We need a new design guideline.
So some of us invented one.
We call it Natural Capitalism.
You can call it sustainability.
I think it's got three basic principles, which
are, first of all, use everything taken from
the earth or borrowed from the future dramatically
more productively.
This solves most of the environmental problems
facing us, some of the social ones, and buys
time, perhaps, the most important.
But it's only the first step.
It then leads us to asking how are we going
to redesign everything?
And ultimately to how are we going to manage
all of our institutions so that they are restorative
of human and natural capital, the forms of
capital that are in short supply?
There's a long way to go.
We now waste at least $300 billion a year
buying and burning energy we don't need to
deliver the services we do want.
I'm not talking about conservation.
I'm not talking about curtailment.
That may be a good thing, and in dealing with
climate change, it may come to that.
But for the moment, let's just talk about
technical efficiency.
After the last run up in oil prices, we cut
oil use in this country 15% at the same time
that we grew the economy 16% just through
vehicle efficiency standards.
We can do that again.
And we better, because a typical community
is bleeding to death trying to buy energy
from outside.
Spending 20% of its gross income, 80% of those
dollars are gone.
We're like somebody who's trying to take a
bath and the hot water keeps running out,
so various people tell us we need a bigger
water heater, whether it be a nuclear one
or a solar one.
No we don't.
We need a plug.
And this man invented one.
And my computer is-- there we go.
His name is Wes Birdsall, general manager
of the Osage Iowa Municipal Utility.
Now Osage Iowa is hardly the hotbed of industrial
innovation in the United States, but he did
an interesting thing.
He stepped across the meter to his customers
side to say I'm going to help you use less
of my product.
Odd thing for a business person to do.
He recognized that you don't want kilowatt
hours.
You wouldn't know what to do with one if it
walked up and bit you.
What you want are the services that energy
delivers, cold beer, hot showers, industrial
shaft power.
If he can get you those services cheaper through
efficiency than through any kind of new supply,
in his case a coal plant, that's the business
to be in.
He cut energy use-- or he cut-- saved $1 million
a year in the small rural community, cut energy
bills to half that of the state average, unemployment
to half that of the national average, because
with the lower rates more factories came to
town.
So then he had to go back and do more efficiency.
This is something we need to believe is possible.
We can save 3/4 of the energy we now use cost
effective against today's prices.
Most of us spend most of our time inside of
things like this.
And we know how to make any existing building
three to four-fold more efficient, new ones
10 times as efficient.
Listen.
That's waste.
When you hear a building hum, those of dollars
leaving.
And that waste costs.
It uses a lot of energy, more than half the
electricity, responsible for a lot of the
greenhouse gas emissions, a lot of materials
used.
And it delivers us a lousy quality of life.
The companies that are trying to deal with
what you do inside a building, if I told you
I was going to take your children and systematically
poison them for their entire academic career,
you'd string me up.
But that's what we do when we use toxic cleaning
materials inside of buildings.
So this little company out of Chicago has--
is working to get its products Green Seal
certified.
That's enabling them to win contracts by packaging
them in little portion control packets.
You're not shipping all that water around,
and by color coding it, you enable people
for whom English is not a first language to
know which chemical goes into which container
for which purpose.
We know that if you have good green buildings,
clean air, day lighting, you're going to get
higher test scores.
There's a reason Walmart's going green.
They ran an inadvertent experiment.
They built half a green building.
Cash registers in Walmart's are hardwired
to Bentonville.
They know what each cash register is selling.
The green side had 40% higher retail sales.
Boeing did a lighting retrofit, saved a lot
of money.
It enabled the workers to see better and cut
their error rate 30%.
For those of us who fly around on airplanes,
this is very good news.
Lockheed did a building that was designed
around good day lighting.
Saved a lot of energy, which had a nice payback.
But it reduced absenteeism 15% and increased
labor productivity 15%.
That enabled the company to win a contract,
the profit of which paid for the building.
What you spend on people is dramatically higher
than anything that you spend on energy or
other inputs to the building, but it's how
you deal with that energy use in a building
that enables you to get the increase in labor
productivity.
We know what it takes.
Being able to see what you're doing, being
able to have natural light, control your own
space, hear yourself think, and breathe decent
air is not all that-- it's not rocket science.
It's economics science.
This article just out from Harvard Business
Review that owners of standard buildings face
massive obsolescence, that they are reviewing
their portfolios to see how green their buildings
are and what they need to do to meet the growing
market demand.
