Re: [GBlist] house thoughts

[Sarah Holland/David Foley <hollandfoley@acadia.net>]

on 01/10/2002 6:37 PM, Ralph Bicknese at ralph.bicknese@christnerinc.com
wrote:

> David:
> 
> I have tremendous respect for Donella H. Meadows and take her writings to
> heart.  I will have to find the article you mentioned.
> 
> Last Februaruy I spoke with William McDonough and the work he had recently
> embarked on with Ford Motor Company on the redesign of Ford's Rouge River
> plant.  Bill said he felt it was possible to reduce the energy and materials
> input that goes into manufacturing an automobile by 5000 times.  That is
> FIVE-THOUSAND.  I remain stunned.
> 
> This example is intended to show what is possible.   McDonough and company
> examined the entire chain of manufacture from extracting the raw materials
> to assembling a car to reusing the fragments remaining after the initial
> process.
> 
> Let us admit that it is possible the extremely intelligent Mr. McDonough is
> off little in his calculations and it is only possible to reduce the input
> by 500 times. What then?  Even if one could reduce the input by a factor of
> 50 imagine how it would revolutionize the automobile industry.  Imagine the
> impact on all other industries.  Imagine how much cleaner the world would
> be.  The possibilities are truly amazing even if the inputs could be reduced
> by a factor of 10.
> 
> Let us hope that Ford has the wisdom and guts to go ahead with this kind of
> revolutionary process. I can hardly wait to see the results.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ralph Bicknese

Hi Ralph,

I agree with you wholeheartedly that the kind of elegant efficiency that
McDonough, Lovins, Hawkin and others advocate is one of the necessary
conditions of a sustainable world.  Gosh, I'd better agree, because I've
earned my bread for the past 22 years trying to apply this kind of thinking
to the built environment.  But I don't think that doing this is sufficient.

Efficiency will not indefinitely support a population that doubles roughly
each 40 years, as ours currently does.  (It could, however, under the right
circumstances, help provide the simple decencies of life that often persuade
people to have smaller families.)  Efficiency also will not indefinitely
support a human economy that doubles the amount of resources it consumes,
and waste it generates, roughly every 20 years, as ours currently does.
Think of the physical stuff that flows through the human economy!  Whether
it's the number of cars on the road, the fish we catch, the trees we cut,
the pesticides we spray or the minerals we mine, and we double their number
roughly every 20 years.  Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four -
well, there is no technical solution to that.

I have a Danish friend, Jorgen Norgard, who's a professor at the Technical
University of Denmark at Lyngby.  He and his colleagues have done a number
of studies analyzing electrical consumption in Europe.  They've found that
even if you assume the most efficient technologies imaginable, Europe cannot
achieve a sustainable electrical supply system UNLESS there is also a
personal, ethical decision on the part of Europeans to be satisfied with a
finite set of electrical appliances.  The efficient technologies are useless
without satisfaction with "enough."  If technological improvements only
serve to remove a limit, then growth in consumption will ultimately
overwhelm the technical fix.

There are plenty of people who believe that human ingenuity will always
outpace physical limits.  I'm not one of them, but I still love nifty
technology and elegant efficiency, and I hope, with you, that Ford will
revolutionize its manufacturing processes.  I hope that Fred Unger is right,
too, and we'll see a quick transition from fossil-fuel-powered transport to
fuel cells.  But I still think we're going to need trains.

Thanks for your thoughtful postings, Ralph.

Best wishes,

David

-- 
Holland & Foley Building Design L.L.C.
232 Beech Hill Rd.
Northport, Maine 04849 USA
p: (207) 338-9869 f: (207) 338-9859 e: hollandfoley@acadia.net


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