During my quest to understand where all this is headed, I ran across Natural Capitalism which is essentially a manifesto for the new green economy. I will not endorse the entire book until I’ve read it in its entirety, but the first couple chapters have me intrigued. Clearly, others have thought about how capitalism - and all of the positive energy that it unleashes - can co-exist with a healthy respect for our environment.
Similar to my thoughts on the less is more economy, the authors of Natural Capitalism discuss how “resource productivity” will be the force that drives the next industrial revolution. Whereas human productivity (making the same amount of things with fewer people) was the primary source of progress thus far, the new economy will be driven by our ability to do more with the same amount of raw inputs. In other words, in the new economy we will be able to do more with less - make more, faster, better, safer products with the finite resources available to us.
They support this line of thinking with some interesting facts, namely the almost disgusting level of waste/inefficiency in the current economy. The evidence is everywhere (the U.S. economy actually utilizes something like 37% of the energy that is produced…the rest is wasted at various points of storage, distribution, etc…). A factoid from the book that I found interesting is that in the U.S. economy, the weight of all materials used to produce the goods that the average American consumes in 1 year is 2 million pounds! I’m not sure how much weight I actually consume, but it’s certainly not 2 million pounds…making the rest waste.
There is more to the story, and I intend to uncover it and share the key points on this blog. In the meantime, take a look around you and become more aware of the waste that you produce even at a personal level. Many new opportunities will come to those who help make our use of resources more efficient.
