Decoupling wealth from resource consumption is the core business of the (United Nations) International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, decoupling can be seen as the biggest challenge facing civilization in this century.
Factor Five, the new book by Ernst von Weizsäcker and Charlie Hargroves, shows that prosperity can be created with one fifth of the energy, water, and minerals inputs typically required for today's clumsy technologies. That's decoupling by a factor of five. And it is only the beginning.
Major policy shifts are necessary, however, to make the shift happen. Markets will continue to tell the deceptive story of the nearly unlimited availability of resources. The reason is that technical progress in mining has so far outpaced inherent scarcities. This deceptive story is likely to go on for another 50 or 100 years. If we wait until the signals of scarcity become overwhelming, time will be much too short to develop new technology and a civilization based necessarily on maximized resource productivity. The state and the international community of states will have to interfere in the markets and artificially make resources ever more expensive. It can be done a such a slow pace that no social hardship occurs.
22 янв 2010
