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Factor four: Doubling wealth

by Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory B Lovins and L Hunter Lovins (1998, but still frequently reprinting). Earthscan London

(Reviewed by Edgar Wille in March 2007)

(These book reviews offer a commentary on some aspects of the contribution the authors are making to management thinking. Neither Ashridge nor the reviewers necessarily agree with the authors’ views and the authors of the books are not responsible for any errors that may have crept in.

We aim to give enough information to enable readers to decide whether a book fits their particular concerns and, if so, to buy it. There is no substitute for reading the whole book and our reviews are no replacement for this. They can give only a broad indication of the value of a book and inevitably miss much of its richness and depth of argument. Nevertheless, we aim to open a window on to some of the benefits awaiting readers of management literature.)

• Positive approaches to resource productivity
• Practical ideas for more with less
• Practical cases
• Examples of revolutionising energy productivity
• Examples of revolutionising materials productivity
• Examples of revolutionising transport productivity
• Using these examples
• Policy options for resource productivity
• Urgency

Positive approaches to resource productivity

The year 2007 is notable for the extent to which the media are paying considerable attention to issues such as the environment, climate change, world poverty, population growth, pollution and the using up of earth’s resources in an unsustainable way. There is no question of regarding this as the preserve of cranks and doomsayers. There are variations of interpretation, but there is no gainsaying that there is strong evidence that the Western way of life is facing serious threats and the tragedies of the less developed world are likely to worsen.

If even the less drastic scenarios were fulfilled, we live at a time when "business as usual" is not going to be an option. Many of the luxuries to which we have become accustomed may need to be restricted if greater disaster to the planet is not to overtake us. We have reviewed books on these areas of concern and it is high time for the business world to address the situation, to be ready for whatever may lie in the future and even enhance profit by being early in line.

The Stern Review gave alternative scenarios on greenhouse gases affecting the climate. Some of these could be manageable, given the will, but others would be stark disaster. Sir Jonathan Porritt in Capitalism as if the world mattered discussed how capitalism could become a system which delivered sustainability of earth’s resources and promoted the wellbeing of all. We also reviewed books by CK Prahalad and Stuart Hart which suggested ways by which businesses could alleviate the shocking poverty of two thirds of the world’s population, while making a profit for themselves.

We have avoided books which are negative and produce panic, but have felt it important to take a cool look at problems which, if not addressed, could drastically weaken the fabric of business and industry. Our aim in including such books in our reviews is to alert all business organisations to the need to accelerate the rate of innovation and creatively be ready to adopt alternative policies with which to replace some elements of their current activity and thus stay in business. And, of course, businesses which are first in seeing opportunities where others may see only threats are the ones that will prosper.

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Practical ideas for more with less

Factor Four is an outstanding book full of suggestions for this innovative approach. Its very sub-title shows that it is not purveying doom and gloom, but rather a well considered optimism based on radical steps. The keynote of the book is that "we can live twice as well – yet use half as much". This is applied particularly in energy, construction and transport – areas which are especially susceptible to the voracious human appetite for living beyond our means as a planet. The control of waste is a central issue and productivity is re-defined in terms of resource productivity, rather than worker productivity. Our ways of measuring profit are reconsidered, so that we should no longer regard air, water, soil and other resources of nature as free gifts to be used prodigally ("externalities" as economists term them). They must be husbanded and be accounted for in our financial sums. "Bads" should be taxed rather than "goods", so as to reduce activity that is wasteful of earth’s limited resources.

The theme of this book makes good business sense because the kind of efficiency it recommends produces cost reduction and therefore enhances profit opportunities. One of my MBA students in the Czech Republic is a senior partner in an energy saving consultancy. Their approach is not that businesses should consider energy efficiency simply as altruistic corporate social responsibility (CSR), but as a significant element in their profit making capacity – doing well at the same time as doing good. This is the opposite of the point of view which sees environmental protection and resource conservation as unwelcome costs.

"Doing more with less is not the same as doing less, doing worse or doing without". Whereas some environmentalists face us with the prospect of going back a century or two to a more primitive way of life, the authors of this book offer a resource efficiency which will enable us to see better with more efficient lighting systems, eat better with fresher food from more efficient refrigerators and enjoy safer and more comfortable travel in more efficient vehicles. And the road to this world is innovation, often in simple ways, and with a readiness to consider what we may previously have thought unattainable.

The way in which costs can be reduced is illustrated by minimising wasted resources which pollute air and water; resource efficiency means you don’t have to pay now for resources that are being turned into pollutants and you don’t have to pay later to clean them up. Technology is better employed by reducing the unproductive kilowatt hours, tonnes and litres than by defining productivity as reduction in people employed.

Architects and engineers tend to be paid by a percentage of the project cost, according to the size of their budget – what they spend - not according to what they save. If the cost goes down so does their fee! What kind of an incentive is that for exercising resource efficiency?

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Practical cases

The purpose of the book is to offer practical examples of new and significant ways which by halving resources and doubling wealth can quadruple efficiency. But radical thinking is required. It is a matter of leapfrogging, not slow incremental improvements. Inertia has to be overcome by taking action to change the way things are. It means getting rid of obsolete practices to which we are used, but which actually impede progress.

The fact that the examples are taken from the 1990s does not detract from their value. The basic principles are established. That reprints are still taking place is evidence that the book is still very topical. However, we might want to know whether this was just a temporary flash of genius or whether it has continued. A look at the web pages of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado will show that the work continues unabated. Two of the authors of this book, Amory and Hunter Lovins, founded the Institute in the 1980s.

Part One of the book is devoted to some 50 case studies which illustrate the possibilities of significant innovation which were already revolutionising energy productivity, material productivity and transport productivity, when the book was written.

Whatever the field of readers’ businesses, some of these examples are bound to strike a chord and suggest similar innovations, perhaps in totally different areas. Never was it more essential to "think outside the box".

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Examples of revolutionising energy productivity

The phrase "energy productivity" is preferred to "energy saving". It redirects technology for positive purposes. Where reducing labour was the main purpose of technology, people lost jobs and were reduced to penury, while others found benefit if prices were reduced. When energy is made to go further at less overall cost, everyone benefits. Getting twice as much for half as much gives us the Factor Four.

Here then is a selection from the twenty energy examples. Inevitably, technical details can only be sampled here, just to give the flavour. You can get fuller detail by reading the examples that interest you or by looking at the Rocky Mountain Institute website.

• Automobiles are perhaps the most wasteful of the products of modern technology, as is particularly emphasised in Earth Odyssey, which we recently reviewed. There has been some progress in making cars more efficient, but most of these are partial improvements, not whole system integrated transformations. About 80% of the energy utilised is normally lost before getting to the wheels of cars. Reduction in the amount of energy dissipated in heating the air as the car rushes forward, also heating the tyres, the road and the brakes, would mean that much more would get to the wheels. So a minority of auto engineers got to work on materials which would be drastically lighter in weight and fuel consumption, and they can overcome most of these energy losses. Thus the wheels receive the effect of most of the energy. The hypercar was born, though it is still not generally adopted. But it exists and when people realise that they can save 90% of the fuel and cut out most of the smog, it will take off; much as people buy CDs and the vinyl record has almost disappeared.
• Using solar heat, insulation and glass, bananas are being grown at the Rocky Mountain Institute at 2200 metres above sea level with blizzards raging outside. And the cost is rapidly recouped. This suggests that technology can now more cheaply grow many desired products near the point of consumption rather than transporting them across half the globe. A house, an indoor farm for other products and a 20-desk research centre are all accommodated under the same roof.
• By law, Swedish houses have to follow strict thermal insulation standards to ensure minimal heat loss. Germany followed suit with the Passivhaus at Darmstadt, which uses only 10% of the normal amount of energy for space heating and 25% of the normal amount of electricity. Special windows insulated to the equivalent of eight sheets of glass provide a 50% improvement in space heating over normal windows. The system is suitable for mass production. Incoming fresh air is directed through a plastic pipe three or four meters underground, thus giving an airtight house a regular supply of temperate air, heated by the depth of the earth. Initial costs were higher, but these have now come down and allowed the building of whole residential and office areas at no extra cost and with four times the energy efficiency.
• In the hot dry climate of California, air conditioning is seen as essential for four and more of the summer months. Windows in the right places, better window frames and saving of wood, along with a number of small contributions, produced 17% saving in construction costs and 57% in energy saving. Even the refrigerator's waste heat was used to produce hot water, instead of making the house warmer.
• "Superwindows" make a big contribution to energy efficiency. They use invisibly transparent high-tech films to select visible from infra-red (heat) radiation. Such windows independently control the entry of light and heat so that, for example, windows facing the hot afternoon sun eliminate more heat and light than windows facing in other directions, yet they all look the same. Designed initially for hot climates, the same principles apply to gaining and retaining heat in cooler climates, particularly in Europe. Their heavy gas filling and the reflection of heat back into the room through special film considerably reduces heat loss. Figures are quoted for both applications of savings of 72% in electricity use. Large buildings shared by a number of occupants need ways of spreading the costs and the savings among all of them. This human factor can hold things up.
• The School of Engineering in De Montfort University, Leicester, has in its Queen’s Building the largest naturally ventilated building in the UK. The construction used traditional labour intensive methods which created jobs for local workers, offered attractive architecture and used cleaner and greener technology. The very site choice, in relation to facing direction, was guided by heat and ventilation considerations. Both heating and air conditioning needs were met by largely passive methods, including a complex system of dampers, louvres and heating controls. The building uses between 25% and 50% of the electricity of an equivalent normal building and its equipment can be smaller, reducing capital cost.
• Run down and derelict houses in St Louis were renovated in an enterprising manner. Walls were not vertical nor floors level; many parts of the structures were falling to pieces. A float concrete floor, insulating foam between drywalls, combinations of windows which enabled them to heat, ventilate, cool or insulate the houses at various seasons, were installed. Heating needs fell by 90%. And all for a cost of $2000 per house beyond the basic renovation, to turn a derelict stone shell into an elegant, durable, attractive, safe and affordable home.
• The ING Bank in Amsterdam was rebuilt after a major merger to accommodate 2400 staff. It consists of a series of ten slanting, brick-faced, pre-cast concrete towers with gardens and courtyards interspersed. It is called a "groundscraper", rather than a skyscraper. Rooms are small enough and windows well designed to make maximum use of daylight. Insulation is advanced and the structure itself is designed to store and disseminate heat from solar sources – in spite of the temperate nature of the climate. A nearby building built normally consumes five times as much energy. The capital cost was average for the Netherlands, but the payback period on annual energy costs was short.
• The Technical University in Denmark has analysed the recent developments in the use of electric appliances. The level of usage for cooking, cooling, cleaning and clean air requires only 26% of previous consumption of electricity, where efficient technology is introduced. The chapter on this quotes detailed figures for the efficiency obtained by refrigerators, clothes washing machines, dishwashers, cookers and similar domestic appliances with outstanding energy savings due to better insulation, better motors, heat pumps and smarter controls. Between 30% and 50% savings accrued from the use of such advanced technology.
• A section on super refrigerators shows how refrigerators can be greatly improved by radically better insulation, whereas manufacturers have in the past concentrated on thinner insulation to maximise capacity inside. Inefficient compressors were, and often still are, mounted under the refrigerator so that hot air rising into the food compartments has then to be removed all over again! A number of other design faults permit the escape of cooling capacity. In America in the late 80s, a sixth of all electricity consumption was due to refrigerators, adding drastically to the number of power stations required. Detail is given of how newer equipment is able to reduce the electricity used in defrosting, how condenser heat can contribute to house heating, and better seals keep an efficient cooling process. Improvements like these can mean a 95% saving of energy.
• In the US a quarter of electricity goes directly into lighting – 120 giant power plants. In Russia and China, at the time the book was written, about 15 power stations generating 1000 MW each did nothing but run inefficient lighting. The standard incandescent light bulbs are actually small heaters which offer only 10% of their output as light. They can be replaced by small fluorescent lamps. A single 18 watt compact fluorescent lamp over its lifetime can save, when compared with a 75 watt incandescent lamp, a tonne of carbon dioxide and high amounts of other greenhouse gases and 200 litres of oil fed into oil fired power stations. This section gives advice on how to use wall bounce and many other simple approaches to enhance the effectiveness of lighting. Saving 90% of the electricity needs can bring both cost benefit and better, more relaxed seeing.
• Other examples detailed in this section include drastically more efficient energy use in driving computers and other office equipment; with similar savings figures to those illustrated above for other equipment. Replacement of alternating current (AC) by direct current (DC) reduces the wattage required, but does not attract much consumer demand. In countries where there is no universal power grid and small renewable devices, it may be necessitated. Attention is paid to the remarkable savings in Scandinavia, enabling them to export much of the energy. Energy efficiency in agriculture is also covered. The demand for beef is an extravagant use of resources taken up by feeding the animals, to say nothing of the vast amount of methane their flatulence emits. The Dutch tomato industry is low on energy usage.
• In some organisations in Singapore "elegant frugality" is practised. Energy, money, time, metal – every resource is used in just the right amount, place and manner. Careful measurement ensures this. There is no wasted effort, motion or investment. Energy is used over and over again till almost nothing is left. Toyota’s "five whys" approach is an illustration of tracking down waste. For every answer there is a further "but why?" This is illustrated with reference to the efficiency with which fans and pumps move air and water against friction. As many as 35 minor changes between the meter and the fan can make a lot of difference. Electric motors account for a vast amount of electric usage; the widespread use of the 35 improvements would save about 160 giant power stations in the US alone.
• Many of the improvements mentioned in the book can transform air conditioning and "expand the "comfort envelope". The story is told of a Dow plant where the employees up to supervisor level were all invited to provide ideas for resource conservation and waste avoidance. Volunteer ingenuity was transformed into saved money.

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Examples of revolutionising material productivity

Wuppertal Institute’s Division for Material Flows and Eco-restructuring have developed a system known as MIPS – material inputs per service unit – which determines or estimates for any well defined service the kilograms or tonnes of materials that must be moved about anywhere in the world to provide the service.

A given requirement might need tailings from a copper mine in Chile, water and other materials used in manufacturing in, say, Mexico, packaging done in, say, Chicago, plus materials moved in the final sales process. The impact on the environment of all this movement can be included in the calculations. Durability of the output will reduce the total cost, but it is affected by factors beyond this, "from cradle to grave", or "from cradle to cradle" when recycled material starts a new life span. The externalities to which reference has been made are taken account of. It is claimed that this approach can reduce resource usage by a factor of ten.

The Product Life Institute in Geneva supports the MIPS approach and suggests a strategy which:

• Encourages leasing rather than selling, thus giving the provider the incentive to make things last a long time
• Extends product liability, which could induce manufacturers to guarantee low pollution usage and easy re-use or disposal
• Shares cars or appliances, reducing requirement for the product
• Installs remanufacturing – preserving the frame and replacing only worn out parts
• Designs products for durability or ease of remanufacturing or recycling.

All a matter of common sense, but very effective.

The authors ask how many widgets need to be made if we each require one. Just enough to replace breakages or wear, plus as many as we need to keep up with population growth. This would mean that a lot fewer ceramic mugs would be needed for our drinking than if we drink out of styrofoam cups, which have no durability. Almost unbreakable ceramic mugs would last several generations, whereas "consumer ephemerals" are thrown away after one use.

A number of examples are given of items which could be produced with minimal MIPS, to be almost eternal or, if not, taken back by the producer for remanufacture.

• Office furniture leased rather than bought, and made so that individual parts could be replaced.
• It is reckoned that to make a car requires moving about 1500 tonnes of material: metal mining, including shifting un-needed rock and earth, refining, shipping; plastic and glass making. A hypercar would have twice the amount of polymers, one eighth more copper, 92% less iron and steel, one third less aluminium, three fifths less rubber, four fifths less platinum and non fuel fluids. And there is scope for greater savings of material mining and usage. Hypercars using these different materials would be easier for using for other purposes at the end of their lives.
• Electronic books and catalogues, replacing paper with bits and bytes. We are familiar with this, but there is a lot further we could go, saving trees, energy and water.
• Using steel rather than concrete pylons, 36 tonnes of material turnover reduced from 90 tonnes per concrete pylon.
• Sub-surface drip irrigation; great resource savings by delivering water to the roots at the rate required, rather than en masse over the whole field. Reduced tillage of the soil also reduces energy use and these and other approaches mean better yields.
• Drastic reduction in the use of water in manufacture of paper, board, razor blades, pens and microchips. (Facts and figures from Gillette on the last three items).
• Better design of flush toilets saves water phenomenally; more economic shower sprays, washing machines and other equipment. Using roof water more efficiently.
• Cotton production with much less water.
• Reducing generally the flows of materials in industry to boost profits. Hallmark, the greeting cards people, switched to water based inks with considerable saving.
• Specially designed cooling chambers to replace refrigerators, whose chambers can be repaired separately and which maintain coolness better than the normal "frigde".
• Replacing individual washing machines in large buildings by laundromats; leasing lifts instead of paying for them outright.
• Rehabilitating buildings instead of demolishing them (see the earlier example from St Louis), re-using demolished material where demolition has to take place, meaning that only 5% is sent to landfill sites: in contrast 92% is normally sent for a comparable demolition.
• Sensible, old fashioned varied agriculture, which avoids monoculture and consequent soil erosion. Perennial crops. Growing several crops together, some of which, for example, fix nitrogen for the benefit of others.
• Intensive mini-farming, based on four principles: deep soil cultivation for optimum root growth, growing compost crops in lieu of fertiliser, intensive spacing, implanting crops which will fight pests. (This reviewer cultivated a half acre of land attached to the house in this way, many years ago, with great success; it grew all our vegetables.)
• Where you must use fertilisers, then rent a programme which will look after the hazards and ensure right applications.
• Using less concrete for stabilising walls – high pressure injection.
• Recycling wrapping plastic made to a suitable formula which permits this.
• Re-using bottles, cans and large containers; a number of ways of doing this are offered, with reduced transport.
• Better use of wood in construction, with due regard to dangers to forests.
• Use of engineered wood products in place of mainly natural wood products.

Some of these methods have been around for a long time. They just need to be brought onto more agendas and to be developed further. Many of the products our way of life seems to demand use up resources in the manufacture and especially in the initial mining or growing processes, to say nothing of the transport across the globe.

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Examples of revolutionising transport productivity

Every journey, by whatever transport medium goods or people are moved, involves energy and material consumption. But in addition there are habitat destruction (by roads), noise, the effect of mass tourism, interference with wild life, all with some effect on the environment and human behaviour. The examples suggest ways of reducing the extent to which physical transport is used.

• Video conferencing has greatly improved in effectiveness and can create an atmosphere of reality sufficient to make many long journeys to attend meetings unnecessary, with saving of time, hotel costs and personal effort, as well as reducing the market for transport if used widely enough. Online auctions are now very popular and selling without handling the goods; even car dealers and their customers are coming to see that they don’t necessarily need to touch the car. Some face to face contact is of course needed, such as networking at conferences, but these occasions could be fewer and therefore better used. Telecommuting is another potential great saver. (These reviews are written in different countries according to where we happen to be for other reasons.)
• Emailing has created work, but on balance saves the cost of expensive journeys and telephone calls for many purposes. It also permits ongoing contact. It is much more efficient than faxing for most purposes.
• Three billion cups of strawberry yogurt are eaten each year in Germany. Bringing together the ingredients and the material for the cups involves 4500 km of travel, much of which could be avoided if production was more local and from the saved costs it would be economic to employ local labour. There are important principles here to be noted in relation to the benefits and disadvantages of globalisation. Also, some of this kind of requirement could be met as part of leisure activity rather than as part of the money economy. Another example of this issue is that a ten tonne truck drives 65 km in the service of producing a pound of mushrooms, largely delivering horse manure and topsoil. Similarly, Germans drink 1.5 billion litres of orange juice a year; some of this could be reduced by encouraging healthy drinks which could be produced locally.
• Next we are told of the research of a German professor who sees opportunity for a more intensive use of railways with better movement and safety controls and container transfer improvements, all of which are technologically feasible and over time would pay for themselves. This example illustrates the fact that we do not need to become more primitive to achieve resource efficiency, but in many cases to become more advanced. Examples are given of modern trains, invented in Italy, which use tilt methods to permit higher speeds. A prototype has also been built in Idaho, of a computer based system which runs trains, especially intercity ones, according to demand instead of by time table, where trains run when there are many passengers or goods wanting them at a given time.
• New cities in Brazil are incorporating overground "metro" bus lines planned to meet the needs of planned residential areas, with ring routes as well as horizontal and vertical ones. A fixed small fare for all distances! They are run privately and the bus companies are paid by kilometres travelled, not by passengers carried. Curitiba is the showpiece city.
• More formal arrangements are being developed in Berlin to provide incentives for car sharing. It apparently reduces car ownership considerably without loss of mobility. One would like to know more about how they do it. In Bremen, a location was made car free and people were encouraged to move to it on condition that they signed up to non ownership of a car. It has not been a widely accepted scheme, but most innovations start small. There is also a growing movement, patronised by the Prince of Wales, for the development of village life as bringing much to the quality of life, by reducing dependence on the car, clustering homes, with wide open spaces and narrow tree lined streets and all the main amenities within walking distance.

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Using these examples

It is not expected that readers will necessarily be inspired by our very brief review of these examples to seek the implementation of any of the specific instances. They are given to encourage similar approaches, maybe in entirely different areas. We are seeking to encourage the business world to greatly accelerate the rate of innovation and to rule nothing out as impossible, whether for technological or social/human purposes.

Bringing myself up to date by searching websites, such as the Rocky Mountain Institute’s, I have been impressed by the amount of exciting experimentation that is going on, some of it already yielding results. It would be better for businesses to be getting on with it now, rather than facing the need with their backs to the wall, if some of the worst scenarios for the future were to be realised.

In evaluating the whole picture, the authors of the book stress that economic benefit must be assessed by net profit, not by total revenue. Moreover, the type of activity described is fully compatible with market expansion, but without resource expansion. It is essential to count all the costs, not only the direct ones which ignore "externalities".

A change of perspective is required which will not be concerned to ensure labour shedding, but to reduce capital and resource intensity with benefit to employment opportunities.

The profit motive is not derided. One powerful paragraph declares: "So effective is the profit motive that perhaps markets headed for unsustainability can best be redirected by the creative use of market forces themselves, to harness their ingenuity, rapid feedback and diverse, dispersed, resourceful, highly motivated actors". Involved in this is finding the cheapest way to do the job; investing in saving resources, wherever that is cheaper than investing in harvesting them: making markets in saved resources: using prices to tell the truth: fostering competition on a level playing field between all options; rewarding the behaviour wanted, not its opposite; taxing the undesirable, not the desirable; scrapping inefficient devices prematurely and replacing them with efficient ones. This would be a recipe for a different world, but still market based.

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Policy options for resource productivity

The latter part of the book, in a balanced way considers methods of using the innovative potential of market forces to meet the current and future global problems and to turn them into profit opportunities.

It is proposed that we need to move on from the philosophy which assumes that consumer preference is expressed through purchasing decisions and that if people wanted something different the demand would have been evident. But this assumes that perfect information is available about available options and because of this we go on paying too much for inefficient energy, goods and transport. The current battle in the energy field in the UK is beginning to correct this as gas and electricity companies regularly compete in offering attractive cost saving options.

The market economy is itself, by offering cost reduction, highlighting ways of saving resources. A major change will take place as people realise the obvious fact that saving fuel could cost less than burning it. It doesn’t have to be true that appliances that use energy efficiently have to be more expensive, as we are often led to suppose. It is not true that inevitably if saving energy involves substitution of equipment and material, then the cost will rise. Yet often government inspired subsidies are based on this assumption.

How can efficiency be sold at a profit? The marketing perspective recognises that essentially people buy a service, not goods per se. They do not want to buy kilowatt hours per se, but efficient, reliable, convenient services at the cheapest possible price. There is nothing new about this approach; but such market principles, properly followed, could transform the planet’s prospects. And business needs to remember that it is a sound strategy to sell customers what they want before someone else does. The story is told of how the Pacific Gas and Electricity Company stopped building power stations, disbanded its engineering and construction divisions and aimed to get 75% of its savings by leading customers toward more efficient use of energy and making up the remainder with renewable provisions.

New information provision and new financial devices all enter the innovation equation where this attitude is adopted. Companies following this line will be rewarded with more customers by cutting our bills rather than selling us more electricity. It’s called "trading in negawatts". No longer will companies make more profit when they sell more of something and decrease profits when they sell less. And as some of the examples illustrated, designers will be rewarded not for what they spend, but for what they save. These principles apply in all the activities of business, from materials to transport as well as to energy and other limited resources.

Implicit in this approach is making prices tell the truth. This is illustrated by the fact that many of the costs of motoring are not reflected in the motorist’s direct costs. Someone has to pay for smog, congestion, lost time, accidents, roadway damage, land use and the side effects of driving itself. But the connection with driving is not immediately apparent. The price of driving as perceived does not tell the truth about its cost.

The book also sets out ways of using taxation, rebates and pricing positively to help stop the world overexploiting resources and under-using human labour. The day has passed when we could see environmental protection, resource efficiency and nature conservation as meaning economic sacrifice. They are social assets which will be worth paying for, but which if the innovatory activity proposed in this book is followed will not in the end cost us more. The lean thinking on which management books have been written, and which companies like Toyota have applied, will divert us from the path of prodigal waste

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Urgency

This is the message of the last part of the book. If it was urgent in 1999, how much more so is it now apparent that there is no time to be lost. In eight years much more information has come to light and research is widespread, whose findings cannot really be gainsaid in principle, though there may be disputes about specific elements and the interpretation of some statistics.

The Rio Summit of 1992 left a mark on awareness of the problems, ranging from the likelihood that the gold ring on your finger will have needed three tonnes of material to be moved and processed, to the statistic that 1000 Germans consume roughly ten times more resources than do 1000 Filipinos, Egyptians or Argentinians.

One issue which remains topical is the tendency of the prosperous nations to look to the poorer part of the world to provide the answer to sustainable use of resources. But the latter can reply: "You have had your time of unlimited resource exploitation which made you prosperous. Why should we go without our share now". This feeling is understandable, even though the latecomers will suffer with the early comers in the resultant over exploitation of earth’s resources.

And the problem remains that if the poorer nations caught up and consumed and polluted at the same level as Canada, the example given, it would take three globes to accommodate us all. Urgency is accentuated when we recognise the difficulty of expecting governments to ration air miles, auto miles, heating oil or water for our kitchens and bathrooms. They dare not do it if they wish to continue in office, which makes it difficult for them to insist that China, for example, should desist from following the path that has made us relatively rich.

Chapter Eleven of the book is entitled: "We may have fifty years left to close the gaps", but as the Stern Review and IPCC reports on climate change have shown, this is only true if we start now. And the message of this book is that innovation by business is the way ahead. But business should not wait for disaster before putting innovation in resource productivity at the top of its agenda.

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