NC Ch 1 : The Next Industrial Revolution

This is a pretty self-explanatory introductory chapter to Natural Capitalsm (1999).

I wanted to take note of some terms, though.

human capital
financial capital
manufactured capital - infrastructure, machines, tools, factories
natural capital

introduces 4 essential strategies
1. radical resource productivity - factor four, factor ten, "Carnoules declaration"

For the past 300 years or so, industrialization and modern economic practices maximize labor productivity. The authors introduce the idea of changing the focus to maximizing resource productivity.

Important factoid: Individuals do 200 times more work than they did 250 years ago.

They claim that many "subsidies to mining, oil, coal, fishing, and forest industries...are vestigial, some dating as far back as the eighteenth century, when European powers provided entrepreneurs with incentives to find and exploit colonial resources. Taxes extracted from labor subsidize patterns of resource use that in turn displace workers." (p14)

This highlights a key contradiction. One person can do the work of 200 people, and yet there are more than 8 times more people today than in 1750 (6.7 billion now, 790 million in 1750) instead of 200 times less. On the one hand, you could say that the economy has "grown," and there is not a shortage of things to do (ie, maintain the environment). However, it does seem that we are running into having an excess of labor. There does seem to be a growing shortage of things to do that you can get paid for and/or the available labor are not capable of doing higher paid tasks.

2. biomimicry - (in the sense that all processes are cyclical)

"Estimate that in the US only 6 percent of fast flows of materials actually end up in products." (p14)

3. service and flow economy - (change of relationship between consumers and producers) Swiss industry analyst Walter Stahel and German chemist Michael Braungart proposed a new industrial model featuring a service economy wherein consumers obtain services by leasing or renting goods rather than buying them outright.

Key contradiction in selling goods instead of services is that "durables manufacturers have a love-hate relationship with durability." The idea of a service economy would be to stop making things that people don't end up using, a way of reducing waste.(p19)

4. investing in natural capital -

projects:
deprintable and reprintable papers and inks
cellulose-based plastics
landfilled scrap carpets
roofs and windows and roads as solar-electric collectors