Dear Professor Lu Mai, dear Professor Liu Shinjin, ladies and gentlemen,

It is an unusual honour for me to be invited to this keynote address, which I have put it under the title of Resource Productivity.

Fig 1

This title contrasts with the preoccupation with labour productivity during the last 200 years of technological progress. Labour productivity has been the melody of the first Industrial Revolution. It increased twentyfold or more during those 200 years. This has been the basis of prosperity and it is the main theme of China’s stunning economic progress.

During those same 200 years, the world has also seen a systematic decrease of prices of natural resources.

Fig 2

This invited mankind to a wasteful use of those resources. Small wonder, then, that resource productivity was stagnant or even decreasing during much of this time.

Let me submit to you that we cannot continue on this road. It may be wise, chiefly for the industrialized countries to slow down the further increase of labour productivity while forcing the increase of resource productivity.

Forcing resource productivity has become an imperative also for the developing countries that cannot afford a wasteful use scarce resources. Obviously, this consideration was at the roots of planning this conference. The new trend in technological development, namely a strong emphasis on resource productivity, may be triggered by the recent increase of resource prices:

Fig 3

For China in particular, the rising commodity prices were a signal of warning. But then, you have additional reasons to become more resource efficient. It would allow you to simultaneously reduce one major health problem, namely pollution-caused mortality in your industrial agglomerations:

Fig 4

Clearly, air pollution should also be addressed directly by appropriate pollution control measures. These have an additional cost, which however, is far exceeded by the economic benefits for China, according to Stefan Hirschberg et al (2003) of the Swiss Paul Scherrer Institute:

Fig 5

China is going through the standard development with regard to pollution: Countries start poor and clean. Then they industrialize and get rich and dirty. And then they rich enough so that they can afford pollution control and end up rich and clean:

Fig 6

It has been the traditional view of the developing countries that they are too poor to pay for pollution control. As Indira Gandhi said it in 1972 at the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm: “Poverty is the biggest polluter”

Fig 7

Indira Gandhi’s slogan went down well not only with the political leaders of developing countries to whom it was a nice excuse for not acting on pollution control, but also for industry in the North that could conveniently say that they needed good profits for the sake of the environment.

The trouble is that today’s biggest environmental problems, biodiversity losses and climate change, are chiefly caused by the rich.

Fig 8

Regarding biodiversity, the biggest problem is habitat losses due to increased land use for agriculture, settlements, mining, energy and transport. You can estimate the acreage that is needed per person for a sustainable supply of all the daily goods and services. This is then the “ecological footprint” according to William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, caricatured in the next picture:

Fig 9

The ecological footprints of average Chinese people are roughly one hectare. We in Western Europe have footprints four times as large, and in the US and Canada, footprints are even eight times that size. If all 6.3 billion people had US type lifestyles, we would need three to four planets Earth to accommodate all their footprints. This is obviously unsustainable.

The other big problem is global warming. Global temperatures have been rising and falling over the last 160.000 years in close correspondence with CO2 concentrations.

Fig 10
Based on the physics behind this correlation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected temperatures to rise dramatically during our century:

Fig 11

The consequences could be alarming for water, food security and for biodiversity. You would also have to count with more devastating typhoons and, most dangerous perhaps, with a rising sea water table, indicated by the green line in the next picture.

Fig 12

The difference between high and low water tables is more than 100 metres, which means that coast lines will heavily vary. The next picture shows it for Italy. 20.000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, the Sea was lower and Italy was larger than today. But two million years ago there were no polar ice caps (and also the geological situation was different in the Mediterranean Basin) so that Italy was much smaller:

Fig 13

At present, we see a dramatic change of temperatures in the Arctic region, as has been discussed in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (2004). The summer freshwater coverage of Greenland has increased more than fourfold in ten years:

Fig 14

We are unable to predict the consequences of this development. But we know from historical records that ice masses can collapse or glide into the oceans in a very short period of time. This has been the case with the ice shield once covering Labrador and the Hudson Bay, which disintegrated during a few decades, perhaps even a few weeks some 7800 years ago, letting the sea water table rise by some 7 metres:

Fig 15

Imagine what such a mega-event would mean for China’s or Japan’s coastal areas, or for the Netherlands or Egypt or Florida!

What do we have to do to prevent such disasters from happening? It is plausible that at least we should try to stabilize CO2 concentrations. This, however, will require us to reduce annual CO2-emissions by 60-80 percent, according to the IPCC. Let us optimistically assume that 50 percent will do. But under the present trends, we shall get exactly the opposite. We are heading for a doubling of CO2-emissions:

Fig 16

China, India and other countries are drastically expanding their industrial outputs, their motorized transportation and their energy consuming housing and agriculture. So we shall see China and India to have emissions similar to those of the US:

Fig 17

Fig 18

The world energy pie shows that worldwide we have still an overwhelming dominance of fossil fuels.

Fig 19

In Europe, we have begun systematically to work on the reduction of CO2-emissions. The trading began in December, 2004. Initially, the prices paid per ton of CO2-emissions were at around 8 Euros. Meanwhile, prices have roughly doubled.

Fig 20

One component of our combating greenhouse gas emissions has been the increase of renewable sources of energy. In Germany, we have been quite successful in this:

Fig 21

We were very glad to see a large Chinese delegation at the Renewables 2004 conference in Bonn last year, and many said that China was about to copy the German system and is now planning another such conference this November. However, for all their merits, the renewables will not suffice to solve the problem. The energy pie is simply too large and must be reduced if we want to fight global warming and also avoid a dangerous dependence on nuclear power.

The key to the answer will be a Second Industrial Revolution focussing on the strategic increase of resource productivity. This has been the vision in the book “Factor Four. Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use”, which was also translated into Chinese:

Fig 22

It has been known for a long time that lower energy intensity is a sign of modernity:

Fig 23

We therefore see the Factor Four story as a true continuation of technological modernization and progress.

Let me now open a window for you to look into the new universe of eco-efficient technologies. The pictures will mostly compare existing technologies on the left hand side with new technologies on the right hand side that are some four times, or even ten or a hundred times more resource efficient than the old ones.

Fig 24

Let me start with my co-author’s Amory Lovins’ favourite idea, the “hypercar”, which allegedly does 150 miles a gallon, or needs only 1,5 litres per 100 kilometres.

Fig 25

Some remain a bit sceptical about its success but according to Amory, some 2 billion dollars have already been invested in the concept.

Fig 26

The next is Amory Lovins’ institute and home, the Rocky Mountain Institute, high up in the Rocky Mountains, which during much of the year is largely energy-self-sufficient and is easily a factor of ten better regarding energy than typical mountain.

Fig 27

The concept has been transferred ten years ago to ordinary apartment houses in Germany and elsewhere, as “passive houses” making use of solar heat and of heat exchange ventilation.

Fig 28

In my political constituency, Stuttgart, or rather in nearby Fellbach, we have a true zero-external-energy house. It has become a tourist attraction. And part of the excess energy it produces is channelled into a super-efficient car.

You all know the efficient light bulbs that need only a quarter of the electricity used in old incandescent bulbs. China has become the largest manufacturer worldwide of the efficiency bulbs. However, as most of you know, this is not yet the end of the road. Light diodes are coming up that are yet another factor of two or three better than the efficiency bulbs shown on the picture.

Fig 29

This is a small cooling chamber to replace the refrigerator that stands freely in the kitchen. Two weeks ago, I met with a Japanese gentleman who told me that even freely standing refrigerators have now been developed that are seven times more energy efficient that the old ones. The new development was probably triggered by the “Top runner programme” of Japan.

Fig 30

Fig 31

If you replace the old-fashioned filing cabinet technology by CD ROM’s you save more than a factor of ten and you have easier access to your data.

Fig 32

Water scarcity is one of the biggest problems of China. You may therefore be interested in a technology used in Germany that has reduced water consumption twelve fold in paper manufacturing, chiefly by systematically recycling and cleaning waste water.

Fig 33

My friend Professor Ryoichi Yamamoto of Tokyo once sent me the above picture showing a thin rod of steel that has the strength and capacities of otherwise ten times more resource consuming steel.

Fig 34

Video conferences are, of course, something like a factor of one hundred more energy efficient than the otherwise necessary business travel. I admit that video does not easily substitute for a business meeting on the Bahamas.

Fig 35

This is the story of modern, energy intensive agriculture. Winter tomato grown in greenhouses in Holland tend to need a hundred times more energy than they afterwards contain! With intensive cattle farming, the ratio is hardly better. Organic farming, on the other hand, is roughly by a factor of four more energy efficient.

Fig 36

This is the well-known strawberry yoghurt saga established by Stephanie Böge at the Wuppertal Institute. Lorries criss-cross Europe and drive some 8000 kilometres for the manufacturing of strawberry yoghurt. Obviously you could do at least ten times better.

So much perhaps to encourage you to think further about the upcoming technological revolution. Let me close by making a few remarks about methods to arrive there.

China is one of the countries that has established efficiency standards for cars. To meet the 2008 standards, many European and American car manufacturers have still to do considerable homework, while Toyota is well prepared.

Fig 37 [*]

In the business world we seem to see a slight competitive advantage of eco-efficient companies listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index over the average listed in the Dow Jones Group Index.

Fig 38

And if you compare different countries using the World Economic Forum’s Competitiveness Index you see a positive correlation with the Sustainable Development Index of countries.

Fig 39

So we seem to be on a good way. However, this is all too slow to reach the necessary factor of four. Let me in closing say a few words about instruments. I am impressed with what I heard in China about the determination with which you are creating incentives for more resource efficient technologies. Moreover, Douglas Ogden this morning mentioned the possibility of tax refunds for companies that achieve ambitious standards, and James Sweeney spoke about appropriate pricing.

Japan has gone a considerable step further with her “top runner programme” that makes the most energy efficient appliance or vehicle the top runner or standard and announces shame on those companies in a few years that still sell outdated, less efficient items. Ultimately they even have to pay a fine.

Germany and other countries have adopted an ecological tax reform to reduce the fiscal load on human labour while making natural resources more expensive.

And at the G 8 Summit that takes place in a few days, we hope countries agree on a geographical extension of climate policy beyond “Kyoto”. We hope that also China, India, Brazil etc will be invited under fair term to join international climate policy.

For this, the North has to understand that the present “grandfathering” approach is unfair to the developing countries and has to be replaced step by step by a system based on per capita allowances, – which would be good for China and India.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I feel that the race is on worldwide among countries and among companies to take the lead in the Second Industrial Revolution that is driven by the second melody of progress, the melody of a revolutionary increase of resource productivity.

Thank you for your patience and attention!

References

• Hirschberg, Stefan, et al. 2003
• Rees, William and Mathis Wackernagel
• Von Weizsäcker, Ernst Ulrich, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins. 1997. Factor Four. Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. A Report to the Club of Rome. London: Earthscan. Also available in Chinese and ten other languages.

[*] After the lecture, I was approached by a reresentative of General Motors who said that GM had also met the standards with cars exported to China.

The answer to this question should be yes and no.

Yes, we are closer than ten years ago. During all of he 1990s, an irritatingly optimistic mindset was dominating the world. The very expression of ‘saving the planet’ would not have been politically correct in these days, because it sounds ‘pessimistic’.

What caused the air of optimism of the 1990s? The Cold War was over, alright, that was a great relief because it was also the end of the fear of a Third World War. Capitalism was celebrated as the only remaining ideology, constituting the ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama put it. In its radical, Anglo-Saxon version it was politically hailed as the engine of growth and thereby as a cure-all, with slogans like “rising tide lift all boats”. ‘Creative destruction’ was seen as legitimate whenever what was to be destroyed had a smell of communism. Well, markets are a growth engine and a healthy cleansing mechanism, but at least two billion people felt outright cheated and exploited. They saw their ‘boats’ sinking, not rising at all.

Stock exchange quotations were another cause of optimism, as they seemed to rise without limits. That was a deception, too, as the collapse of the ‘dot com’ bubble showed in 2000. Concerning the environment, the prevailing paradigm was the optimistic Kuznets curve of pollution, meaning that once countries turn rich they will spend enough money on pollution control, and countries end up rich and clean. In terms of local pollution, the Kuznets curve was a reality, but for global warming and biodiversity losses the paradigm was dead wrong.

I must say, I was in a state of alarm during the late 1990s about the careless optimism and the uncompromising arrogance behind it. I felt rather helpless raising my voice against it.

So I see with a degree of relief that the days of the blatant type of arrogance are over and that it has become almost mainstream once again to address the real problems. What made this sea change happen? There were many different factors. The billions of people in their ‘sinking boats’ are no longer silent. The world community has addressed their situation in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), acknowledging that markets will not do the trick. The end of the dot com bubble was a wake up call to some but the broader public did not hear the signals until the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007, originating in America but spreading worldwide. Some of the once celebrated investment gurus and their institutions got unmasked as irresponsible speculators using the money of credulous clients.

In the political arena, the military and ideological answer to the insidious attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets (‘9/11’), the “War on Terror”, more and more became a nightmare for all parties involved. The arrogant US unilateralism once impersonated by the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Pentagon lost its support even in the White House, let alone the US Congress after its mid term elections.

The environment is back on stage, after a quarter century of denial among the leading classes in the USA, and under the weight of evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the devastating pollution in the industrial centres of the high growth countries, notably China. The EU has taken the lead in politically addressing global warming, setting up the ETS, the European Trading System for carbon dioxide emissions. The two remaining candidates for the US presidency have expressed a clear commitment on mitigating global warming. China has become very serious about addressing pollution, climate, and energy efficiency. Renewable sources of energy constitute a dynamic growth sector. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is enjoying increasing visibility in the signatory states, i.e. nearly all states except the USA.

It is fair to summarise, then, that the last ten years have seen a tidal change in appreciation of the real problems the world community. Overcoming the arrogant optimism of the 1990 has been a huge and necessary progress.

It was necessary, but is surely not sufficient for an agenda of saving the planet. This is the core of the No answer.

Global warming got worse throughout the past ten years. New figures and extrapolations, e.g. from NASA’s James Hanson seem to show that stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at 450 ppm is far from sufficient and that we should rather aim at 350 ppm, which is still well above the pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm.

Biodiversity losses have accelerated, notably in the tropical countries. Fish stock depletion went on and partly accelerated. China aggressively began to access mineral and energy resources in Africa and elsewhere so as to continue its steep increase of resource consumption. India, Brazil, South Africa, Angola and a few other countries enjoy tremendous growth rates, all based on accelerated resource extraction, at a comfortably high price level. No end of the trend is in sight, not even a flattening of the curves. All countries of the world seem to work under the assumption that they have a right to the same kind of prosperity as the USA. And after many years of brainwashing that the American way of life was the best one could aim at, this assumption is hard to deny. But six or eventually ten billion people living by US American life styles is just not possible. We would need four or five planets Earth to accommodate their ecological footprints, according to the Global Footprints Network.

Thus in terms of climate and the ecological situation, the picture has become quite a bit grimmer, not better.

How can we now deal with this odd combination of the Yes and No answers? I submit that we can break out of the vicious circle of seeking wealth in material growth alone. I suppose we can decouple wealth creation from energy and material consumption very much like we decoupled wealth creation from the number of hours of human labour. The latter was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution. Labour productivity rose easily twenty fold in the course of 150 years of industrialisation. In other words, from one hour of human labour we learned to extract twenty times more wealth. Now is the time to do the same for energy and materials. We can learn and must learn to extract four times, ten times, and eventually twenty times as much wealth from one barrel of oil or from one ton of bauxite as we do today. Technologically speaking, this should not be more difficult than the rise of labour productivity. Resource productivity should become the core melody of the next industrial revolution.

Labour productivity rose in parallel with wages. Rising wages were justified by rising labour productivity, and rising labour cost stimulated ever further increases of labour productivity. Energy prices, on the other hand saw a secular decline (in constant dollars) over 200 years. The latest price hikes have not even brought us back to the price levels of some thirty years ago. Tragically, the political zeal has always been to keep energy prices as low as possible, thereby frustrating most attempts at increasing energy productivity. Energy price elasticity is very much a long term, not a short term affair. Infrastructure investments, which are crucial for an energy efficient society, take a lot of time.

What our societies ought to learn now is creating a long term trajectory of energy prices slowly but steadily and predictably rising in parallel with energy productivity. By definition, this would not cause any hardship, on average. But it would set a clear signal to investors and infrastructure planners that energy efficiency and productivity will become ever more profitable and necessary. It is bound to become more profitable and sexier even than the renewable energies.

If our societies, starting perhaps with the EU, embrace this new agenda of technological progress, and if later historians see the period between 1998 and 2008 the kick-off period for this new technological revolution, I suppose that those historians will agree that this time span has brought us closer to saving the planet.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) is the third event in a row.

The first was the UN Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 1972. In its wake, the UN Environment Programme, UNEP, was founded in Nairobi, and some UN agencies made some moves towards an ecological significance of their programmes. Ten years later, a meeting was held to assess progress since Stockholm and ended in disappointment. Continuing deterioration of the environment was reported chiefly in the developing countries. As one consequence, the World Commission on Environment and Development was created to study the reasons for that lamentable state of affairs, and Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norvegian Prime Minister was appointed Chairperson. After three years of intensive work, the Commission published its report which was submitted for discussion at the UN General Assembly in 1997. As a result, the UN decided to convene another UN Conference, this time on Environment and Development, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

The Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit” was the second in the series of UN conferences. It had three major results: The Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), the Convention Biological Diversity (CBD) and Agenda 21 with its fourty chapters. Agenda 21 was seen by many observers as a prescription leading – if properly applied – to sustainable development, a term already found in the Brundtland Report. Another five years later, the UN General Assembly held a special session in New York with a view to look back and assess progress made since Rio. Once again, the assessment was rather depressing from the point of view of the environment, and once again the UN decided to hold major conference, this time called World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2002.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that UN conferences and reports have not been able to slow down let alone stop or revert the destructive trends. To be sure, pollution control has made major progress in the OECD countries. But then pollution is no longer the main ecological concern.

• Global warming seems to go on unmitigated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fears that the added greenhouse effect might lead to a rise in average temperatures by some 1.4°C to 5.8°C during the 21st century. This could theoretically have disastrous effects on world agriculture and potentially on the global sea water table. If we want to halt this trend, it would be wise to stabilise CO2 concentrations at preindustrial or, less ambitious, at 1990 levels. This, however, would mean to reduce world wide CO2 emissions by at least 50 percent. Development aspirations, however, rather point at a doubling of CO2 emissions.
• Biodiversity losses have hardly slowed down; some 50 plant or animal species are said to become extinct every day! The major cause seems to be land conversion for civilisational use. One way of measuring this land use was given by William Rees and Matthis Wackernagel as the “ecological footprint”. It represents the direct and indirect land use for living, farming, clothing, transport, industry, recreation, energy etc. OECD countries have typical per capita footprints sized 4 hectares. This leaves most OECD countries too small to accommodate all of their footprints. They therefore have to export much of those footprints to less populated and less area-demanding countries. To accommodate six billion OECD type footprints we would need at least two planets earth. As we have only one, we should reduce OECD footprints at least by a factor of 2, — under the plausible assumption that developing countries have equivalent rights and aspirations regarding wealth and well-being.

Both trends and challenges have a massive bearing on Agenda 21 and the perspectives of sustainable development. If we need to reduce both CO2 emissions and ecological footprints by a factor of two at least while simultaneously aspiring at least to double world-wide wealth, we seem to be confronted with the need to perform at least four times more efficiently with the use of natural resources.

Fortunately, this goal it not as outlandish as it may sound at first. Amory and Hunter Lovins have coauthored a book with me, “Factor Four” which features fifty examples of a fourfold resource productivity. Automobiles can do 150mpg, cooling systems can do with 25% of today’s typical electricity consumption. Buildings can be designed for close to zero external energy input. Farm produce can be made with one quarter of the typical European energy inputs. Materials can be saved by large factors using re-manufacturing techniques. Water can be used four times more efficiently than today in many industrial, agricultural and private uses.

In addition, energy and materials used can be ecologically optimised as is already happening in several countries. Renewable sources of energy are a booming industry in many European countries. And materials can be selected to be perfectly recyclable.

Prices for the use of environmentally scarce resources should be gradually moved upwards so as to create an incentive for introducing “factor four-technologies”. An ecological tax reform or tradeable permits for resource use should be seen as chief candidates for instruments leading to that goal. Both can be designed in a socially and economically acceptable way. Tax-caused price increases can be tied to the pace of progress in average resource productivity.

Aggressive strategies to invcrease resource productivity may show the way for a true harmonisation of environmental and developmental goals thus ending the ecological frustrations we have experienced since the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

For further information visit the UN Chronicle’s website: http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/.