Thomas Friedman wakes up every morning looking for a new reason to be hopeful about the course of human history. He is an optimist to the core. And because he knows so much about so many things, he will persuade you that there is hope, after all.
He was caught in a horrific traffic jam in Moscow a week or so ago and that got him to thinking about the future. There will be two billion more people on the earth by 2050 and, he observed, “they will all want to live and drive just as we do. And when they do, there is going to be a monster traffic jam and pollution cloud, unless we learn how to get more mobility, lighting, heating and cooling from less energy and less waste … (that will be) the next great global industry: energy and resource efficiency.”
Typical Friedman: he looks at a monster problem and sees a monster opportunity.
On this one, he had help from James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady. They wrote a book entitled, “The Sixth Wave: How to succeed in a Resource Limited World.”
They argue that since the industrial revolution, we’ve seen five long waves of innovation — from water power to steam to electrification to mass production and right up to information and communications technologies. They argue the sixth wave will be resource efficiency — because rising population with growing appetites will lead to both increasing scarcity of resources and dangerously high pollution, waste and climate change.
Moody writes these forces will require us to decouple consumption from economic growth. In the past, “the more we consumed, the more we grew,” he observed.
“There was, therefore, a tension between green and gold. But that cannot last. When you have a global market, with a burgeoning population, that faces rising scarcity of resources and so much waste exists in how we make and consume things, there is a great market opportunity for innovation.
“We’re going to go from green versus gold to green equals gold,” Moody predicts, “because the only way to grow without consuming more resources is through systematic breakthroughs in efficiency — developing new business models to deliver mobility, heating, cooling and lighting with dramatically fewer resources and pollution.”
Friedman then gives an example that energy expert Hal Harvey uses: “Consider a standard incandescent light bulb, powered by a coal-fired power plant. If the coal plant is 33 percent efficient — which is the U.S. average — and the light bulb is three percent efficient, then the net conversion of energy to light is just one percent. That is pathetic — and typical. A LED light, powered by an efficient natural gas turbine, converts 20 percent of the total energy to light — a 20-fold increase.” Run the power plant on renewables and its carbon-free to boot.
There is where Amory Lovins, the physicist who is chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, begins in his new book, “Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era.”
“The Institute and its business collaborators show how private enterprise — motivated by profit, supported by smart policy — can lead America off both oil and coal by 2050, saving $5 trillion, through innovation emphasizing design and strategy.
“You don’t have to believe in climate change to solve it,” says Lovins. “Everything we do to raise energy efficiency will make money, improve security and health and stabilize climate.”
ARE FRIEDMAN, Moody, Nogrady, Lovins and all of their co-believers on the right track? Almost certainly they are. The alternatives are ruinous — besides, there are piles of money to be made in making the use of energy more efficient, less wasteful. So why aren’t the candidates for president, President Obama or the Fighting Four, promising to launch just such an innovative crusade?
Easy question. The efficiency revolution these scientists and their publicists propose would shake up the world as we know it. Moving the U.S. away from oil and coal is not a goal that coal mine operators and the oil industries embrace. And they have tens of millions of dollars they are using to say so. Politics focuses on today and rewards those who have their hands on the levers of power right now. Elections are not won with an agenda that deals with the nine billion who will be here in 2050.
But, dear reader, 2050 really is not that far away. Today’s college freshman will still be in the prime of life; may just be getting to know her first grandchild when that fateful day dawns. It’s not at all too early to be thinking about the kind of world she will inherit. So, sign up on Friedman’s Optimist Squad. It’s a happier way to live.
