Stranger than science fiction.

Extraordinarily concentrated energy flows invite and reward devastating attack. In our 1982 Pentagon study Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security, we found that a handful of people could shut down three-quarters of the oil and gas supplies to the Eastern states (without leaving Louisiana), cut the power to any major city, or kill millions by crashing an airplane into a nuclear power plant. All of that remains true today. Expanding such centralized and vulnerable energy systems would threaten our national security.

Fundamentally, energy security is less about foreign vs. domestic sources, or a shortage of giant energy facilities, than about the basic architecture of the energy infrastructure. A system is secure not because it’s American or big, but because it’s designed to make large-scale failures impossible and local failures benign. Energy security starts with using less energy far more efficiently to do the same tasks. Then it gets that energy from sources that are inherently invulnerable because they’re dispersed, diverse, and increasingly renewable.

This strategy doesn’t cost more; indeed, it’s already winning in the marketplace. For example, central power stations, no matter how well engineered, can’t supply really cheap and reliable electricity. The power lines that deliver the electricity cost more than the generators, and cause almost all power failures. Onsite and neighborhood micropower is cheaper, eliminates grid losses and glitches, and harnesses waste heat — so savvy investors favor it.

Fuels Paradise

Of course, oil from the Middle East is a problem. Getting oil from the unstable Persian Gulf leaves America less secure and yoked to unattractive regimes. Although only 22 percent of oil imports come from the Gulf (three-fifths come from the Western Hemisphere), decreasing that dependence is wise. But this requires investing in the fastest and cheapest energy system, so we buy the most solution with every year and every dollar spent. We don’t need just another crude-oil source, but an inherently secure supply chain delivering fuel safely all the way to the customer.

Energy efficiency is the rapid-deployment energy resource. Compared to 1975, America used 40 percent less energy and 49 percent less oil last year to produce each dollar of gross domestic product. Those savings are now the nation’s largest “source” of energy — five times domestic oil output. Most were achieved in just six years, from 1979 to 1985, when GDP grew 16 percent, total oil use fell 15 percent, and Gulf imports fell 87 percent. Maintaining that pace could have eliminated all Gulf imports after 1985.

Get hyper about cars of the future.

Photo: RMI.

Modern efficiency technologies can put another $300 billion a year back in Americans’ pockets. A light-vehicle fleet that was just 2.7 miles per gallon more efficient would eliminate Gulf imports. Saving energy is the fastest way to blunt OPEC’s market power, beat down prices, and expand the share of energy supply from invulnerable sources. And national security would benefit from improvements in fuel-efficiency in another respect: The Defense Science Board, an influential advisor to the Defense secretary, recently identified billions of dollars of military fuel-saving opportunities.

Then there are new ways to supply fuel that are secure, fast, and competitive. Done right, abundant farm, forest, and even urban wastes can yield clean liquid fuels while protecting topsoil, farmers, rural culture, climate, and prosperity. Producing such biofuels locally bypasses vulnerable pipelines and provides more jobs. Another attractive innovation is fuel cells that use natural gas or renewable energy. (Manhattan’s Conde-Nast Building outperformed its rivals by saving half its energy and incorporating the two most reliable known power sources — fuel cells and solar cells — all at no extra cost.) Together, these proven alternatives can displace oil promptly, securely, profitably — and, in time, completely.

The 800-mile-long Chapstik

In contrast, such options as drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge decrease security. If the refuge held economically recoverable oil (unlikely and in any case a decade away, according to the official data), then delivering that oil by its only route, the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System, would undercut the anti-terrorist goals of the Defense Authorization Act. It would make the pipeline the fattest energy-terrorist target in the country — akin, writes Bill McKibben, to pinning a “Kick Me” sign on Uncle Sam’s backside.

In the pipeline of fire.

Photo: NREL.

The pipeline would carry a domestic energy source all right, but it’s frighteningly insecure. It’s mostly aboveground, accessible to attackers, and can become impossible to repair in winter. If pumping stations or key facilities at either end were disabled, 9 million barrels of hot oil could congeal in one winter week into an 800-mile-long Chapstik. The Army, U.S. General Accounting Office, and Senate Judiciary Committee found the pipeline indefensible. On Oct. 4, a drunk shut it down for 60 hours with one rifle shot. It had previously been sabotaged, shot at on over 50 occasions, and incompetently bombed twice. A disgruntled engineer’s more sophisticated plot to blow up three critical points with 14 bombs, then profit from oil futures trading, was thwarted by luck two years ago. He was an amiable bungler compared with the Sept. 11 attackers, whose Algerian colleagues have just threatened to blow up a major gas pipeline to Southern Europe. On the weekend of Oct. 26, Midwest police detained, and later released, six suspicious Middle Eastern men who had photographs of the pipeline.

Both Gulf oil and the vulnerable, rapidly aging Trans-Alaska Pipeline imperil national energy security. Both should be replaced with faster, cheaper, inherently secure energy efficiency and a distributed domestic supply system. That is how to design an energy system that terrorists can’t shut off — and a durable foundation for an America that would no longer be a fragile power.

For further details, please visit the Rocky Mountain Institute’s library of articles on energy and energy security. An earlier version of this piece was published on TomPaine.com.

Natural Capitalism
By Paul Hawken,
Amory Lovins,
and L. Hunter Lovins
Little, Brown,
1999, 396 pages

Imagine for a moment a world where cities have become peaceful and serene because cars and buses are whisper quiet, vehicles exhaust only water vapor, and parks and greenways have replaced unneeded urban freeways. OPEC has ceased to function because the price of oil has fallen to five dollars a barrel, but there are few buyers for it because cheaper and better ways now exist to get the services people once turned to oil to provide. Living standards for all people have dramatically improved, particularly for the poor and those in developing countries. Involuntary unemployment no longer exists, and income taxes have largely been eliminated. Houses, even low-income housing units, can pay part of their mortgage costs by the energy they produce; there are few if any active landfills; worldwide forest cover is increasing; dams are being dismantled; atmospheric C02 levels are decreasing for the first time in two hundred years; and effluent water leaving factories is cleaner than the water coming into them. Industrialized countries have reduced resource use by 80 percent while improving the quality of life.

Among these technological changes, there are important social changes. The frayed social nets of Western countries have been repaired. With the explosion of family-wage jobs, welfare demand has fallen. A progressive and active union movement has taken the lead to work with business, environmentalists, and government to create “just transitions” for workers as society phases out coal, nuclear energy, and oil. In communities and towns, churches, corporations, and labor groups promote a new living-wage social contract as the least expensive way to ensure the growth and preservation of valuable social capital. Is this the vision of a utopia? In fact, the changes described here could come about in the decades to come as the result of economic and technological trends already in place.

Our new book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, is about these and many other possibilities.

It is about the possibilities that will arise from the birth of a new type of industrialism — which we call natural capitalism — one that differs in its philosophy, goals, and fundamental processes from the industrial system that is the standard today. In the next century, as human population doubles and the resources available per person drop by one-half to three-fourths, a remarkable transformation of industry and commerce can occur. Through this transformation, society will be able to create a vital economy that uses radically less material and energy. This economy can free up resources, reduce taxes on personal income, increase per-capita spending on social ills (while simultaneously reducing those ills), and begin to restore the damaged environment of the earth. These necessary changes done properly can promote economic efficiency, ecological conservation, and social equity.

Capitalism As If Living Systems Mattered

Natural capitalism and the possibility of a new industrial system are based on a very different mind-set and set of values than conventional capitalism. Its fundamental assumptions include the following:

• The environment is not a minor factor of production but rather is “an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy.”
• The limiting factor to future economic development is the availability and functionality of natural capital, in particular, life-supporting services that have no substitutes and currently have no market value.
• Misconceived or badly designed business systems, population growth, and wasteful patterns of consumption are the primary causes of the loss of natural capital, and all three must be addressed to achieve a sustainable economy.
• Future economic progress can best take place in democratic, market-based systems of production and distribution in which all forms of capital are fully valued, including human, manufactured, financial, and natural capital.
• One of the keys to the most beneficial employment of people, money, and the environment is radical increases in resource productivity.
• Human welfare is best served by improving the quality and flow of desired services delivered, rather than by merely increasing the total dollar flow.
• Economic and environmental sustainability depends on redressing global inequities of income and material well-being. The best long-term environment for commerce is provided by true democratic systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business.

Our book introduces four central strategies of natural capitalism that are a means to enable countries, companies, and communities to operate by behaving as if all forms of capital were valued. Ensuring a perpetual annuity of valuable social and natural processes to serve a growing population is not just a prudent investment but a critical need in the coming decades. Doing so can avert scarcity, perpetuate abundance, and provide a solid basis for social development; it is the basis of responsible stewardship and prosperity for the next century and beyond.

1. Radical Resource Productivity

Radically increased resource productivity is the cornerstone of natural capitalism because using resources more effectively has three significant benefits: It slows resource depletion at one end of the value chain, lowers pollution at the other end, and provides a basis to increase worldwide employment with meaningful jobs. The result can be lower costs for business and society, which no longer has to pay for the chief causes of ecosystem and social disruption. Nearly all environmental and social harm is an artifact of the uneconomically wasteful use of human and natural resources, but radical resource productivity strategies can nearly halt the degradation of the biosphere, make it more profitable to employ people, and thus safeguard against the loss of vital living systems and social cohesion.

2. Biomimicry

Reducing the wasteful throughput of materials — indeed, eliminating the very idea of waste — can be accomplished by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines that change the nature of industrial processes and materials, enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles, and often the elimination of toxicity.

3. Service and Flow Economy

This calls for a fundamental change in the relationship between producer and consumer, a shift from an economy of goods and purchases to one of service and flow. In essence, an economy that is based on a flow of economic services can better protect the ecosystem services upon which it depends. This will entail a new perception of value, a shift from the acquisition of goods as a measure of affluence to an economy where the continuous receipt of quality, utility, and performance promotes well-being. This concept offers incentives to put into practice the first two innovations of natural capitalism by restructuring the economy to focus on relationships that better meet customers’ changing value needs and to reward automatically both resource productivity and closed-loop cycles of materials use.

4. Investing in Natural Capital

This works toward reversing worldwide planetary destruction through reinvestments in sustaining, restoring, and expanding stocks of natural capital, so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resourc
es.

All four changes are interrelated and interdependent; all four generate numerous benefits and opportunities in markets, finance, materials, distribution, and employment. Together, they can reduce environmental harm, create economic growth, and increase meaningful employment.

This is an excerpt from Natural Capitalism, used courtesy of Time Warner Bookmark. © 1999 by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter L. Lovins.