Emerging green technologies

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Emerging green technologies

• A vision too far?

Willy De Backer Europe Director Global Footprint
Network
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Global Footprint Network

• Five-year old non-profit research organisation
  based in California with offices in Brussels and
  Zürich
• Work on ecological footprint accounts of
  nations, regions, cities or businesses

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23 September 2008
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One step back technological innovation

• Technology should be a means to an end help
  achieve a high-quality life for more people on
  the planet
• Should be driven not just by the market but by
  analysis of the trends and vision of the
  preferable future
• Policy-makers should create the framework for
  innovation and technology development based on
  their view of the future

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Environmental Technologies?

• All technologies should respect environment and
  ecological constraints or they are not
  sustainable
• All technological innovation should take our
  ecological limits into consideration

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The Future
or
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Trends context and drivers

• Environmental collapse
• Climate Change
• Biodiversity
• Over-fishing
• Water scarcity
• Soil erosion

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Trends context and drivers

• Energy scarcity
• Supply/demand crunch (IEA) or even peak oil, peak
  gas, peak coal
• Shell scenarios scramble for oil
• End of cheap energy

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Trends context and drivers

• Population explosion
• From 2 billion to 6 billion to 9 billion to ...?
• Urbanisation more than 50 living in cities

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Trends context and drivers

• Economic power shift
• The end of US economic dominance?
• Power to the BRICS sovereign wealth funds
• Since 15 October 2008 the end of market
  fundamentalism

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Preferable future survivable development

• Manage transition from the Age of Abundance to
  the Age of Sufficiency
• Accepts Ecological Limits to overcome
  uneconomic growth
• Learn to deal with new scarcities

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The eco-industrial revolution

• Respects the Planets ecological limits and
  recognises the economy as a subsystem of the
  global ecology/energy system
• Redesigns its products, systems and business
  models copying natures functionalities (e.g.
  waste closed loop)

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Technology Policy for the eco-industrial age

• Technology and innovation will play a key role in
  this transformation
• Governments will have to set the framework
  (taxes, incentives, education) for this
  eco-innovation revolution

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Eco-Innovation in business

• Is not business as usual extra product line
  with environmental products or services
• Is business as unusual business for a
  one-planet economy

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Eco-Innovation at the EU

• Eco-innovation is the creation of novel and
  competitively priced goods, processes, systems,
  and procedures designed to satisfy human needs
  and provide a better quality of life for everyone
  with a life-cycle minimal use of natural
  resources per unit output...

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Or in other words

• Relying on traditional environmental
  technologies is just not enough
• Adapt our economies to the carrying capacity of
  our planet

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Move to new level of imagination

• Product innovation electric cars or even new
  transport modes
• Business Model innovation car makers become
  transport service companies utilities

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Receding horizons for technology development

• New techological developments need more energy
  and more use of finite raw materials (cell
  phones)
• Higher oil price will make technology development
  more difficult

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Preferable innovations

• New metrics of sustainability Beyond GDP
• Cradle to cradle product design
• Decentralised, smart Energy Internet
• A new repair industry
• A global institute for the durability of consumer
  goods

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Questionable innovations

• Agrofuels
• Tar sands
• Hydrogen cars
• Nuclear Renaissance
• Carbon capture and storage
• Geo-engineering to combat climate change

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Some good advice

• For a successful technology, reality must take
  precedence over public relations, for Nature
  cannot be fooled.
• Richard Feyman

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Conclusion

• Emerging green technologies a vision too far?
• No, a lack of vision.
• Thanks!

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• Thanks!
• Questions?
• www.footprintnetwork.org
• willy_at_footprintnetwork.org