Ernst von Weizsaecker, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins - Factor 4 - Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use (Earthscan 1997)

This book is good news and should prevent pessimism.

In 1970 the report to the Club of Rome "The Limits to Growth" had a huge sale in every part of the world and helped spark off the green movements. Personally I felt encouraged by that book as I thought that having stated the serious problems facing the planet suitable action would be taken. Forty years on we can see that very little has happened. I am assured by professional economists that no action is needed as the markets will take care of all problems. They tell me that the Limits has been discredited because "we are not running out of resources as predicted". This seems a bit like the man who jumped off the Empire State building. As he passed a window half way down they asked him how he was doing. "All right so far". Is the Club of Rome, which persists in its studies, composed of naive leftwing fools, as those committed to unregulated business seem to imply? To the contrary, it seems to be an informal group of industrialists, scientists and philosophers from every continent who first met about 1968 to discuss their worries about the planet-wide problems that they believed were developing. A series of Reports have followed. This is the latest. Their general implication is that rising population, resource use and pollution will combine to produce a severe and complex problem sometime in the 21st century. This could take the form of a collapse in the numbers of people who can be supported by the planet.

The Lovins, husband and wife, are well known experts on energy use and live and grow bananas at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado on very little bought in energy and have lectured in numerous universities. Ernst von Weizsaecker has been Director of the Institute for European Environmental Politics and is President of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy in the North Rhine/Westphalian Science Centre.

Their case is that we could run our civilisation on much less energy and materials if we used better designed machinery. Their catchy title is that we could supply the needs of twice as many people with half the resource needs. This in itself would not solve the main problem but it could postpone the worst effects, giving us time to tackle the main problem, the number of humans.

One example is refrigerators. There already exist refrigerators, no more expensive to buy than those we use at present, which use .19 kilowatt hours per litre per year. This compares with the 1990 US average of 1.32. If all existing refrigerators were replaced by the most efficient types we could retire many existing power stations, because refrigeration takes about one sixth of domestic electricity. This saving comes about by using more efficient insulation and motors. Those governments which signed a commitment to reduce Carbon dioxide output could require that in future only the most efficient refrigerators be sold and could then achieve much of their commitments. Why don't they?

The book consists almost entirely of examples of this kind: Motor cars that could obtain huge reductions in fuel per mile; housing that could provide a comfortable ambiance for fractions of the energy commonly used at present; energy from solar and related sources that would produce neither carbon dioxide nor nuclear waste; agriculture that would neither need the high energy inputs nor produce the pollutants in the water supplies; public transport that would use a fraction of the energy and resources needed at present.

None of this is fantasy. These policies need only the political will to implement and would not cost people more than our present methods. (Of course the Free Market fanatics are busy assuring us that none of this needs doing as the Market will save us.)

Written using solar electricity for lighting.

(C) George Matthews 1997.