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turkeydance (1266624) writes A new study [PDF] from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, argues that using solar and wind energy may be the most expensive alternatives to carbon-based electricity generation, even though they require no expenditures for fuel.....Specifically, this means nuclear power offers a savings of more than $400,000 worth of carbon emissions per megawatt of capacity. Solar saves only $69,000 and wind saves $107,000. An anonymous reader points out that the Rocky Mountain Institute finds the Brookings study flawed in several ways, and offers a rebuttal.

mdsolar writes "In the Dec. 7 edition of The Nation, Christian Parenti details what he considers to be the real problem with nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions in the US: Not the high cost of new nuclear power, but rather the irresponsible relicensing of existing nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The claim is that the relicensed plants — amounting to more than half ot the 104 original 1970s-era nukes in the US — operate like zombies beyond their design lifetimes only because of lax regulation spurred by concern over carbon dioxide emissions. But these plants are actually failing, as demonstrated by a rash of accidents. And some of the ancient plants are now being allowed to operate at 120% of their designed capacity. There is a video interview with Parenti up at Democracy Now."

JoeSilva writes: "I immediately thought this cheaper and faster process for manufacturing composite materials could really lend a hand to the goals of HyperCars a-la the Rock Mountain Institute folks, and Reusable Space Launchers a-la X-33/VentureStar, Roton, and others. The RMI folks have been advocating use of carbon fiber composites, but have noted that Aluminum has seen some favor with the Auto manufacturers, and one reason for that has been cost. The X-33 program was set way back due to a manufacturing failure in making what they claimed was the worlds largest carbon fiber composite fuel tank...in fact I recall reading that there was no AutoClave in the world big enough for the tank size for VentureStar. The X-33 was a smaller scale test vehicle...not a launcher. The new process can make whole boats and airplane fuselages."

From somehere just off the beaten path of SciFi, programming and encryption reviews, Kevin Whilden of Your Planet Earth submitted this review of Natural Capitalism, a book aimed at reconciling nature lovers with free market enthusiasts. The book's basic ideas may be old hat to many libertarians and other free-marketeers, but are phrased in way that seems aimed at a fairly conventional lay audience. How do you feel about the connections he draws between open source software and the eco-economy? What is the best economic atmosphere for a healthy environment, and is it also the best one for free software? How realistic is the Rocky Mountain Institute's analysis? Natural Capitalism author Paul Hawken, Amory Lovens, L. Hunter Lovens pages 416 publisher Rocky Mountain Institute rating 9 reviewer Kevin Whilden ISBN 0316353167 summary Treatise on saving the Earth through enlightened capitalism

Introduction to the book Natural Capitalism is as important to the environmental movement as Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar is to the Open Source Software. Natural Capitalism describes a new philosophy of doing business that runs counter to the very-well-established capitalist establishment. The book that summarizes and integrates complex concepts into an easy to read, coherent, and convincing whole, with the ultimate effect of raising consciousness and discussion to an entirely new level. Those are strong words, but the book really is that good. As a bonus, there are many similarities between the state of natural capitalism today and the state of Linux and OSS two years ago. Natural capitalism is fighting for acceptance in the marketplace, much like Linux did, and environmentalists and would-be natural capitalists would do very well to study how the OSS movement "won" its marketplace victory.

Natural capitalism is an alternative to so-called "conventional capitalism." They both share many aspects, and natural capitalism is nothing at all like Socialism or Communism. Natural capitalism is designed to fix some of the most significant problems with conventional capitalism. These problems are created because conventional capitalism takes a short-sighted approach to the environment and the value of the health and happiness of people that live within it. In other words, CC favors short-term profits at the expense of the environment and people's lives, while NC makes the contrary claim that short and long term profits can be equal if not greater when a higher value is placed on the environment and happy workers. Does anyone lose in the latter scenario?

The book itself describes various aspects of natural capitalism that must all work together to simultaneously protect the planet Earth and ensure that the global economy will not collapse. Capitalism and environmentalism are not mutually exclusive ideals, and the sooner everyone realizes this, the sooner we can all get to work on actively stopping global warming, ecosystem collapse, air and water pollution, and other environmental problems. Discussing the nature, magnitude, and urgency of these problems is the realm of many other books, scientific articles, non-profit action alerts, government and agencies -- Natural Capitalism (the book) discusses these problems only enough to talk about the revolutionary solutions that natural capitalism (the theory) provides. If you want to learn more about the problems, then you should check out my Web site Your Planet Earth, which is a slash-based site devoted to discussing environmental issues with a scientific perspective.

Part of the real attraction of natural capitalism is that some companies have implemented its principles with great success, so it is proven to work (much like OSS and Linux in the early stages). But the other half of the attraction is that it provides an essential piece of the solution to the world's environmental problems: market-based incentives to protect the environment. Our current economy will be crippled, if not destroyed, if we continue to ignore our present environmental destruction. This is because our current economic and social systems are based on obtaining resources from the natural world (e.g. food, air. water), and they cannot exist independently it.

Here are the four underlying principles of natural capitalism that can be developed into an environmentally friendly and profitable economic system.

The four tenets of natural capitalism

1. Radical Resource Productivity

   Just as the Industrial Revolution allowed one man to do the work of twenty with the help of modern machinery, so can we continue to improve processes and machinery that produce more work from less energy and resulting in less waste. This is not new concept, but the book describes a way to do this in an environmentally friendly way. What is more, it talks about how to achieve revolutionary gains in productivity vs. merely evolutionary gains using the so-called "whole-systems" approach to solving problems. An example of this is a building where the building was designed around the plumbing as opposed to the conventional practice of designing the plumbing around the building. This resulted in much smaller pumps and 90% lower energy use. This order of magnitude increase in efficiency constitutes a revolutionary gain in resource productivity. The book describes examples of how this was achieved in many ways, illustrating the contention that in natural capitalism, one gain always begets another.

   Another cool concept of natural capitalism is that radical achieving resource productivity results in the counter-intuitive result of creating more highly paying skilled jobs. Jobs are not lost because manufacturing processes become more efficient. Rather jobs are created by trying to figure out ways to make these radical resource gains. Instead of raising the bottom line a little bit by slashing jobs, the principles of natural capitalism raise the bottom line dramatically by hiring people to make whole systems more efficient.

2. Biomimicry

   We still have a lot to learn from how nature produces advanced materials and solves problems with waste. For example, not even our most advanced chemistry or engineering processes, which typically use extremely high temperatures (1000+ C) and produce much toxic waste, can even come close to creating materials as strong and light as spider silk, or as tough as abalone shells. Spiders produce their silk at roughly room temperature, out of materials that are no more toxic than the juice of crickets and bugs; while abalones make their shells in 50F sea water. We would do well to set our industrial goals to mimic the spider and other natural processes.

   Another important aspect of biomimicry is termed "closing the loop". This means creating circular recycling streams of materials in our society, because in nature, nothing is wasted, and everything is recycled. In nature, there are no toxic by-products that require superfund cleanup and no overflowing landfills that leach carcinogenic pollutants into our drinking water. Natural processes exist in a circular fashion such that the waste from one processes is the input to another process. Companies that develop these and other biomimicry techniques will produce better products from cheaper and more readily available materials, with fewer or no toxic by-products that would otherwise cost money to clean up. The book is filled with practical examples of how this works.

3. Service and Flow economy

   In the service and flow economy, the ownership of goods and services is reversed such that the company that produces a good owns that good throughout its entire lifetime. For example, when you buy carpeting for an office, you wouldn't own the physical carpet fibers, but you would own a contract that requires the carpet company to provide the service of carpeting in your office. After all, all you care about is having carpet to walk on and look at, and you would really rather not be responsible for repairing, replacing, or recycling it. The beauty of this service relationship is that the company that provides you with the carpet service has incentive to give you a longer lasting, higher quality product, because it costs them money every time they have to bring in a bunch of workers to replace it. The carpet company has incentive to innovate in its product design to follow the previous two principles of natural capitalism, because the problem of disposing of used carpet is its own problem. This principle can be extended in many ways, including recently designed "industrial ecology" business parks, designed to form a closed-loop mini-ecology: one business' waste output is another business' raw material input, just like in nature.

4. Invest in Natural Capital

   From the book:

   "Natural capital can be viewed as the sum total of the ecological systems that support life, different from human-made capital in that natural capital cannot be produced by human activity. It is easy to overlook because natural capital is the pond in which we swim, and, like fish, we are not aware we're in the water. Natural capital comes about not by singular miracles, but as the product of yeoman work carried out by thousands upon thousands of species in complex interactions. These interactions between plants and animals, in conjunction with the natural rhythms of weather, water, and tides, provide the basis for the cycle of life, a cycle that is ancient, complex, and highly interconnected. When one of its components - say, the carbon cycle - is disrupted, it in turn affects the oceans, soils, rainfall, heat, wind, disease, and tundras to name but some of the other components. Today, every part of the earth is influenced by human activity, and the consequences are unknowable. As biologist E. O. Wilson has commented, the multitudinous diversity of obscure species don't need us. Can we say with certainty the same about them?"

   The above is a number of excerpts from chapter 6, pasted together seamlessly, because their words define natural capitalism better than anything I might describe. Implicit in their description is that humans are systematically destroying the many ecosystems of the earth, either to make a quick few bucks, and/or because we foolishly do not realize the destructive nature of our actions. Yet we are 100% dependent on the natural services that the earth provides, such as fresh oxygen from plant respiration, clean water produced from healthy watersheds, and food from the earth. These things are not trivial -- try to imagine life without them.

   Yet in our messed up economy, the natural world remains valueless until it is chopped down, dug up, mined, drilled, dammed, paved, developed, and/or otherwise destroyed.

   The services that natural capital provides are priceless, yet scientists have indeed tried to quantify their value. In a landmark paper, they calculated the value of biological services flowing directly into society from the stock of natural capital as $36 trillion in 1999 dollars (Costanza et. Al. "The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital", 1997, Nature 387:253-260). Compare this with the gross world product of $39 trillion, and you get an idea of just how much of our economy exists because of the services nature provides.

Other neat ideas from the book The book has some very interesting ideas on how our society can place a much higher value on natural capital that will eliminate waste and destruction of our ecosystems. One of these ideas is totally eliminating personal income tax, and instead taxing the use or waste of natural resource; the book does a great job of justifying that decidedly radical concept. The basic idea is that things have changed drastically since the early stages of the industrial revolution when labor was scarce and natural capital was abundant. Way back then, it made sense to tax what was scarce. Now however, labor is incredibly abundant (6 billion and counting), and natural capital is the resource that is becoming increasingly scarce. Considering that natural capital is ultimately priceless, we should tax those people and corporations that destroy it. This provides strong incentive to conserve and protect natural capital, which is what we all ultimately want and need. Currently, the U.S. gives away its natural capital for a song and dance (e.g. Mining Act of 1872, US Forest Service, etc ...) to corporations which then rape and pillage the environment to make a fortune for their shareholders.

Conclusion This is a landmark book that summarizes and integrates many different theories about how to practically achieve an environmentally friendly economy. It describes the theory and practice of natural capitalism, including what it is, why we need it, and why and how it works. There are countless interesting ideas put forth in this book, with many chapters devoted to the " what, why, and how" questions in specific areas of our economy. These areas include automobiles, efficient building design, the pulp and paper industry, the farm industry, fresh water supply, and climate change. Best of all, it never loses focus on how to implement the changes proposed. People are not very receptive to "doom and gloom" predictions of impending catastrophe unless there are tangible solutions to prevent it. Natural Capitalism has so many real-world examples of its principles in action that it's hard to disbelieve the primary message: protecting the environment is damn good for business. As you read the book, you may end up shaking your head, as I did, wondering why this concept has taken so long to develop. You may also realize that these principles present an incredible business opportunity for those who are smart enough to become the early adopters.

You can learn more about who these people are on the book's homepage, www.naturalcapitalism.org.

Buy Natural Capitalism at ThinkGeek.