Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
is sending about 20 kilowatts of premium power back to the grid at the
daytime price, which is pretty good.That will earn you enough money to
pay for half the cost of leasing the car.
It does not take many people doing this to put any remaining coal and
nuclear plants out of business, because the Hypercar fleet will ultimately
have about 5 times the generating capacity of the national grid.You start to
see why I think oil is likely to become non-competitive even at low prices
before it becomes unavailable even at high prices.There are, of course, a lot
of specific obstacles that get in the way of doing this sort of thing.You will
find a lot of them classified in showing how to turn each one into a busi-
ness opportunity in a paper Hunter and I wrote in 1998 titled “Climate:
Making Sense
and
Making Money.”
I think it is worth concluding on a slightly different note of where
resource efficiency fits. Hunter and I have written a book with business
author Paul Hawkin, titled
Natural Capitalism,
which, I think, provides the
context we have been seeking for what resource efficiency is about and
why are we doing it. It isn't just to prevent pollution somewhere or save a
resource somewhere. It is part of a much deeper historical process. You
could say that what we have now is unnatural capitalism. It is a temporary
aberration, not because it's capitalist, but because it defies its own logic by
liquidating without valuing the largest source of capital, namely, the natural
capital that provides our ecosystem services, for which there is no known
substitute at any price, and the base of natural resources that the economy
consumes. Of course, capitalists have long valued physical and financial cap-
ital, but they have not, in general, valued human and natural capital, which
are much bigger, more valuable, more important, less substitutable.
What would happen if we had capitalism that actually valued all forms
of capital? It would look very different because it would be dealing with a
different pattern of scarcity. Economics tells you to economize on your
scarcest resource. If somebody had gone to Parliament in Britain in 1750
and said, we are going to make people more than 100 times as productive,
he would have been laughed out of the room. But that is exactly what we
did, and it made sense at the time, because at that time, people, and indeed
technology and capital, were relatively scarce. What was apparently abun-
dant were resources and places to put waste. So we made people more than
100 times as productive, and they were no longer the scarce resource.
Now we have abundant people and scarce nature. If you apply the same
impeccable economic logic to this new pattern of scarcity, then it makes
