The title of Saul Griffith's talk at the State of Green Business Forum today was "Being Honest With Ourselves: Putting Numbers Behind Green Business," and he very much did what it said on the program.
The result was a whirlwind 30-minute presentation that looked at his personal contributions to global warming, which then scaled up to the global scale, and explored where solutions might come from.
Now, to preface his discussions of problems and solutions, Griffith laid out the extent to which he's measured his personal impact. It is, in a word, detailed.
This is one you'll want to look at full-sized.
Without even looking at how the world will be powered in the low-carbon future (something that Griffith digs into in granular detail), it's worth noting the changes in culture and consumption that Griffith envisions the world undergoing.
In a nutshell, through the stuff he owns, the places he lives and works, the ways he travels, the food he eats, and the government that may or may not represent him, Griffith uses 18,000 watts of energy per year.
In the New Energy Future that we will need to inhabit in order to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, everyone on Earth will be allotted 2,400 watts.
The only way we'll be able to achieve these goals is to look at the myriad environmental challenges we face as design problems, rather than scientific or logistical problems.
If you think about the world in the old model of thinking about sustainability, Griffith said, "it ignores the social and cultural changes that we need to make. It makes the problem sound like it's just for scientists."
"The sustainability movement needs a Bob Dylan much more than it needs a new physicist," Griffith told the crowd.
Perhaps the largest element of the change in how we live is the one that is most difficult, and which our institutions are least wiling to discuss: We need to consume less, not smarter.
(This is an idea we've covered frequently in recent months; to read more, see "Why We Need a Cultural Revolution in Consumption," by Marc Gunther; "Sustainable Consumption: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?," by Aron Cramer; and "Pondering the Sustainable Consumption Conundrum," by Joel Makower.)
Griffith said that his young son will make all his shopping and personal decisions based on the embedded energy of products. That will change everything, leading to what Griffith calls "the Age of Consequence." In the Age of Consequence, where we need to cut the embedded energy of all our stuff by 90 percent, the only ways to do that is to either consume much, much less, or to make the stuff we consume last much longer.
"You need to make a cell phone that lasts 25 years," Griffith explained; companies that talk about green design but aren't making "heirloom products" just don't understand.
But there are, as with all environmental challenges, business opportunities available in finding solutions. If Coca-Cola or Pepsi shifted the market to sell sugar packets rather than bottles of soda, and used the saved aluminum from cans to build solar, Griffith said it would be "the biggest solar company in the world."
And opportunities like that abound. Look at the pie chart above again. Griffith told the crowd that if your firm is able to figure out how to slice any of those slices by 10 percent, "you've got a billion-dollar market opportunity."
