For decades, environmentalists have warned of a
coming climate crisis. Their alarms went unheeded, and last year we reaped an
early harvest: a singularly ferocious hurricane season, record snowfall in New
England, the worst-ever wildfires in Alaska, arctic glaciers at their lowest ebb
in millennia, catastrophic drought in Brazil, devastating floods in
India--portents of global warning’s destructive potential. 1 With climate change
hard upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that embraces
environmentalism’s concerns but rejects its worn-out answers. Technology can be
a font of endlessly creative solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change.
Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific exploration,
innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have.
Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can
propel the world into a bright green future. 2 Consider the unmitigated
ecological disaster that is the automobile. Every time you mm on the ignition,
you’re enmeshed in a system whose known outcomes include a polluted atmosphere,
oil-slicked seas, and desert wars. As comprehension of the stakes has grown,
though, a market has emerged for a more sensible alternative. Today you can
drive a Toyota Prius that burst far less gasoline than a conventional car.
Tomorrow we might see vehicles that consume no fossil fuels and emit no
greenhouse gases. Combine cars like that with smarter urban growth and we’re
well on our way to sustainable transportation. 3 Renewable energy is plentiful
energy. Burning fossil fuels is a filthy habit, and the supply won’t last
forever. Fortunately, a growing number of renewable alternatives promise clean,
inexhaustible power: wind turbines, solar arrays, wave-power flotillas,
small hydroelectric generators, geothermal systems, even bioengineered algae
that mm waste into hydrogen. The challenge is to scale up these technologies to
deliver power in industrial quantities--exactly the kind of challenge brilliant
businesspeople love. Efficiency creates value. The number one
US industrial product is waste. Waste is worse than stupid; it’s costly, which
is why we’re seeing businesspeople in every sector getting a jump on the
competition by consuming less water, power, and materials. What’s true for
industry is true at home, too: Think well-in-sulated houses full of natural
light, cars that sip instead of guzzle, appliances that pay for themselves in
energy savings. 4 Quality is wealth. More is not better. Better is better.
You don’t need a bigger house; you need a different floor plan. You don’t need
more stuff; you need stuff you’ll actually use. Ecofriendly designs and nontoxic
materials already exist, and there’s plenty of room for innovation. You may pay
more for things like long-lasting, energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, but they’ll
save real money over the long term. 5
It may seem impossibly far away, but on days
when the smog blows off, you can already see it: a society built on radically
green design, sustainable energy, and closed-loop cities; a civilization afloat
on a cloud of efficient, nontoxic, recyclable technology. That’s a future we can
live with. A. Using satellite technology and various
measurements, NASA scientists confirm the earth is melting at both poles. In the
north, at the Arctic, the melting of Greenland’s three-kilometer thick ice sheet
had been expected, though not as dramatically as it is now happening. But in the
south, many believed the far more massive ice sheets covering Antarctica would
increase in the 21st century. That’s not so, according to the NASA
observations and data. Despite increasing snowfall, Antarctica’s ice sheets are
shrinking. B. Redesigning civilization along these lines would
bring a quality of life few of us can imagine. That’s because a fully
functioning ecology is tantamount to tangible wealth. Clean air and water, a
diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and
predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the
human race survives--and may even extend our stay on Earth. C.
You don’t change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or
buying indulgences in the form of save the earth bumper stickers. You do it by
articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity
humanity can muster. Indeed, being green at the start of the 21st
century requires a wholehearted commitment to upgrading civilization. Four key
principles can guide the way: D. Green-minded activists failed
to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but
because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called
for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and
living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and
prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the
movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world’s wealthiest, most
advanced societies to tm their backs on the very forces that drove such
abundance in naive at best. E. Cities beat suburbs.
Manhattanites use less energy than most people in North America. Sprawl eats
land and snarls traffic. Building homes close together is a more efficient use
of space and infrastructure. It also encourages walking, promotes public
transit, and fosters community. F. Americans trash the planet
not because we’re evil, but because the industrial systems we’ve devised leave
no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms,
freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet
works. They’re primitive inventions designed by people who didn’t fully grasp
the consequences of their actions.