's so far built mainly parks, waterways and roads. The goal is to have the first of the city sites ready for habitation in a few years. Although his plan has won the support of China's leaders—President Hu Jintao likes to repeat phrases from the Chinese translation of McDonough's book, "Cradle to Cradle"—the project relies on funding that is being raised by local governments and is not assured. And McDonough must first overcome a thousand gritty realities of life in China that could sidetrack his vision.
It makes a certain sense that China is turning to McDonough for an urban design vision. He believes that industrial cities could be far more efficient than they are now if they were designed from the ground up with ecological principles in mind instead of taking shape piecemeal. This notion would be impractical in most countries but could work in China, where the government has the wherewithal to impose its plans on citizens.
Efficiency is also key to relieving one of China's biggest roadblocks to modernization—its demand for energy. The Chinese use three times more energy per square meter to heat and cool buildings than Europeans and Americans, according to professor Yuan Bin at Beijing's Tsinghua University school of architecture. China is already the second largest energy consumer in the world, after the United States. Although only 23 million Chinese own cars, China produces 16 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions and is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO2 within 30 years. If each person in China used as much energy as an average American, they would swallow up the world's entire current supply of petroleum. "China cannot consume energy like the U.S. because we have 1.3 billion people," says Yuan Bin.
If McDonough's method could be summed up in a phrase, it might be to leave nothing to chance. In each of the six cities, he is starting with a thorough examination of the land to be developed. He figures out how rainwater runs off and enters aquifers, how animals migrate, what plants grow where. He studies sunlight angles and wind patterns. Then he sketches in parks, which interconnect so citizens can walk or ride bicycles from one to the next and wildlife can carry on without disruption. Next comes the plan for the infrastructure, beginning with the angle of the streets. He slants them at a 15-degree angle to the winds in order to break up cold winter blasts and help keep city air clean. And orienting them on a diagonal rather than a rigid east-west grid also maximizes the sunlight that reaches apartments year-round. The cities are zoned for mixed residential, commercial and industrial use to ensure that transportation connects residences to the workplaces. Shops will be on the ground floor, residences above, and the rooftops will have farm plots. Bridges over the streets will connect the plots. The farmers will live downstairs.
Energy efficiency will be maximized through new types of building materials and a solar-powered energy grid. McDonough has begun by developing a polystyrene made by BASF without ozone-depleting chloro-fluorocarbons but with excellent insulating qualities. "Buildings can be heated and cooled for next to nothing," he says. "And they'll be silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them." He's also working on new toilet bowls that are so slippery you can flush them with a light mist. Bamboo wetlands nearby would purify the waste, and the bamboo could be harvested and used for wood.
McDonough would like to see China's cities powered chiefly by solar panels. China, he says, is uniquely qualified to get solar power off the ground by virtue of its scale. "We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs," he says. "Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them."
McDonough's ideas have worked well, albeit on a smaller scale, in the United States. He's designed green developments for communities and corporations, including the Gap and Ford. The headquarters for the clothing retailer the Gap in California has a roof with vegetation on it, a raised floor for better heating and cooling, and makes good use of daylight. The building exceeds California's energy requirements by 30 percent; Pacific Gas and Electric named it the second most energy-efficient building in the state.
In China, McDonough's plans for all six city districts have passed the government's standards test; three have gotten the green light. In Zhejiang province, the group has integrated the city of Ningbo's water system, creating wetlands that help conserve rainwater and protect animal and plant life. In Jinan, McDonough and his team are trying to clean up land contaminated by toxins from a steel plant. Outside Chengdu, in Sichuan province, they're trying to preserve an ancient landscape with old trees that would otherwise be leveled to make room for buildings and roads. "We're just at the beginning," McDonough said. "If you really want to see something, give us a few years."
Many prominent companies have gotten involved. Vermeer Manufacturing Co. of Iowa contributed an earth-block press for Huangbaiyu. Hewlett-Packard is donating computers for the schools. BP has given solar collectors. Intel is sponsoring an American anthropology Ph.D. student, Shannon May, to live in the model village for 14 months. May will study local habits and report back to Intel so it can figure out how to design products for rural Chinese. She'll also work on her dissertation, which will explore "the dissonances between what the Americans hope to accomplish here and what actually happens on the ground." The whole world will be eager to see the results.
Read article at the original source
Friday, June 24, 2005
Realism and Responsibility
Realism and Responsibility
"Realism and Responsibility
Listen to some of the new wise men of Africa. They insist that unless Africans get their own house in order, aid will not fix anything.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, June 20, 2005
... it is American (and European) policy to deny Africa access to our markets. We subsidize a few hundred of the richest agricultural companies in the world, and prevent tens of millions of the world's poorest people from participating in free trade and capitalism. It is estimated that if Africa gained 1 percent more of the world's share of exports, it would be worth five times the total amount of foreign aid it receives. So America is correct: good government policies are key—but in this crucial case, it's our policies that need improving."
Read the entire article
"Realism and Responsibility
Listen to some of the new wise men of Africa. They insist that unless Africans get their own house in order, aid will not fix anything.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, June 20, 2005
... it is American (and European) policy to deny Africa access to our markets. We subsidize a few hundred of the richest agricultural companies in the world, and prevent tens of millions of the world's poorest people from participating in free trade and capitalism. It is estimated that if Africa gained 1 percent more of the world's share of exports, it would be worth five times the total amount of foreign aid it receives. So America is correct: good government policies are key—but in this crucial case, it's our policies that need improving."
Read the entire article
Governments have long been creating comparative advantages for their own economies
Why Asia Will Eat Our Lunch
"Businessweek, Book Review, June 20, 2005
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, are all too rational
By Clyde Prestowitz
Prestowitz has been mulling over America's competitiveness problems for 30 years, most recently as head of his own think tank -- the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington. Before that he was an international executive for U.S. multinationals, a trade negotiator in the Reagan Administration, and author of a ground-breaking, although ultimately alarmist, 1988 book about U.S.-Japan relations, Trading Places. Prestowitz writes with clarity, historical perspective, and an uncommon ability to extricate himself from the intellectual straitjackets that hobble so many Washington economic policymakers. Free trader or protectionist? Democrat or Republican? Keynesian or supply-sider? He doesn't fit in any of those boxes.
Governments have long been creating comparative advantages for their own economies, Prestowitz notes, but U.S. policymakers have apparently forgotten this. Despite today's fashionable disdain for industrial policy, Washington was once an active participant in boosting the gross domestic product. The federal government created Radio Corporation of America and established U.S. dominance in radio technology, launched Boeing (BA ) and nurtured it with government contracts, and created AT&T (T ) and its genius pool at Bell Laboratories (B ), cradle of microelectronics. Then there's the Internet. 'The apparently effortless technological supremacy Americans assume as a birthright...had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with targeted policy decisions,' Prestowitz notes.
Prestowitz also challenges one of the most popular and soothing myths in Washington -- that U.S. workers can compete with any in the world if given 'a level playing field.' The truth: Western workers won't be able to compete without accepting wage cuts, since, in the area of labor costs, China enjoys a "fifteen to thirtyfold advantage" over the developed world.
China and India, which together accounted for 75% of the world's GDP before the discovery of America, are on a steep trajectory to regain their prominence. 'The potential size of their markets, their endless supply of low-cost labor, the unique combination of many highly skilled but low-paid professionals, and the investment incentives offered by their governments will constitute an irresistible package' that will soak up global investment.
There is reason for hope, Prestowitz allows. America's technology is often the best, as are its universities. The U.S. leads in biotech, and it retains an entrepreneurial culture. That said, Prestowitz still could be too pessimistic. As with Trading Places, he tends to project current trends far into the unknowable future.
But the U.S. government is dangerously shortsighted. The country's savings rate, secondary-education system, energy and water conservation, critical infrastructure, research investment, and worker training lag behind those in too many other nations."
Read the entire review
"Businessweek, Book Review, June 20, 2005
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, are all too rational
By Clyde Prestowitz
Prestowitz has been mulling over America's competitiveness problems for 30 years, most recently as head of his own think tank -- the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington. Before that he was an international executive for U.S. multinationals, a trade negotiator in the Reagan Administration, and author of a ground-breaking, although ultimately alarmist, 1988 book about U.S.-Japan relations, Trading Places. Prestowitz writes with clarity, historical perspective, and an uncommon ability to extricate himself from the intellectual straitjackets that hobble so many Washington economic policymakers. Free trader or protectionist? Democrat or Republican? Keynesian or supply-sider? He doesn't fit in any of those boxes.
Governments have long been creating comparative advantages for their own economies, Prestowitz notes, but U.S. policymakers have apparently forgotten this. Despite today's fashionable disdain for industrial policy, Washington was once an active participant in boosting the gross domestic product. The federal government created Radio Corporation of America and established U.S. dominance in radio technology, launched Boeing (BA ) and nurtured it with government contracts, and created AT&T (T ) and its genius pool at Bell Laboratories (B ), cradle of microelectronics. Then there's the Internet. 'The apparently effortless technological supremacy Americans assume as a birthright...had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with targeted policy decisions,' Prestowitz notes.
Prestowitz also challenges one of the most popular and soothing myths in Washington -- that U.S. workers can compete with any in the world if given 'a level playing field.' The truth: Western workers won't be able to compete without accepting wage cuts, since, in the area of labor costs, China enjoys a "fifteen to thirtyfold advantage" over the developed world.
China and India, which together accounted for 75% of the world's GDP before the discovery of America, are on a steep trajectory to regain their prominence. 'The potential size of their markets, their endless supply of low-cost labor, the unique combination of many highly skilled but low-paid professionals, and the investment incentives offered by their governments will constitute an irresistible package' that will soak up global investment.
There is reason for hope, Prestowitz allows. America's technology is often the best, as are its universities. The U.S. leads in biotech, and it retains an entrepreneurial culture. That said, Prestowitz still could be too pessimistic. As with Trading Places, he tends to project current trends far into the unknowable future.
But the U.S. government is dangerously shortsighted. The country's savings rate, secondary-education system, energy and water conservation, critical infrastructure, research investment, and worker training lag behind those in too many other nations."
Read the entire review
Can China Go Green?
Can China Go Green?
"CAN CHINA GO GREEN?
Fortune, June 27, 2005
When China's ministry of Science and Technology decided to build a new headquarters in Beijing, the government sought help from an unlikely partner - the Natural Resources Defense Council, best known for litigating and lobbying for stricter environmental rules in the U.S. The resulting green building uses the best available technology to save energy and water; since it opened last year, it has been toured by 2,000 local officials, designers, and architects. 'In terms of environmental innovation, China's going to kick our ass within a decade unless we wake up,' says Rob Watson, a senior scientist with the NRDC who works on China projects.
At least on paper, China is matching, if not exceeding, environmental standards set in the West. To curb its dependence on imported oil, China has adopted fuel-economy rules for automobiles that are more stringent than those in the U.S. or Europe. That is putting pressure on GM and Volkswagen, the leading foreign carmakers in China, to find ways to profit from selling small, fuel-efficient vehicles. The Chinese government is also investing in fuel-cell technologies for motor scooters, cars, and buses, hoping to invent an entirely new kind of auto industry. 'They've set the policy stage for innovation,' says Watson.
Desperation is driving the initiatives: Like so much in China, the scale of environmental problems is mind-boggling. China is home to five of the world's ten most polluted cities in terms of air quality. It burns dirty coal in more than 2,000 plants, generating clouds bearing mercury, soot, and sulfur dioxide that have been tracked all the way to the Oregon coast. China's industry is wasteful, requiring three to ten times more energy than industry in the U.S., Western Europe, or Japan to produce a dollar of economic output. Water is in short supply and deserts are expanding rapidly, according to Elizabeth Economy, the author of The River Runs Black, a book about China's environmental crisis.
Global companies are poised to capitalize. Immelt says that GE's investments in clean coal technology, wind power, nuclear energy, and fuel cells are being made with China in mind. "While Europe has been a driver for innovation in cleaner technologies, China promises to be its market," he says.
Because China relies so heavily on coal, for instance, it is likely to become the biggest buyer of a cleaner coal technology called IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle, if you must know) that converts coal to natural gas, which generates fewer pollutants. The technology can be combined with a process in which carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, can be captured and buried deep in the earth. David Hawkins, an expert on climate change with the NRDC who has consulted in China, says, "I think we'll see the technology move forward there faster, conceivably, than in the U.S."
Bill McDonough, the architect and industrial designer, predicts that China will become a seedbed for environmental innovation. "The Chinese are very practical," he says. "They are asking what mistakes have been made in the rest of the world and how they can avoid them." McDonough, who is chairman of a nonprofit called the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, says new building materials will be developed for China—he is working with the chemical industry giant BASF to develop a strong, lightweight, insulating poly- styrene to replace brick—as armies of Chinese people move to the cities. He foresees solar-power farms on a vast scale. "China is the place where the costs of solar collectors will drop once they go into mass production," he says. "It's a massive gift that China will give to the world."
Read the entire article
"CAN CHINA GO GREEN?
Fortune, June 27, 2005
When China's ministry of Science and Technology decided to build a new headquarters in Beijing, the government sought help from an unlikely partner - the Natural Resources Defense Council, best known for litigating and lobbying for stricter environmental rules in the U.S. The resulting green building uses the best available technology to save energy and water; since it opened last year, it has been toured by 2,000 local officials, designers, and architects. 'In terms of environmental innovation, China's going to kick our ass within a decade unless we wake up,' says Rob Watson, a senior scientist with the NRDC who works on China projects.
At least on paper, China is matching, if not exceeding, environmental standards set in the West. To curb its dependence on imported oil, China has adopted fuel-economy rules for automobiles that are more stringent than those in the U.S. or Europe. That is putting pressure on GM and Volkswagen, the leading foreign carmakers in China, to find ways to profit from selling small, fuel-efficient vehicles. The Chinese government is also investing in fuel-cell technologies for motor scooters, cars, and buses, hoping to invent an entirely new kind of auto industry. 'They've set the policy stage for innovation,' says Watson.
Desperation is driving the initiatives: Like so much in China, the scale of environmental problems is mind-boggling. China is home to five of the world's ten most polluted cities in terms of air quality. It burns dirty coal in more than 2,000 plants, generating clouds bearing mercury, soot, and sulfur dioxide that have been tracked all the way to the Oregon coast. China's industry is wasteful, requiring three to ten times more energy than industry in the U.S., Western Europe, or Japan to produce a dollar of economic output. Water is in short supply and deserts are expanding rapidly, according to Elizabeth Economy, the author of The River Runs Black, a book about China's environmental crisis.
Global companies are poised to capitalize. Immelt says that GE's investments in clean coal technology, wind power, nuclear energy, and fuel cells are being made with China in mind. "While Europe has been a driver for innovation in cleaner technologies, China promises to be its market," he says.
Because China relies so heavily on coal, for instance, it is likely to become the biggest buyer of a cleaner coal technology called IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle, if you must know) that converts coal to natural gas, which generates fewer pollutants. The technology can be combined with a process in which carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, can be captured and buried deep in the earth. David Hawkins, an expert on climate change with the NRDC who has consulted in China, says, "I think we'll see the technology move forward there faster, conceivably, than in the U.S."
Bill McDonough, the architect and industrial designer, predicts that China will become a seedbed for environmental innovation. "The Chinese are very practical," he says. "They are asking what mistakes have been made in the rest of the world and how they can avoid them." McDonough, who is chairman of a nonprofit called the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, says new building materials will be developed for China—he is working with the chemical industry giant BASF to develop a strong, lightweight, insulating poly- styrene to replace brick—as armies of Chinese people move to the cities. He foresees solar-power farms on a vast scale. "China is the place where the costs of solar collectors will drop once they go into mass production," he says. "It's a massive gift that China will give to the world."
Read the entire article
Saturday, May 21, 2005
William McDonough - Designing the Future
William McDonough - Designing the Future
Designing the Future
NEWSWEEK talks to a leading ecological architect whose goal is nothing less than eliminating waste and pollution.
Newsweek, May 16, 2005
"Imagine buildings that generate more energy than they consume and factories whose waste water is clean enough to drink. William McDonough has accomplished these tasks and more. Architect, industrial designer and founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry in Charlottesville, Va., he's not your traditional environmentalist. Others may expend their energy fighting for stricter environmental regulations and repeating the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle." McDonough's vision for the future includes factories so safe they need no regulation, and novel, safe materials that can be totally reprocessed into new goods, so there's no reason to scale back consumption (or lose jobs). In short, he wants to overhaul the Industrial Revolution—which would sound crazy if he weren't working with Fortune 500 companies and the government of China to make it happen. The recipient of two U.S. presidential honors and the National Design Award, McDonough is the former dean of architecture at the University of Virginia and co-chair of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. He spoke in New York recently with NEWSWEEK's Anne Underwood.
UNDERWOOD: Why do we need a new industrial revolution?
MCDONOUGH: The Industrial Revolution as a whole was not designed. It took shape gradually as industrialists and engineers figured out how to make things. The result is that we put billions of pounds of toxic materials in the air, water and soil every year and generate gigantic amounts of waste. If our goal is to destroy the world—to produce global warming and toxicity and endocrine disruption—we're doing great. But if the goal isn't global warming, what is? I want to crank the wheel of industry in a different direction to produce a world of abundance and good design—a delightful, safe world that our children can play in.
You say that recycling, as it's currently practiced, is "downcycling."
What we call recycling is typically the product losing its quality. Paper gets mixed with other papers, re-chlorinated and contaminated with toxic inks. The fiber length gets shorter, allowing more particles to abrade into the air, where they get into your lungs and nasal passages, and cause irritation. And you end up with gray, fuzzy stuff that doesn't really work for you. That's downcycling.
[My mentor and colleague] Michael Braungart and I coined the term upcycling, meaning that the product could actually get better as it comes through the system. For example, some plastic bottles contain the resi-dues of heavy-metal catalysts. We can remove those residues as the bottles come back to be upcycled.
Not all products lend themselves to that.
Most manufacturers take resources out of the ground and convert them to products that are designed to be thrown away or incinerated within months. We call these "cradle to grave" product flows. Our answer to that is "cradle to cradle" design. Everything is reused—either returned to the soil as nontoxic "biological nutrients" that will biodegrade safely, or returned to industry as "technical nutrients" that can be infinitely recycled. Aluminum is a technical nutrient. It takes tremendous energy to make, but it's easy to recapture and reuse. Since 1880, the human species has made 660 million tons of it. We still know where 440 million tons are today.
Are there products already that meet cradle-to-cradle goals? If so, how do we find them?
Within the month, we will be branding cradle to cradle. Products that meet our criteria for biological and technical nutrients can be certified to use our logo. A note on the packaging will tell you how to recycle it. You'll know: this one goes into my tomato plot when I'm finished or this one goes back to industry forever. We have already approved a nylon, some polyester textiles, running tracks, window shades, chairs from Herman Miller and Steelcase, and carpets from Shaw, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway. The first was a Steelcase fabric that can go back to the soil. We're now working on electronics on a global scale.
How do paper products like magazines fit into this picture?
Why take something as exquisite as a tree and knock it down? Trees make oxygen, sequester carbon, distill water, build soils, convert solar energy to fuel, change colors with the seasons, create microclimates and provide habitat.
My book "Cradle to Cradle," which I wrote with Michael Braungart, is printed on pages made of plastic resins and inorganic fillers that are infinitely recyclable. They're too heavy, but we're working with companies now to develop lightweight plastic papers. We have safe, lightweight inks designed to float off the paper in a bath of 180 degrees—hotter than you would encounter under normal circumstances. We can recapture the inks and reuse them without adding chlorine and dioxins to the environment. And the pages are clean, smooth and white.
So we can keep our trees and have newspapers, too.
Most environmentalists feel guilty about how society behaves, so they say we should make longer-lasting products—for example, a car that lasts 25 years. That car will still use compound epoxies and toxic adhesives, but the ecological footprint is reduced because you've amortized it over a longer time. But what's the result? You lose jobs because people aren't buying as much, and you're using the wrong technology longer. I want five-year cars. Then you can always be getting the newest car—more solar-powered, cleaner, with the newest air bags and safety features. The old car gets upcycled into new cars, so there are still plenty of jobs. And you don't feel guilty about throwing the old one away. People want new technology. You're not typing on an Underwood, if you know what I mean.
So growth is good?
Yes, if you use nature as a model and mentor, if you use modern designs and chemicals that are safe. Growth is destructive if you use energy not from the sun and a system of chemicals that is toxic, so it's anti-life.
Given that industry today fits your definition of anti-life, why aren't you fighting for stricter environmental regulations?
If coal plants release mercury—and mercury is a neurotoxin that damages children's brains—then reducing the amount of mercury in emissions doesn't stop that. It just says, "We'll tell you at what rate you can dispense death." Being less bad is not being good. Our idea is to make production so clean, there's nothing bad left to regulate. This is extremely interesting to people of all political persuasions—those who love the environment and those who want commerce free of regulation.
Can you really have industry so clean it requires no controls?
[At the Rohner textile plant in Switzerland] we designed a fabric safe enough to eat. The manufacturing process uses no mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, heavy-metal contaminants or chemicals that cause ozone depletion, allergies, skin desensitization or plant and fish toxicity. We screened 8,000 commonly used chemicals and ended up with 38. When inspectors measured the effluent water, they thought their instruments were broken. The water was as clean as Swiss drinking water. A garden club started using the waste trimmings as mulch. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And it eliminated regulatory paperwork, so they've reduced the cost of production by 20 percent. Why spend money on paperwork, when you can spend it delivering service or paying your workers a living wage?
Where would I find this fabric?
It was selected for upholstery on the new Airbus 380. It's made of worsted wool to keep you at the right temperature—cool when it's hot and warm when it's cold—and [a plant fiber called] ramie to wick away moisture. It's a high-performance-design product. Going ecological doesn't mean downgrading performance criteria.
How do you get more industries to adopt these ideals?
Industries don't change unless they have to or there's some commercial benefit. At Herman Miller [the furniture company], we designed a factory full of daylight and fresh air. Productivity soared. And because of all the natural light, they cut lighting costs by 50 percent—overall energy by 30 percent. We've been doing this a long time. But now that China has taken it up, it portends exciting things.
What are you doing in China?
The China Housing Industry Association has the responsibility for building housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. We're working with them to design seven new cities. We're identifying building materials of the future, such as a new polystyrene from BASF [with no noxious chemicals]. It can be used to build walls that are strong, lightweight and superinsulating. The building can be heated and cooled for next to nothing. And it's silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them.
We've designed a luxurious new toilet. The bowl is like a lotus leaf—so smooth, axle grease slips right off. Nothing sticks to it, including bacteria. A light mist when you're done will be enough to flush it, so you won't use lots of water. We'll have bamboo wetlands nearby to purify the waste—and the bamboo, which grows a foot a day, can be harvested and used for wood.
The Chinese are afraid urbanization will reduce productive farmland, so we'll move farms onto rooftops. At least, that's what I'm proposing. The farmers can live downstairs. And when you look at the city from a distance, it will look like part of the landscape.
Is it practical to put farms on roofs?
Traditional roofs aren't practical. They degrade from thermal shock and ultraviolet radiation and have to be replaced in 20 years. For the Gap's corporate campus in San Bruno, Calif., we planted a "green roof" of ancient grasses. The roof now damps the sounds of jets from the San Francisco airport. It absorbs storm water, which is important because they have serious issues with storm water there. It makes oxygen, provides habitat, and it's beautiful. We also made a green roof for Ford Motor Co.'s River Rouge plant. It saved Ford millions of dollars in storm-water equipment.
How will you fuel the Chinese cities?
I want to see solar power cheaper than coal, but to get the speed and scale to do that fast, you need a place like China. We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs. Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them. We could import these panels, and for every job the Chinese give themselves, we get four. What a gift. And I guarantee you, China will never be able to capture an American photon. We would have indigenous energy and energy security. And we wouldn't be throwing our money into holes in the ground.
And we wouldn't need nuclear energy.
I love nuclear energy. I just want to make sure it stays where God put it—93 million miles away, in the sun.
Your ideas are really catching on.
It's an amazing moment in history. We also have two huge new projects in England—working with the cities of Greenwich and Wembley. The developer, Adrian Wyatt, has asked us to conceive the meta-framework for the project.
We won't get everything right the first time. Change requires experimentation. But no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. Our job is to dream—and to make those dreams happen."
Read the interview at the original source
Designing the Future
NEWSWEEK talks to a leading ecological architect whose goal is nothing less than eliminating waste and pollution.
Newsweek, May 16, 2005
"Imagine buildings that generate more energy than they consume and factories whose waste water is clean enough to drink. William McDonough has accomplished these tasks and more. Architect, industrial designer and founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry in Charlottesville, Va., he's not your traditional environmentalist. Others may expend their energy fighting for stricter environmental regulations and repeating the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle." McDonough's vision for the future includes factories so safe they need no regulation, and novel, safe materials that can be totally reprocessed into new goods, so there's no reason to scale back consumption (or lose jobs). In short, he wants to overhaul the Industrial Revolution—which would sound crazy if he weren't working with Fortune 500 companies and the government of China to make it happen. The recipient of two U.S. presidential honors and the National Design Award, McDonough is the former dean of architecture at the University of Virginia and co-chair of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. He spoke in New York recently with NEWSWEEK's Anne Underwood.
UNDERWOOD: Why do we need a new industrial revolution?
MCDONOUGH: The Industrial Revolution as a whole was not designed. It took shape gradually as industrialists and engineers figured out how to make things. The result is that we put billions of pounds of toxic materials in the air, water and soil every year and generate gigantic amounts of waste. If our goal is to destroy the world—to produce global warming and toxicity and endocrine disruption—we're doing great. But if the goal isn't global warming, what is? I want to crank the wheel of industry in a different direction to produce a world of abundance and good design—a delightful, safe world that our children can play in.
You say that recycling, as it's currently practiced, is "downcycling."
What we call recycling is typically the product losing its quality. Paper gets mixed with other papers, re-chlorinated and contaminated with toxic inks. The fiber length gets shorter, allowing more particles to abrade into the air, where they get into your lungs and nasal passages, and cause irritation. And you end up with gray, fuzzy stuff that doesn't really work for you. That's downcycling.
[My mentor and colleague] Michael Braungart and I coined the term upcycling, meaning that the product could actually get better as it comes through the system. For example, some plastic bottles contain the resi-dues of heavy-metal catalysts. We can remove those residues as the bottles come back to be upcycled.
Not all products lend themselves to that.
Most manufacturers take resources out of the ground and convert them to products that are designed to be thrown away or incinerated within months. We call these "cradle to grave" product flows. Our answer to that is "cradle to cradle" design. Everything is reused—either returned to the soil as nontoxic "biological nutrients" that will biodegrade safely, or returned to industry as "technical nutrients" that can be infinitely recycled. Aluminum is a technical nutrient. It takes tremendous energy to make, but it's easy to recapture and reuse. Since 1880, the human species has made 660 million tons of it. We still know where 440 million tons are today.
Are there products already that meet cradle-to-cradle goals? If so, how do we find them?
Within the month, we will be branding cradle to cradle. Products that meet our criteria for biological and technical nutrients can be certified to use our logo. A note on the packaging will tell you how to recycle it. You'll know: this one goes into my tomato plot when I'm finished or this one goes back to industry forever. We have already approved a nylon, some polyester textiles, running tracks, window shades, chairs from Herman Miller and Steelcase, and carpets from Shaw, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway. The first was a Steelcase fabric that can go back to the soil. We're now working on electronics on a global scale.
How do paper products like magazines fit into this picture?
Why take something as exquisite as a tree and knock it down? Trees make oxygen, sequester carbon, distill water, build soils, convert solar energy to fuel, change colors with the seasons, create microclimates and provide habitat.
My book "Cradle to Cradle," which I wrote with Michael Braungart, is printed on pages made of plastic resins and inorganic fillers that are infinitely recyclable. They're too heavy, but we're working with companies now to develop lightweight plastic papers. We have safe, lightweight inks designed to float off the paper in a bath of 180 degrees—hotter than you would encounter under normal circumstances. We can recapture the inks and reuse them without adding chlorine and dioxins to the environment. And the pages are clean, smooth and white.
So we can keep our trees and have newspapers, too.
Most environmentalists feel guilty about how society behaves, so they say we should make longer-lasting products—for example, a car that lasts 25 years. That car will still use compound epoxies and toxic adhesives, but the ecological footprint is reduced because you've amortized it over a longer time. But what's the result? You lose jobs because people aren't buying as much, and you're using the wrong technology longer. I want five-year cars. Then you can always be getting the newest car—more solar-powered, cleaner, with the newest air bags and safety features. The old car gets upcycled into new cars, so there are still plenty of jobs. And you don't feel guilty about throwing the old one away. People want new technology. You're not typing on an Underwood, if you know what I mean.
So growth is good?
Yes, if you use nature as a model and mentor, if you use modern designs and chemicals that are safe. Growth is destructive if you use energy not from the sun and a system of chemicals that is toxic, so it's anti-life.
Given that industry today fits your definition of anti-life, why aren't you fighting for stricter environmental regulations?
If coal plants release mercury—and mercury is a neurotoxin that damages children's brains—then reducing the amount of mercury in emissions doesn't stop that. It just says, "We'll tell you at what rate you can dispense death." Being less bad is not being good. Our idea is to make production so clean, there's nothing bad left to regulate. This is extremely interesting to people of all political persuasions—those who love the environment and those who want commerce free of regulation.
Can you really have industry so clean it requires no controls?
[At the Rohner textile plant in Switzerland] we designed a fabric safe enough to eat. The manufacturing process uses no mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, heavy-metal contaminants or chemicals that cause ozone depletion, allergies, skin desensitization or plant and fish toxicity. We screened 8,000 commonly used chemicals and ended up with 38. When inspectors measured the effluent water, they thought their instruments were broken. The water was as clean as Swiss drinking water. A garden club started using the waste trimmings as mulch. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And it eliminated regulatory paperwork, so they've reduced the cost of production by 20 percent. Why spend money on paperwork, when you can spend it delivering service or paying your workers a living wage?
Where would I find this fabric?
It was selected for upholstery on the new Airbus 380. It's made of worsted wool to keep you at the right temperature—cool when it's hot and warm when it's cold—and [a plant fiber called] ramie to wick away moisture. It's a high-performance-design product. Going ecological doesn't mean downgrading performance criteria.
How do you get more industries to adopt these ideals?
Industries don't change unless they have to or there's some commercial benefit. At Herman Miller [the furniture company], we designed a factory full of daylight and fresh air. Productivity soared. And because of all the natural light, they cut lighting costs by 50 percent—overall energy by 30 percent. We've been doing this a long time. But now that China has taken it up, it portends exciting things.
What are you doing in China?
The China Housing Industry Association has the responsibility for building housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. We're working with them to design seven new cities. We're identifying building materials of the future, such as a new polystyrene from BASF [with no noxious chemicals]. It can be used to build walls that are strong, lightweight and superinsulating. The building can be heated and cooled for next to nothing. And it's silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them.
We've designed a luxurious new toilet. The bowl is like a lotus leaf—so smooth, axle grease slips right off. Nothing sticks to it, including bacteria. A light mist when you're done will be enough to flush it, so you won't use lots of water. We'll have bamboo wetlands nearby to purify the waste—and the bamboo, which grows a foot a day, can be harvested and used for wood.
The Chinese are afraid urbanization will reduce productive farmland, so we'll move farms onto rooftops. At least, that's what I'm proposing. The farmers can live downstairs. And when you look at the city from a distance, it will look like part of the landscape.
Is it practical to put farms on roofs?
Traditional roofs aren't practical. They degrade from thermal shock and ultraviolet radiation and have to be replaced in 20 years. For the Gap's corporate campus in San Bruno, Calif., we planted a "green roof" of ancient grasses. The roof now damps the sounds of jets from the San Francisco airport. It absorbs storm water, which is important because they have serious issues with storm water there. It makes oxygen, provides habitat, and it's beautiful. We also made a green roof for Ford Motor Co.'s River Rouge plant. It saved Ford millions of dollars in storm-water equipment.
How will you fuel the Chinese cities?
I want to see solar power cheaper than coal, but to get the speed and scale to do that fast, you need a place like China. We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs. Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them. We could import these panels, and for every job the Chinese give themselves, we get four. What a gift. And I guarantee you, China will never be able to capture an American photon. We would have indigenous energy and energy security. And we wouldn't be throwing our money into holes in the ground.
And we wouldn't need nuclear energy.
I love nuclear energy. I just want to make sure it stays where God put it—93 million miles away, in the sun.
Your ideas are really catching on.
It's an amazing moment in history. We also have two huge new projects in England—working with the cities of Greenwich and Wembley. The developer, Adrian Wyatt, has asked us to conceive the meta-framework for the project.
We won't get everything right the first time. Change requires experimentation. But no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. Our job is to dream—and to make those dreams happen."
Read the interview at the original source
Friday, May 13, 2005
Attention: Deficit Disorder
Attention: Deficit Disorder
Attention: Deficit Disorder
By ROBERT E. RUBIN, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, May 13, 2005
"THE United States has tremendous economic strengths but it also faces great challenges: the need to ensure national security; a newly competitive China and India; serious shortcomings in public education, basic research, infrastructure and other requisites for meeting that competition; and much else. An immediate and critical imperative is to redress fiscal imbalances.
Most pressing is the 10-year federal deficit, which most independent analysts project at $4.5 trillion to $5 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 are made permanent and that the alternative minimum tax is adjusted to avoid unintended effects on middle-income taxpayers. And while 10-year numbers can be highly unreliable, deficits are as likely to be higher as to be lower. Over the longer term, Social Security has a 75-year estimated deficit of $4 trillion, while the different components of Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, represent a fiscal problem of roughly $20 trillion.
Virtually all mainstream economists agree that, over time, sustained deficits crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, and reduce productivity and economic growth. But, far more dangerously, if markets here and abroad begin to fear long-term fiscal disarray and our related trade imbalances, those markets could then demand sharply higher interest rates for providing long-term debt capital and could put abrupt and sharp downward pressure on the dollar. These market effects, plus the adverse impact of continuing fiscal imbalances on business and consumer confidence, could seriously undermine our economy.
We have managed to avoid these market effects so far because private demand for capital has been relatively limited, and because the central banks of Japan, China and other countries have provided large inflows of foreign capital. A change in either of those circumstances, or simply a change of market psychology for whatever reason, could, however, turn these interest rate and currency risks into a reality."
Read the entire article
Attention: Deficit Disorder
By ROBERT E. RUBIN, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, May 13, 2005
"THE United States has tremendous economic strengths but it also faces great challenges: the need to ensure national security; a newly competitive China and India; serious shortcomings in public education, basic research, infrastructure and other requisites for meeting that competition; and much else. An immediate and critical imperative is to redress fiscal imbalances.
Most pressing is the 10-year federal deficit, which most independent analysts project at $4.5 trillion to $5 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 are made permanent and that the alternative minimum tax is adjusted to avoid unintended effects on middle-income taxpayers. And while 10-year numbers can be highly unreliable, deficits are as likely to be higher as to be lower. Over the longer term, Social Security has a 75-year estimated deficit of $4 trillion, while the different components of Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, represent a fiscal problem of roughly $20 trillion.
Virtually all mainstream economists agree that, over time, sustained deficits crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, and reduce productivity and economic growth. But, far more dangerously, if markets here and abroad begin to fear long-term fiscal disarray and our related trade imbalances, those markets could then demand sharply higher interest rates for providing long-term debt capital and could put abrupt and sharp downward pressure on the dollar. These market effects, plus the adverse impact of continuing fiscal imbalances on business and consumer confidence, could seriously undermine our economy.
We have managed to avoid these market effects so far because private demand for capital has been relatively limited, and because the central banks of Japan, China and other countries have provided large inflows of foreign capital. A change in either of those circumstances, or simply a change of market psychology for whatever reason, could, however, turn these interest rate and currency risks into a reality."
Read the entire article
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