Totten Elsevier Earth Flourishing Sustainably in Anthropocene? Known Possibilities Unknown Probabilities 79p July 2018

Flourishing Sustainably in the Anthropocene?
Known Possibilities and Unknown

Probabilities
Michael P Totten, AssetsforLife LLC, Denver, CO, United States
© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Part 1. Is “Sustainable” Attainable? 3

A Note on Terminology 3
Competing Narratives 3
Positive Progress Trend 3
Pessimistic Trend—Planetary Boundaries 4
Earth’s climate dominant states 5
Humans incapable of planetary-scale changes? 6
Ecological Footprint 6
Evolving Towards a Stationary (But Dynamic) State? 6
Sustaining Earth’s Biodiversity Richness 6
Manifesting Wisdom to Flourish 8
Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s 8
Life support systems in the 21st century 8
Path Dependency and Lock-In 8
Carbon Lock-In 9
Carbon Conundrum 9
Solar Fusion Solution 9
Solar Power Internet 10
Sustainability Dilemma 10
Defining Sustainability 11
Weak Versus Strong Sustainability 11
Framing Sustainability 11
Sustainability Principles 12
No Limits to Learning 13
Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) 13
Evolutionary Quandary 13
The SuperExponentiator: General Purpose Technology 15
Hyperbolic Growth, GPTs and Cultural Evolution 15
Combustion complexity 15
Technosphere 17
NPP (net primary productivity) 17
Negative externalities 17
Unpriced natural capital 18
Beyond Natural Catastrophic Events 18
Human-Driven Catastrophic Events 18
Trouble in Sustainable Cities 22
Scaling and Accelerating Sustainability 26
Using Information to Displace Energy and Materials 26
China Energy Efficiency Opportunities 32
Efficiency First and Foremost 33
Efficiency Unbound and Rebound 33
Efficiency is the Backbone of Economic Growth 34
Bottom of the Pyramid Opportunities 34
Power—Synergism of Energy Efficiency and Solar Power 34
Water—Energy Efficiency and Safe, Clean Water 35
Communications—Mobile Phones Going the Distance 35
Mobility—Solar Powered Electric Bicycles 35
Bottom of the Pyramid Policies 36
From Centralized and Hierarchical to Distributed and Lateral 36
Mega-Projects and Mega-Losses 37
Blockchain Ledger 37
GAIN—Genetics, Auto-Robotics, Informatics and Nanotechnologies 37
More Information and Knowledge, Less Energy and Materials 38
Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-409548-9.10910-8 1

2 Flourishing Sustainably in the Anthropocene? Known Possibilities and Unknown Probabilities
Faustian Bargains? 38
Consumption: Consumptive or Consummatum 38
Deep Learning, Deep Play, Deep Work—The New Lifespan 39
Mindshift for Sustenance 39
Economics (Household Stewardship) for Sustainably Flourishing 40
Cities as Muddlers 40
Black Swans 40
Life-Long Learning Imperative 41
From Peripheral to Central 41
Quadruple Helix of Knowledge Innovation Systems 43
Quadruple Helix Facilitated by Internet Platform Networks 43
Part 2: Attaining Sustainability at City Scale 43
Networking City Assets 43
From pipes to networks 43
Cognitive biases and willful ignorance—Insurmountable or malleable? 44
Mega-Transformations Opportunities at City Scale 44
Energy 44
Efficiency—The Low-Hanging Fruit 45
Solar PV and Wind Power 45
100% Renewable Powered Global Economy 45
2030 and 2050 roadmaps 45
Multiple Ancillary Benefits 46
RandD network 47
Learning effects 47
Utility regulatory transformation 47
Nutritious, Secure, Sustainable Food 48
Climate Impacts on Food Security and Quality 48
Perverse Biofuel Subsidies Drive GHG Emissions 48
Carbon-Negative Biomass on Abandoned Lands 48
Greater Resilience Through Polycultures of Perennial Grasslands 49
Feed and Fuel Farm Subsidies 49
Agriculture subsidies contribute to obesity epidemic 49
Agriculture for direct human food consumption 49
Mini, Milli, and Micro Animal Food and Feed 49
Long-Term Farm Policies 50
From Burning Field Straw to Building Efficient Strawbale Schools 51
Negative emission technologies (NET) 51
City Garden-Farming for Health, Well-Being, and Food Security 51
Slow farming, gardening and food 52
More sustainably flourishing landscapes 53
Kinder gartens for life-long learning and earning 53
Cooperative garden and minifarming platform 54
Mobility Access 54
Social costs of mobility 54
Sprawl versus smart growth 55
Social cost and risks of CO2 emissions 55
Social costs of military for energy security 55
Transportation Business-as-Usual (BAU) Costs and Risks to 2050 55
Mobility Solution Space 55
Mobile Travel by Phone 56
Location efficient mortgages and smart growth communities 56
Mobility Management (MM) 56
Challenges of generating and sustaining aesthetic cities 57
Collaborative Mobility in the Sharing Economy 57
Peer-to-peer ridesharing 57
On-demand driverless electric vehicles 58
Rethinking Transportation—Radical Disruption 58
Policymakers can accelerate or retard transition 58
China policymakers 58
Flourishing Sustainably in the Anthropocene? Known Possibilities and Unknown Probabilities 3
City-Scale Sustainably Flourishing Solutions 59

Fractal-like networks 59
Antifragile city design 59
Network platforms for cultivating human, social, civic, knowledge and natural capital 60
COINs—collaborative/collective intelligence networks 60
Affording and Financing a Sustainably Flourishing Planet 60
National-level Economics 61
City-Scale Economics 61
Community cooperatives 62
Financing a Global Deal for Nature 62
Conserving and Protecting Nature 62
Global deal for nature 63
Cities Scaling Solar Power Internet ASSET Platforms 63
COINing ASSETs 63
Bricolage Innovation 64
Geospatial visual mapping 64
Road-map creation from tech-knowledge for leveraging local assets 65
Action mapping—Getting it accomplished 65
Campuses and cities as test-beds 65
References 66
Further Reading 78
Part 1. Is “Sustainable” Attainable?
“Sustainability is Dead,” declare pessimists, reluctantly or staunchly (Anonymous, n.d.; Southwood, 2017; Liu, 2013; Terborgh,
2004). “Long Live Sustainability” rejoin optimists, hopefully or steadfast (AtKisson, 2006). Sustainability is a nonsensical issue,
retort skeptics (Beckerman, 1994). “Sustainability, not a problem,” pronounces the techno-idealistic singularitarians
(Kurzweil, 2006).
There is longstanding, if not unresolvable debate over sustainability, conventionally polarized under various names—
pessimistic Malthusians versus optimistic Cornucopians, Cassandran versus Panglossian advocates, Doomsters versus Boomsters,
Limits-to-Growth (Meadows et al., 1972; Meadows, 2002) versus Ultimate Resources (Simon, 1981), growth addiction versus
endless growth, degrowth (Jackson, 2016) versus end of doom (Bailey, 2015), Beyond Growth (Washington and Twomey, 2016)
versus Infinite Growth (Dyson, 2004), etc. So what can we say about a “sustainably flourishing” Anthropocene epoch? Is the issue
hopelessly schizophrenic (Boyd, 2015), or hopefully reconcilable?
A Note on Terminology
A diversity of terms and definitions have been proposed for describing the essential or salient properties of planetary well-being,
encompassing humanity, biodiversity, and biosphere integrity, now and over future generations. No one definition, let alone a
single word, adequately captures this complex process. Sustainability is a primary term of long-time use, but is admittedly so pliant
that it allows a multitude of, sometimes contradictory, interpretations. Concatenations of terms used by some writers to contex-
tualize the spatiotemporal complexity, for example, ‘cleaner, greener, safer, smarter, more secure and resilient, and ecologically
sustainable’ is unwieldy and still incomplete. These various words are used throughout the paper, fully recognizing that none of
them capture but some aspect or dimension of a far more complex dynamic continuously evolving through time.
Competing Narratives
Both sides of the sustainability debate marshal detailed evidence, leaving citizens, specialists and experts alike very confused.
Positive Progress Trend

For example, the 200-year retrospect of Our World in Data compiled by Max Roser clearly shows very positive trends in the steep
declines in extreme poverty and child mortality, and steady rises in basic education, literacy, vaccination and democracy
(Roser, 2017).
Michael Sherman, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Lead Humanity
Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (Shermer, 2015), extends these positive trends, emphasizing:
[G]overnance (the rise of liberal democracies and the decline of theocracies and autocracies): economics (broad property rights and the freedom to trade
goods and services with others without oppressive restrictions); rights (to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship,
assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness); prosperity (the explosion of wealth and increasing affluence for more people in more places;
and the decline of poverty worldwide in which a smaller percentage of the world’s people are impoverished than at any time in history); health and
longevity (more people in more places more of the time live longer, healthier lives than at any time in the past); war (a smaller percentage of people die as
a result of violent conflict today than at any time since our species began); slavery (outlawed everywhere in the world and practiced in only a few places
in the form of sexual slavery and slave labor that are now being targeted for abolition); homicide (rates have fallen precipitously from over 100 murders
per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to less than 1 per 100,000 today in the industrial West, and the chances of an individual dying violently is the
lowest it has ever been in history); rape and sexual assault (trending downward, and while still too prevalent, it is outlawed by all Western states and
increasingly prosecuted); judicial restraint (torture and the death penalty have been almost universally outlawed by states, and where it is still legal is less
frequently practiced); judicial inequality (citizens of nations are treated more equally under the law than at any time in the past); and, civility (people are
kinder, more civilized, and less violent to one another than ever before). (p. 4)
The ultimate optimist, cornucopian advocate Julian Simon, Professor of Business Administration, has made extremely positive
pronouncements, boldly stating (Simon, 1999):
This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time,
indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards. . . We now have in our
hands—really, in our libraries—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.
Julian Simon passed away in 1998, while his belief in ultimate progress has been carried forward, perhaps most notably by
political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg is renown or notorious, depending upon one’s
perspective, for his provocative claims similar to Simon’s (Lomborg, n.d.):
We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN—we see many more, but the
number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about
fifty-fold over the past century. . .When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such
pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity’s lot has improved dramatically.
Both Simon and Lomborg have generated substantial controversy and criticism by a wide range of the scientific community
(Daly, 2003; Friel, 2000), while also being strongly embraced by supporters of their viewpoints (Visser, 2009).
Pessimistic Trend—Planetary Boundaries

In 2004, the International Geosphere-Biosphere programme (IGBP) released Global Change and the Earth System, a landmark
synthesis that concluded humanity was now the primary driver of change at the planetary scale. Moreover, that the planet is now
operating in a “no analogue” state. Based on a wide range of measurements conducted over several decades of the Earth system’s
biological, chemical and physical processes and their interactions with human systems, over millennia to the present, led the
scientific body to state that Earth has “moved well outside the range of natural variability in the last half million years at least”
(Steffen et al., 2004). Planetary Dashboard visually captures these startling changes in 24 indicators (Fig. 1).
The IGBP was established in 1987 by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). ICSU is the coordinating body of
national science organizations. It was the intention for IGBP to “provide essential scientific leadership and knowledge of the Earth
system to help guide society onto a sustainable pathway during rapid global change” (IGBP, 2010).
In the wake of these compelling findings, a contingent of Earth System and environmental scientists further refined the
indicators into nine planetary boundaries. They proposed the framework of planetary boundaries “designed to define a ‘safe
operating space for humanity’ for the international community, including governments at all levels, international organizations,
civil society, the scientific community and the private sector, as a precondition for sustainable development” (Planetary
Boundaries, n.d.).
The key insight that seemed lost on or ignored by the cornucopian visionaries who cite the steady progression of historically
positive trends, is the great shift from linear to exponential growth rates. What scientists call The Great Acceleration (Broadgate,
2015). For most of humanity’s roughly 80,000-year presence on Earth, changes wrought by humans occurred slowly and linearly.
This pattern accelerated 10,000 years ago with humans creating agriculture in the wake of the interglacial and the beginning of what
is known as the Holocene epoch. Further accelerations occurred with the advent of the industrial revolution, which most historians
attribute to the invention of the steam engine in the 1700s, while other scholars, notably Lewis Mumford, argue that it began with
the clock (and the division of reality into minutes and seconds) developed by Medieval monks at the start of the 14th century.
But The Great Acceleration signaled the shift into exponential growth rates that have subsequently reverberated at a planetary
scale, beginning around the mid-20th Century. Overall, the hyperbolic growth in population, economic expansion, and the
immensity of humanity’s planet-wide technosphere have created a fragile dominion poised for extreme disruptions and disastrous
calamities throughout the geosphere and biosphere (Rockström et al., 2009a; Rockström et al., 2009b; Barnosky et al., 2012; Steffen
et al., 2015; Lenton et al., 2008). The scientific findings on planetary boundaries are in stark contrast to the cornucopian vision.
At the top of the litany of unprecedented challenges of global and historical magnitude include climate destabilization, marine
acidification, species extinctions, ecosystem collapses (from deforestation, soil depletion, desertification, coral bleaching), and
Fig. 1 Great acceleration of earth system processes. Source: Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney O., and Ludwig, C. (2015). The trajectory of the
Anthropocene: the great acceleration. The Anthropocene Review. Map and Design: Félix Pharand-Deschênes/Globaïa.
biogeochemical disruption by humanity’s vast overuse of nitrogen and phosphorous chemicals. As Johan Rockstrom has acutely
emphasized, the 10,000-year Holocene epoch is the only period in planetary history providing the climatic stability that has
enabled humanity to thrive. Global average temperatures have remained within 1 Celsius. By comparison, global temperature
swings in the previous 70,000 years ranged at times 10 Celsius within a decade!
Earth’s climate dominant states

Here is the critical implication of this for humanity’s future. The earth system has innumerable nonlinear dynamic complex systems
with positive and negative feedback loops that permeate the geosphere-biosphere. Deep history informs scientists that the entire
planet can shift, dramatically, if sufficiently strong perturbations persist, between two dominate climate states, the Ice Earth and
Greenhouse Earth; in the extreme, they are referred to as Snowball Earth and Greenhouse Earth.
The Snowball (Ice) Earth occurred when the planetary surface was totally or nearly totally frozen. Paleo-scientists hypothesize
the planet shifted into this state at least once, some 650 million years ago. Possibly another one occurred at an earlier time that was a
longer-lasting snowball incident (the Huronian glaciation) that may have been triggered by the Great Oxygenation Event some
2.4–2.1 billion years ago, when oxygenic photosynthesis increased oxygen in the atmosphere (Kirschvink, 1992; Hoffman et al.,
1998; Hoffman and Schrag, 2002; Kopp et al., 2005).
The Ice Earth, encompassing the glacial and interglacial periods, has been going on for the past 34 million years, with the Arctic
and Antarctic poles forming two million years ago. The 10–000-year interglacial Holocene epoch we are now living in, is a
“Goldilocks” climate state, most conducive for humanity to thrive.
The last Hothouse Earth occurred 290–250 million years ago during the Permian (Hein, 2004), when there were high levels of
CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the sea surface temperatures spanned from 28 C in the tropics to 0 C in the polar regions, and
there were no continental glaciers (Price et al., 1998).
And now humanity is collectively hurtling the planet into the Hothouse Earth at an unprecedented speed that is collapsing what
normally unfolds over geological time to essentially the next half century. Nothing short of ceasing the burning of fossil fuels and
forests over the next several decades—which would otherwise add several trillion tons of CO2e emissions to the atmosphere—
coupled with implementing negative emission technologies, offer hopeful probabilities holding global temperature rise to between
1.5 C and 2 C.
Failing that, extreme heat and weather destabilization will trigger catastrophically disrupted oceans, forests, grasslands, water-
sheds, farmland and society’s technosphere, and eventually melt away the ice of both polar regions. Strong, persistent perturbations
of the planet’s massive systems are underway due to the trillion tons of CO2e emissions already released over the past two centuries.
The ocean has been absorbing half of society’s 50 gigatons of CO2-e emissions now discharged annually, as well as absorbing
90% of the heat. Further perturbations could turn off this vast process, amplifying the perils of accelerating climate destabilization
(discussed further below) (Rockstrom, 2017).
Humans incapable of planetary-scale changes?

Many people find it difficult to imagine how humanity can disrupt a mighty planet like Earth, indignantly expressed by U.S. Senator
James Inhofe (R-OK) who argues, “[T]he arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He
[God] is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.” However, the consensus of scientists assessing planetary boundaries emphat-
ically note (Fig. 2):
[T]he biosphere provides the biophysical preconditions for social and economic development, preconditions that need to be accounted for to secure
human wellbeing and prosperous social and economic development. The size, connectivity and speed of the human enterprise combined with the
necessity to sustain life-support services from the biosphere’s ecosystems call for clarifying safe zones of human operations for prosperous development.
We assert that pervasive uncertainties combined with impacts of trespassing planetary boundaries clearly legitimate using safe minimum standards or
precautionary approaches.
Moreover, information about the risk structure of these processes, including potential large-scale regime shifts, could help refine policies for how to
relate to the zones of uncertainty of the boundaries. Planetary boundaries may be interpreted as “growth within limits” especially in relation to the
biophysical expansion of the human dimension. We picture them as warning signs creating incentives for shifting development into new directions,
new pathways, where growth in human well-being is the focus rather than growth in GDP. (Crépin and Folke, 2014)
Ecological Footprint
Matthis Wackernagel, founder of the Global Footprint network and co-developer of Ecological Footprint Accounting (Wackernagel
et al., 2002; Borucke et al., 2013) used for assessing humanity’s overconsumption of biocapacity, underlines the imperative to get
humanity on to an ecological budget that avoids biocapacity deficits and ecological debts (Galli et al., 2015):
From 1961 to 2010, Ecological Footprint accounts indicate that human demand for renewable resources and ecological services increased by nearly
140% (from 7.6 to 18.1 billion global hectares), reaching a point where the planet’s bioproductive area (increased from 9.9 to 12 billion global
hectares) is no longer sufficient to support the competing demands. In 2010, humanity demanded the equivalent of approximately 1.54 Earths worth of
provisioning and regulatory services.
Between these positive and negative assessments there turns out to be some degree of common overlap where both sides view
technology innovation as a core part of furthering sustainability aspirations, that also helps to continuously shrink humanity’s
gargantuan ecological footprints. However, even that commonality is rent asunder by one side seeing technology enabling endless
growth and the other side documenting the cancer-like system collapse that inevitably comes with unchecked growth. These
competing narratives—one of unfettered, unquestioned progress, and the other one of prudent development and a reasoned
humility regarding the intrinsic uncertainty of the nonlinear complex dynamic systems in which we live—will require reconcilia-
tion, the sooner the better, and the wiser the better.
Evolving Towards a Stationary (But Dynamic) State?

Perhaps telling in this respect is the statement by economist Robert Solow, recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for innovations in
growth theory, “It is possible that the United States and Europe will find that as the decades go by, either continued growth will be
too destructive to the environment and they are too dependent on scarce natural resources or would rather use increasing
productivity in the form of leisure. . .There is nothing intrinsic in the system that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state”
(Stoll, 2008) (p. 162). Solow wrote this nearly two decades prior to China’s decade of double-digit economic growth, but applies to
this economic juggernaut as well as other rapidly industrializing developing nations.
Sustaining Earth’s Biodiversity Richness

Eminent scientist Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson raises exactly the kind of important dimension of unfettered growth that Professor
Solow refers, or what Dr. Wilson calls the extreme version of the Anthropocene. Professor Wilson elaborates in his book, Half-Earth,
Our Planet’s Fight for Life, referring to the extreme version as “the most dangerous worldview,” which he describes as some
revisionists advocating that “humans completely dominate Earth and surviving wild species and ecosystems are judged and
conserved for their usefulness to our species” (Wilson, 2016) (p. 71).
Fig. 2 Planetary boundaries. Source: Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., et al. (2015) Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on
a changing planet. Science 347 (6223). doi: 10.1126/science.1259855.
This is in reference to the hard-hitting credo expressed by geography professor Erle Ellis, who wrote, “Stop trying to save the
planet. Nature is gone. You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over it. We live in the Anthropocene—a geological
epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces” (Ellis, 2009).
Scientists, advocates and politicians line up on both sides, with an aggressive pursuit of terraforming the planet by one side, and
the bold vision of the other side pursuing biodiversity protection of half the planet’s lands and ocean. This human conflict has been
a battle going on for centuries (Nash, 1989; Higgins, 2016; Berry, 1977), and the looming yet-to-be-answered question is whether
humanity as a whole can, as Nobel economist Robert Solow conveyed, experience the fullness of life within acceptable planetary
boundaries.
Manifesting Wisdom to Flourish
If sustainability in all its dimensions is to have any relevance going forward in the Anthropocene epoch, then human smarts,
inventive innovations, moral and ethical integrity, and an evolving empathic civilization concerned and caring for all humans and
life on earth will have to be tested to the limits. Pope Francis awakened a wave of people with the issuance in 2015 of the Encyclical
on the Environment, Laudito Si-On Care for our Common Home. The Pope was blunt and direct (Francis, 2015) (Fig. 18):
I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since
the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all. [. . .].
Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but
also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to
indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity. [. . .] All of us can cooperate as
instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents. (p. 14)
As MIT Professor Emeritus John Ehrenfeld adroitly sums up the challenge before us:
[S]ustainability is not a fixed end state to be achieved but a constant reaching for what it truly means to be a human being living in an interconnected
and complex world. It is a desirable future; one built not just on technological and material development but also on cultural, personal, and spiritual
growth. . .sustainability [can be defined] as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever.” (Ehrenfeld, 2014) (pp. 6–7)
Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s

Life support systems in the 21st century ( Barnosky et al., 2014)
Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who
study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that
humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming. We further agree that, based on the best scientific
information available, human quality of life will suffer substantial degradation by the year 2050 if we continue on our current path.
Science unequivocally demonstrates the human impacts of key concern:
• Climate disruption—more, faster climate change than since humans first became a species.
• Extinctions—not since the dinosaurs went extinct have so many species and populations died out so fast, both on land and in the
oceans.
• Wholesale loss of diverse ecosystems—we have plowed, paved, or otherwise transformed >40% of Earth’s ice-free land, and no place
on land or in the sea is free of our direct or indirect influences.
• Pollution—environmental contaminants in the air, water and land are at record levels and increasing, seriously harming people
and wildlife in unforeseen ways.
• Human population growth and consumption patterns—seven billion people alive today will likely grow to 9.5 billion by 2050, and
the pressures of heavy material consumption among the middle class and wealthy may well intensify (Scientific Consensus,n.d.).
Path Dependency and Lock-In
It is said the future is neither fated nor manifestly destined, but chosen. Yet, choices have consequences and impacts can become
reinforcing, deterministic outcomes, sometimes leading to path dependency and lock-in phenomena (Arthur, 1989; Arthur, 1994;
Liebowitz and Margolis, 2014). This is evident throughout the industrial revolutions of the past several centuries where policies
have promoted regional clusters of industrial prowess that become competitively displaced by evolving innovations, resulting in
these legacy clusters devolving into proverbial “rust belts”.
Economic Geographer Robert Hassink summarizes this phenomenon of cluster decline and political lock-in noting that,
“clusters in old industrial areas point in one way or another at the evolutionary terms path dependence and lock-ins, be it
functional, cognitive or political lock-ins, or a combination of the three forms of lock-ins, as the main internal barriers to industrial
restructuring” (Hassink, 2017).
A path-dependent process or system is broadly defined as “one whose outcome evolves as a consequence of the process’s or
system’s own history” (Martin and Sunley, 2006). Lock-in is the “notion that most fully captures the idea that the combination of
historical contingency and the emergence of self-reinforcing effects, steers a technology, industry or regional economy along one
‘path’ rather than another” (Martin, 2010).
Carbon Lock-In
There is mounting concern expressed over the possible path dependency and lock-in of the fossil fuel industry that would continue
increasing the probability of triggering catastrophic climate disasters (Unruh, 2000; Mattauch et al., 2015; Bertram et al., 2015).
Ongoing research and analysis by the Stockholm Environment Institute concludes, “The capital-intensive nature of new,
unconventional and offshore oil developments, as identified here, suggests that near-term investments may bring resources online
that will be especially difficult to unlock. Furthermore, some researchers have suggested that resource owners may deliberately speed
up investment and production in the near term, while carbon prices are low or nonexistent, so they can lock in and insulate
resources against the loss of rents due to the eventuality of steeply increasing carbon prices” (Erickson, 2015; Erickson et al., 2015;
Kemp-Benedict, 2014; Lazarus, 2015).
Carbon Conundrum
The world’s carbon-intensive energy system has been the undisputed engine and mainstay of global economic growth. Given the
several hundred years of carbon fuel technology evolution that has led it to dominate the planet’s energy market—with decidedly
major government underwriting financially and politically—the fossil fuels and biofuels industries, and their political supporters,
are proving to be formidable resistant forces to society making a time-sensitive shift to a solar powered global economy.
To sustain a better than 50% probability of holding the world temperature rise to 1.5 C—a stipulation for (hopefully) retaining
the favorable climatic conditions humanity has had throughout the Holocene epoch—demands foregoing the release of a
staggering 1500 gigatons of CO2 emissions that are projected to occur under business-as-usual (Anderson, 2017; Rockstom, 2017).
Failure to make the rapid shift could be financially ruinous for society, with adaptation costs estimated in excess of US$1240
trillion this century (Parry et al., 2009). But for the carbon fuel industries, financial assessments indicate between US$25 and US
$100 trillion of fossil resources are at risk of becoming stranded assets given the need to reduce carbon emissions to zero within the
next several decades (Parkinson, 2015).
Just how formidable they are is attested by the outcome of the U.S. 2016 elections where the mendacious climate denying
Republican Party (GOP) won the presidency, both chambers of Congress, most of the state governorships and/or legislatures, as
well as winning the Supreme Court by filling the open vacancy.
What is surprising and revealing is how small of a sum of party and campaign funding (considered legalized graft) it took to
purchase the GOP’s allegiance: roughly a billion dollars over the past decade. The 2016 national election cost US$7 billion—US$2.6
billion for the presidency and US$4.4 billion for the Congress; it is unknown at this point exactly how much money the fossil fuel
industries and their allied partners expended for candidates and media coverage, but even if it was a highly unlikely US$1–$2 billion
they stand to see a return on their money worth several thousand times that amount.
The GOP is anchored to the core message that fossil fuels are good and important, and should be promoted and rewarded, while
solar and wind power should be opposed and ignored. The highly dogmatic position is unencumbered by facts, and flies in the face
of an unrelenting amount of accumulating scientific evidence that is unequivocal in communicating the profound dangers to
humans and the planet now and for millennia to come posed by continued fossil fuel use.
The GOP doctrinaire stance also goes against the long-standing conservative proselytizing for competition and markets to prevail
rather than government dictating market solutions. As data compiled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows, the
governments around the world, including the U.S., strongly tilt the market towards fossil fuels by providing annual subsidies in
excess of US$5 trillion. In the U.S. the subsidies amount to roughly US$700 billion per year, which is >35 times the amount of
subsidies received by the solar PV and wind power industries.
Solar Fusion Solution
The largest fusion system in the solar system located 93 million miles from Earth has been daily bathing the planet in a photon
solution for 4.5 billion years. The sun releases the energy equivalent of six trillion nuclear bombs every second; the stream of solar
photons that lands on the earth every hour is equivalent to humanity’s total annual global energy consumption (17 TerraWatts per
year). It is a power source that never fails, is never interrupted, and never subject to the volatility and fragility afflicting energy and
power sources used in driving economic activity. Solar fusion wastes become earth’s nutrients—1336 W per m2 (3.8 billion trillion
photons per second) from the photon bit stream—representing the original cradle-to-cradle circular economy.
As Caltech Professor Nathan Lewis lucidly expressed it:
The sun is simply the champion of all energy sources. When talking about solar energy, I like to cite what I call the ‘Willie Sutton principle’ of materials
science and energy. Willie Sutton was a bank robber who robbed many banks and managed to elude the law for years before he was finally caught. When
asked why he robbed banks, he replied, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ If Sutton were presented with our energy problem, he would obviously say
that we should use the sun because, quite simply, that’s where the energy is. Solar energy is, in fact, the only renewable resource that has enough
terrestrial energy potential to satisfy alone, with room to spare, the 10–20 TW carbon-free supply constraint in 2050. No other source comes even close.
(Lewis, 2007)
Solar Power Internet

The Solar Power Internet is an umbrella term encompassing the electrification of the global energy system—displacing combustible
carbon fuels now used in power plants, buildings, factories and vehicles, with solar PV and wind power systems. What cannot be
electrified, such as some industrial processes and transport options (large ships and large airplanes), could be fueled with hydrogen
produced from solar and wind power. In a major assessment discussed later in this paper, the results indicate solar and wind and
efficiency gains can fulfill 90% of total global energy demand (with geothermal and hydrokinetic power for the remaining 10%). In
addition to being technically feasible, it is economically attractive, both in generating tens of millions of net new jobs, as well as
accruing some US$50 trillion per year in savings and health benefits by 2050 (Jacobson et al., 2017).
The Internet is the great enabler for achieving extraordinary exergetic efficiency gains across the economy, both in: 1) enabling
high-performance smart buildings with onsite storage and Solar PV systems to serve as nanogrids, connecting with other buildings
into microgrids, that in turn interconnect to transform a city into a highly resilient, robust minigrid (a recurring fractal pattern); and
2) accruing capital savings and multiple values and benefits by leveraging the emergence and convergence of interconnected
buildings, the power grid, and the transport sector. Cities become Solar Power Internet platforms, connected regionally to each other
and to rural wind and solar farms into a smart macrogrid.
The extreme recalcitrance of the GOP-controlled U.S. government in reneging on joining with 194 nations that are signatories to
the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (including the USA), while causing some confusion and setbacks, is already being viewed as
an opportunity for other nations (notably China, the EU and India) to seize market shares, as well as energizing more cities and
some U.S. states to take action in their own hands.
There are also intriguing evidence and persuasive arguments that suggest some teleological tendencies in social-techno change is
fostered by what some analysts have described as the inevitable technological forces shaping humanity’s future (Kelly, 2010; Kelly,
2016; Haff, 2014; Naam, 2013). Thermodynamics professor Adrian Bejan has been one of the most forceful advocates, arguing
these are manifestations of the constructal law (Bejan, 2016; Bejan and Peter Zane, 2013). The ongoing manifestation of this is
based on the accelerating scientific, technological, and engineering advances driving the digitization, Internetization, electrification,
mass minimization/miniaturization, and modularization throughout the economy and society.
Much of the past half century has witnessed the application of these advances in improving the efficiency and cutting the costs of
the businesses of the last industrial revolution. But these new technological advances are driving faster innovations in the design and
component manufacturing for the Solar Power Internet (Seba, 2014; Kurzweil and Page, 2008).
This massive transformation in powering the global economy and society represents the largest opportunity for dramatically
shrinking a myriad of humanity’s most damaging, costly and threatening ecological impacts (footprints): climate destabilization,
marine acidification, debilitating air pollution, water contamination, water extraction, land conversion and species extinction, as
well as reducing the threat of resource wars, while generating significant economic benefits for all strata of society from the bottom
of the pyramid to the top. Physical Chemistry professor Ugo Bardi has even suggested that the full harnessing of solar power as the
solution to the carbon conundrum could lead beyond the Anthropocene epoch to the Stereocene (the age of solid-state devices)
(Bardi, 2016).
Sustainability Dilemma
Sustainability, however, is about far more than energy. It embraces every aspect and facet of humanity’s daily actions and activities—
population, income, consumers’ behavior, producers’ efficiency (Waggoner and Ausubel, 2002). The open question is whether a
sufficient majority of humans can learn to wisely discern the salience of sustainability, and culturally evolve and adaptively manage
its institutions—governance, markets, education, civil society, etc.—in a timely and ongoing manner so as to transition and
transform its existing and emerging capital assets—physical, financial, social, civic, human, spiritual, knowledge—on a safe, secure,
resilient sustainably flourishing path.
This will necessarily entail a significant research endeavor on a myriad of components that arise when examining the radical
transformation of the global economy that confronts humanity. Incremental changes are simply too little, too late, given the
disproportionately massive challenges and wicked problems now unfolding. Such research goes far beyond the major scientific
research underway through intergovernmental panels on climate change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform
on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Transformation is fundamentally transdisciplinary in scope and breadth. As one
research review indicated, the focus needs to encompass: (1) Theories of change to help understand and inform transformation; (2)
Methods of monitoring and evaluation (MandE) to help inform when transformation has occurred or is occurring; (3) Knowledge
production and use for transforming the world; (4) Modes of governance for encouraging transformation; (5) How understanding
social justice can assist transformation; (6) Overcoming limits to human nature for transformation (7) The role of the utopian
impulse for transformation; (8) Approaches to new futures; and, (9) Transformation of human consciousness (Fazey et al., 2017).
There are a plethora of arguments suggesting it is improbable, for example, the veritable lifeboats are already leaking, humans are
hard-wired for focusing on immediate risks, not long-term, intergenerational threats (Ehrlich, 2002; Ornstein and Ehrlich, 1989),
people are emotionally predisposed to be empathic with family and culture, not empathic to humanity at large (Ehrlich and
Ornstein, 2010), and never underestimate the power of human stupidity (Cipolla, 1987).
But, as alluded to above, there are strong and compelling arguments that the potential for success has been boosted in recent
decades by a plentitude of entirely new domains of knowledge, insights, technologies, and multidisciplinary fields across the hard
and soft sciences. Moreover, cultural evolutionary research by disparate fields indicates a deeply endowed and evolving sense of
cooperative behavior among and between citizens; a human quality that evolutionary theorists argue was the driving force behind
humanity’s great acceleration (Tomasello, 2009; Wilson, 2015; Pinker, 2011; Gintis and Bowles, 2011; Benkler, 2011; Turchin,
2015; Boehm, 2011; Ridley, 2001).
Defining Sustainability
The standardized definition of sustainability is taken to be the succinct sentence adopted by the 1987 UN “Bruntland” World
Commission on Environment and Development: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and
Development, 1987).
This was a big leap beyond the traditional use of the word by the natural resource extraction industries (e.g., timber and fisheries)
in pursuing maximum sustainable yields (MSY), or the conventional interpretation of the concept in the market when discussing
corporations’ sustained growth. MSY has been scientifically debunked by Emeritus Eminent Scholar and Professor in Ecological
Sciences C.S. Holling, among other scientists, beginning with the fact that MSY’s underlying premise is based on static criteria and an
obsolete interpretation of ecosystems as stable equilibriums (Holling, 1973; Holling, 1986; Botkin, 1992). Industry believes in strict
adherence to maximizing efficient exploitation, and maintains a strong propensity to think and act as if life is linear, has no carrying
capacity limits, uncertainty is controllable, the future free of surprises, planning is predictable and compartmentalized into silos,
and Gaussian probability distributions are taken as the norm while fat-tail futures are ignored.
This set of behavioral attitudes makes a recipe for disaster, because all economic activity operates within nested clusters of linked,
nonlinear complex adaptive systems comprising the global biosphere and socio-economy’s technosphere. As a strength-through-
exhaustion model, taken as a whole over time, sudden surprises and uncertain reactions, or series of such events, can unwittingly
result in losses of ecological resilience, economic collapse, human morbidity and mortality, and potentially triggering large-scale or
long-term disastrous and catastrophic outcomes (Scheffer et al., 2001; Anderies et al., 2013). Shifting this outlook and behavior to
one grounded in sustainability is what the Bruntland Commission hoped to address and help accomplish.
Weak Versus Strong Sustainability

Orthodox economists have made the case for what has come to be known as the “weak” version of sustainability, the substitutability
of nonrenewable, exhaustible resources with other forms of reproducible capital (Solow, 1974; Hartwick, 1978; Barnett and Morse,
1963; Simon, 1981). A more recent definition specifies, “keeping total net investment [or total savings], suitably defined to
encompass all relevant forms of capital, above zero” (Neumayer, 2010).
Heterodox economists and scientists researching the biosphere not only dispute the weak version, but put forward a strong
version, the essence of which is, “Strong sustainability regards natural capital as providing some functions that are not substitutable
by man-made capital. . .[and stresses]. . .defining sustainability as leaving the future generations a stock of natural capital not smaller
than the one enjoyed by the present generation” (Cbeza Gutés, 1996). Or, more briefly stated, “the preservation of the physical stock
of those forms of natural capital that are regarded as nonsubstitutable (so-called critical natural capital)” (Neumayer, 2013; Ekins
et al., 2003; Ott, 2003; Pelenc and Dedeurwaerdere, 2015; Dedeurwaerdere, 2011) (Fig. 3).
Framing Sustainability
Given the depth, breadth and complexity of relevant sustainability issues, reflecting a myriad of disciplines, with many issues
considerably complex to require multi- (trans-, cross-, and inter-) disciplinary frameworks, the literature is a veritable mosaic
landscape of dense ecosystems of diverse knowledge resources describing a spectrum of perspectives, recommended actions, lesson
learned, what’s worked, what’s failed, new ideas, etc.
How to frame sustainability remains a fundamental challenge across innumerable academic disciplines and sectors of society—
sciences, ethics, governance, civil society, business, markets, etc. (Marshall and Toffel, 2004; Ziegler and Ott, 2011). Similarly,
legions of initiatives have emerged over the decades at all socio-ecological scales to help address sustainability issues, including
simulations, scenarios, modeling, metrics, indicators, international laws and agreements (Hunter et al., 2015), and deep-dive, cross-
disciplinary assessments. Notable examples include Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1974) (Meadows et al., 2004), Agenda
21 (UN, 1992), IPAT, ImPACT, STIRPAT models (York et al., 2003) (Fig. 10), Kaya formula (Yamaji et al., 1991; Raupach et al.,
2007), Ecological Footprint (Wackernagel et al., 2002), LCA and MFA methodologies (Lopes Silva et al., 2015), The Natural Step
(Robèrt, 2008), Genuine Progress Index (Lew, Daly and McElwee, 2014), Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP, 2016a), Soft
Energy Path (Lovins, 1979), Soft Water Path (Brooks et al., 2009; Gleick, 2003), Converge and Contract (Contraction and
Convergence, n.d.), Blue Economy (Pauli, 2010), Biomimicry (Benyus, 1997), Cradle-to-Cradle (McDonough and Braungart,
2010), Circular Economy (Stahel, 2015), IPCC assessments (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (IPCC, 2014a),
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and IPBES (MEA, 2005; IPBES, 2018), Planetary Boundaries (Rockström, 2010), TEEB (The
Environment and Economics of Biodiversity) (TEEB, 2010), IGBP (International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) (IGBP, 2007),
Fig. 3 Main difference between weak and strong sustainability. Mancebo, F. (2013). Développement durable (2nd edn.). Paris: Armand Colin.
UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2017; UNDP, 2016a; UNDP,
2016b; WHO, 2015), UNFCCC Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015), and many more. In addition there have been and remain
innumerable local and sub-national initiatives spanning civil society, public institutions and private organizations.
Sustainability Principles
Numerous criteria or principles have been advocated to help guide in the pursuit of sustainability. The following compilation by
engineers and scientists was released to coincide with the United Nations’ Decade of Education in Sustainable Development
(UNESCO, 2014; Hargroves and Smith, 2013):
1. Dealing transparently and systemically with risk, uncertainty and irreversibility.

2. Ensuring appropriate valuation, appreciation and restoration of nature.
3. Integration of environmental, social, human and economic goals in policies and activities.
4. Equal opportunity and community participation/sustainable community.
5. Conservation of biodiversity and ecological integrity.
6. Ensuring intergenerational equity.
7. Recognizing the global integration of localities.
8. A commitment to best practices.
9. No net loss of human capital or natural capital.
10. The principle of continuous improvement.
11. The need for good governance.
No Limits to Learning
The list is not exhaustive. For example, a crucial principle, enunciated in the 1979 Club of Rome report, No Limits to Learning (Botkin
et al., 1979), underscores the paramount importance of applying information, knowledge and wisdom in ways that efficiently or
sufficiently displace and reduce energy and materials to satisfy humans’ seemingly boundless needs and cravings.
This principle taps into the ancient stream of spiritual and philosophical wisdom and pragmatic common sense that ceaseless
consumption and excess possession of things often do not bring satisfaction, happiness, health, peace or spiritual wellbeing. That, in
fact, such extravagance, often driven by the proverbial “keeping up with the Jones,” more often results in dissatisfaction,
disappointment, and an empty weariness from the treadmill of acquisitive addiction. Whether described as invidious consumption,
conspicuous leisure (Veblen, 1899), positional or Veblen goods, luxury fever (Frank, 2010), status anxiety, or affluenza (de Graaf
et al., 2014), the end result of this cultural promotion and fixation on defining success and the good life as acquisitive behavior has
unwittingly mushroomed most of the sustainability challenges now confronting humanity (Leonard, 2011).
It is not surprising that a core component of sustainability advocacy efforts have been to draw upon the common wisdom of
simpler living (Elgin, 2010; Phillips and Campbell, 2014; Hanh, 2013; Robins, 2008), which has deep roots in many cultures
(Haidt, 2006; Francis, 2015; Maathai, 2010; Hanh, 2004; Shi, 1985). There is deep irony that the early tradition of simple life in
America has been transmogrified into the money-and-success criteria defining the so-called American Dream, with similar dynamics
found throughout other industrialized nations including China (Schor, 1999; Tawney, 1921).
An increasing body of psychological studies also underscores the detrimental mental effects from the obsessive pursuit of
materialism, and the time, effort and stress it takes to acquire materialism and sustain a rising materialistic lifestyle (DeAngelis,
2004; Luthar and Sexton, 2004). In the same vein, there is a substantial literature from diverse disciplines—educational theory,
psychology, anthropology, cultural evolution, cognitive sciences, behavioral economics—showing strong correlations of healthier,
more contented, flourishing lifestyles less driven with material consumption and more focused on pursuit of flow experiences
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997), mindfulness and presence (Hanh and Cheung, 2011), curiosity and learning (Dewey, 1910; Manninen
and Meriläinen, 2011), thriving relationships, social/civic engagement, and spiritual practices.
Limitless learning is the driver to accruing insights and understanding of the dynamic complexity of life in all its dimensions, and
illuminating for humans the path towards pursuit of strong sustainability as it evolves over time and space. As scholar John Foster
expressed this fundamental process:
The main claim is that “how can we learn?” is a better question with which to steer sustainable development than “what future do we want?” Since we
cannot condition in advance for how emergent events will affect the sense we make of overall human well-being, the genuine spontaneity of such an
order of understanding is then the only real warrant we can have that our well-being will be preserved into the future across whatever changes in our
social, technological or environmental situations we encounter. This is what it seems to say that, finally, it is the indispensable structure and processes of
a learning society that constitutes the criteria of sustainability. (Foster, 2005)
Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs)

While “affluenza” has not yet infected that half of the world’s population who live in impoverished to marginal economic
conditions, these four billion citizens rightly desire a level of material wellbeing that is stable, resilient and beyond poverty
(Fig. 4). This is a core part of the UN’s MDGs and subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which countries adopted
in 2015 as a set of 17 goals with 169 targets to: 1) end poverty; 2) protect the planet; and, 3) ensure prosperity for all. The SDGs are
integral to the new global sustainable development agenda to 2030 (UN, 2015) (Fig. 5).
Auspicious and audacious as these 2030 goals may seem, the set of challenges being addressed are complex and interconnected
across diverse economic sectors and policy domains, and occurring at differing scales (local, regional, multination). In a number of
instances, trying to advance one SDG may adversely impact on other SDGs. As TEEB co-author Pavan Sukhdev has pointed out,
Food and agriculture illustrate the point well. For a start, SDG two is about ending hunger, sustainable agriculture, and achieving food security and
improved nutrition. Yet, since fish provide the main source of animal protein for more than a billion people in the developing world, are food security
and better nutrition even possible without first achieving SDG 14, which entails conserving and sustainably using the oceans? At present, we seem intent
on competitively mining fish stocks to depletion and destroying underwater life in defiance of both common sense and good economics. (Sukhdev,
2017)
If the SDGs are to be effective, then as Sukhdev emphasizes, their complexity must be embraced. The silo mentality exhibited
within and across public and private institutions, conventionally focused solely on each silo’s own initiatives, shows a long legacy of
working at cross-purposes and contrary purposes. Embracing complexity is key to superseding silos and the traditional linear
planning models, and adopting collaborative network platforms capable of interacting in the complex dynamic systems humanity is
enmeshed (Benkler, 2007; Beinhocker, 2006; Pentland, 2015; Noveck, 2015).
Evolutionary Quandary
Norman Cousins once astutely noted, “History is a vast Early Warning System” (Cousins, 1978).
Fig. 4 Global poverty pyramid (Prahalad, 2009).
Fig. 5 Sustainable development goals (SDGs). Source: UN SDG, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs.
The concept of sustainability likely emerged in deep history coincident with human cognition and the awareness of future time.
Ethnographers, for example, have amply documented the connections observed in diverse cultures and in linguistic associations
between moon cycles, women’s menstruation periods, and producing offspring.
Some cultural evolution scholars hypothesize it was this recognition process among women that first led to envisioning the
future, and the attendant risks and needs associated with ensuring successful survival of their infants and sustaining healthy
development. This female foresight capacity conceivably gave rise in some populations to selection of mates exhibiting the qualities
able to sustain this nurturing process (e.g., food provisioning and protection from predatory threats) (Shlain, 2003).
The SuperExponentiator: General Purpose Technology

More broadly, the potent power of the human brain as the prototype General Purpose Technology (GPT) (Lipsey et al., 2006)
enabled Homo sapiens to perceive and pursue inventive and innovative ways of enhancing their ability to survive, sustain growth, and
spread around the planet. Ongoing findings in paleontology indicate humankind’s journey through time and space posed an
endless stream of threats and risks to avoid or overcome, with some populations of humans successfully evolving the capabilities
and capacities to sustain their journeys, while many unlucky and less effective populations were more susceptible and succumbed to
risks ending in extirpation (Turchin, 2015). Given the fate of 99.9% of all species that existed on Earth went extinct, Homo sapiens’
sustained survival is all the more astonishing (although still a young species of 200,000 years compared to the estimated one of 2.5
million years as the characteristic duration of the mean species life span in mammals) (van Dam et al., 2006).
Advances in genetic analysis of paleodemographic evidence from human fossils are discovering severe recurring population
bottlenecks occurred over the past two- dozen millennia (Hawks et al., 2000). Homo spp. populations dropped below 20,000
individuals roughly a million years ago (Huff et al., 2009), while recent molecular research indicates just 2000 people populated
sub-Saharan Africa in the Middle Stone Age, lasting 100,000 years and rising again only during the Late Stone Age (Behar
et al., 2008).
Hyperbolic Growth, GPTs and Cultural Evolution

Due in no small part to the unique general purpose technology (GPT) of Homo sapiens’ evolving adept brain, by 50,000 BCE human
population had re-grown to more than one million people, coinciding with a burst of technological, symbolic and cultural
innovations (Powell et al., 2009). By 10,000 BCE Homo sapiens had triggered hyperbolic growth in the wake of harnessing
agricultural innovations and economic expansion, concurrent with the interglacial Holocene epoch.
The benign climatic conditions of the Holocene epoch witnessed hyperbolic growth of both human population and the global
economy (Nielsen, 2015a; Nielsen, 2015b). Since 1000 CE the world population has expanded 25-fold, global GDP soared nearly
350-fold, and per capita income increased >13-fold (Maddison, 2010).
Dramatic gains have also occurred in life expectation. The average lifespan in 1000 CE was 24 years, whereas today a baby can
look forward to surviving 71 years. In 1000 CE, with an estimated population of 275 million, one out of three infants died in the
first year of life, whereas in today’s world of 7500 million humans, 1 in 25 infants die worldwide, and less than one in 100 die in
well-off nations. Per capita growth has been accelerating, with declining time intervals between the doubling times of per capita
global GDP (DeLong, 1998).
This incredible expansion in wealth and better-off conditions resulted from a myriad of factors (e.g., the scientific method,
knowledge advancements, improved sanitary conditions and better hygiene, and innumerable innovations in engineering, tech-
nology and governance). A principal driver for more than a century has been availability of relatively cheap energy. Cheap energy
enabled harnessing vast levels of water and other natural resources at declining cost, triggering an eightfold increase in global
materials use during the 20th century.
Combustion complexity
Fossil resources (encompassing coal, oil, and natural gas) have fueled the global economy’s engine of growth since the beginning of
the industrial era. There is no doubt that humanity has profited immensely from the scientific breakthroughs and technological
innovations essential for harnessing these inert substances for a vast variety of human uses.
Impressive engineering feats have enabled the massive scaling of the extraction, conversion, transport, and combustion processes
capable of fueling and powering hundreds of billions of motors, pumps, compressors, fans, lights, appliances, equipment,
machines, consumer electronics, etc., located in tens of billions of vehicles, factories, buildings, farms, used by billions of people.
The global increase in fossil fuel consumption correlates tightly with the sharp rise in global GDP between 1800 and 2008
(Fig. 6). The use of fossil fuels to deliver electricity, natural gas, and liquid fuels has also correlated tightly with the explosion in
world population. This is not surprising, given the use of these fuels in enhancing health and well-being by producing and
delivering clean water, refrigeration and cooking of food and reducing contamination and illness, increases in agricultural
productivity for feeding and clothing more people, providing warmth from freezing weather and coolth during heat waves, sanitary
disposal of wastes, etc. (Fig. 7).
Until recently, there has been every expectation that these correlations would continue for the rest of the century. Indeed, it has
been generally assumed that economic growth demands energy growth marching in lockstep. Baseline projections of energy
expansion in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report show a tripling from 600 ExaJoules (EJ, equivalent to 98 billion barrels of oil)
in 2014 to 1800 EJ by 2100 that is believed to be necessary for sustaining a global economic growth of 2% per year (IPCC, 2014b)
(Fig. 8). For the longest time the given assumption was that fossil fuels would provide some 80% of this growth.
Complexity scholar Joseph Tainter, who has examined both sustainability and collapse in past societies, has emphasized the
important role complexity has played both in enhancing sustainability as well as in undermining sustainability:
The factors that cause societies to collapse take centuries to develop. To design policies for today and the future we need to understand social and
economic processes at all temporal scales, and comprehend where we are in historical patterns. Historical knowledge is essential to sustainability. No
program to enhance sustainability can be considered practical if it does not incorporate such fundamental knowledge.
Fig. 6 Global primary energy consumption and GDP, 1800–2008. Source: Murphy and Hall (2011). Data from Kremer (2010) and Smil (2010). Historic population
and GDP data. http://www.historicalstatistics.org/. Note: 1 EJ (exajoule) ¼ 174 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Fig. 7 Source: World population and fuel use growth (Pagett, 2011). Right Figure: World population from US Census Bureau, overlaid with fossil fuel use (red) by
Vaclav Smil from energy transitions: History, requirements, prospects.
A recurring constraint faced by previous societies has been complexity in problem solving. It is a constraint that is usually unrecognized in contemporary
economic analyses. For the past 12,000 years human societies have seemed almost inexorably to grow more complex. For the most part this has been
successful: complexity confers advantages, and one of the reasons for our success as a species has been our ability to increase rapidly the complexity of
our behavior. Yet complexity can also be detrimental to sustainability. Since our approach to resolving our problems has been to develop the most
complex society and economy of human history, it is important to understand how previous societies fared when they pursued analogous strategies.
(Tainter, 1996)
The swelling of humanity’s planetary presence and its increasing complexity has led to vast wealth and improved wellbeing for
billions of people. At the same time, the large-scale complexity deriving this accumulated wealth has unwittingly incurred mega
costs and disastrous consequences, as well as increased the number of risks and threats of extreme catastrophes. Historian Yuval
Noah Harari, for example, puts into start terms in his book, Sapiens, the disastrous consequences the expansion of Homo sapiens and
its domesticated animals have had on the rest of the planet’s fauna:
If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our
domesticated farmyard animals—cows, pigs, sheep and chickens—and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about
700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals—from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales—is less
than 100 million tons. (Harari, 2015) (p. 350)
Fig. 8 Global primary energy forecast to 2100. Source: IPCC (2014). Climate change 2014: Synthesis report. Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the fifth
assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change [Core Writing Team, Pachauri, R. K., and Meyer, L. A. (eds.)]. Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC.
Technosphere
Humanity’s biological size is compounded by the material size of the physical technosphere—a staggering 30 trillion tons—defined
“as the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise. It includes active urban, agricultural and marine
components, used to sustain energy and material flow for current human life, and a growing residue layer, currently only in
small part recycled back into the active component” (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017).
NPP (net primary productivity)

To humanity’s gargantuan weight must be added its extensive appropriation of the biosphere’s net primary production (NPP),
estimated to be upwards of 40% of the planet’s total NPP (Vitousek et al., 1986). Not surprisingly, but tragically, such massive
conversion has accelerated the extinction rate of flora and fauna by two to three orders of magnitude (100–1000 times) higher than
the natural background rate (De Vos et al., 2015; Ceballos et al., 2015), as well as causing widespread ecological degradation and
destruction of ecosystem services (TEEB, 2010; MEA, 2005; Dıaz et al., 2015).
Negative externalities
Or consider the fact that cheap energy, and its cheaper harnessing of water, chemicals and natural resources, hyperbolically
expanding the world’s economy, has actually turned out to be quite expensive, when taking account of the full range of negative
externalities (to use the economist’s phrase for the vast spectrum of negative consequences ranging from irritations to catastrophic
cataclysms, or more technically, “the private calculation of benefits or costs differs from society’s valuation of benefits or costs")
(Griffin and Steele, 1986). According to the 2008 accounting estimate prepared by Trucost for UNEP’s Finance Initiative, the UN
Global Compact, and Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI):
Environmental costs are becoming increasingly financially material. Annual environmental costs from global human activity amounted to US$ 6.6
trillion in 2008, equivalent to 11% of GDP [US$60 trillion in 2008]. (Trucost, 2011)
For context, the combined GDP of the poorest half of humanity–>3.5 billion individuals—is roughly US$450 billion (Oxfam,
2017). The assessment also found that one-third of the world environmental costs were caused by the top 3000 public companies.
“In a hypothetical investor equity portfolio weighted according to the MSCI All Country World Index,” the authors note,
“externalities could equate to over 50% of the companies’ combined earnings.”
Unpriced natural capital

In a subsequent 2009 assessment prepared for TEEB for Business Coalition (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), Trucost
estimated the monetized value of unpriced natural capital consumed by 1000 global primary production plus some processing
industries (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, oil and gas exploration, utilities; and, cement, steel, pulp and paper, petrochem-
icals, respectively). They concluded:
The value of the Global 100 externalities is estimated at US$4.7 trillion or 65% of the total primary sector impacts identified. GHGs from coal power
generation in Eastern Asia contribute the largest environmental impact, followed by land use linked to cattle farming in South America. The most
significant impacts making up the US$4.7 trillion are GHGs (36%), water use (26%) and land use (25%). (Trucost PLC, 2013)
Revealing for investors is the recognition that, “[N]o high impact region-sectors generate sufficient profit to cover their
environmental impacts” (Trucost PLC, 2013) (Fig. 15).
The unpriced externalities due to GHG emissions, calculated in the Trucost reports at a social cost of carbon of US$100 per ton
CO2-equivalent (CO2-e), constitutes the unacknowledged herd of elephants in the policy room. Humanity emitted 1.8 trillion tons
of CO2-e into the atmosphere between 1850 and 2006 (including 330 gigatons of carbon (GtC) from fossil fuel and cement
emissions and 158 GtC from deforestation and other land-use changes) (Canadell et al., 2007), plus an additional 0.45 trillion
tCO2-e between 2007 and 2016.
Research connecting a rich diversity of disciplines and knowledge domains—notably in earth systems sciences, complex adaptive
systems, and ecosystem sciences—is resulting in a veritable flood of critical insights regarding the implications of this sudden
flooding of the atmosphere with humanity’s massive CO2-e emissions over the briefest of moments in geological time (IGBP, 2007;
IPCC, 2014a; MEA, 2005; Gunderson and Holling, 2001).
The lengthy catalog of threats and risks is numbing and so debilitating for most citizens that they choose to willfully ignore the
findings, or become paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the challenge at hand. Scientists calculated in 2009 that the net present
value of climate change impacts from continuing business-as-usual amounts to US$1240 trillion; and this assumes stabilization of
atmospheric concentrations of CO2e to below 850 ppm by 2100 (Parry et al., 2009). In reality, society has been on pace to exceed
850 ppm, while new evidence also indicates far greater climate sensitivity at even much lower levels previously thought ‘safe’
( 400 ppm) (Hansen et al., 2013). Climate scientists now estimate the world not only needs to reduce CO2 e emissions to zero by
2040 in order to have a chance of preventing a global temperature rise above 1.5 C, but also will have to implement ambitious
“negative emission technologies” that remove CO2 from the atmosphere (Matthews et al., 2017; Walsh et al., 2017; Fuss
et al., 2014).
Beyond Natural Catastrophic Events

Scientists believe extirpation of 90 þ percent of Homo spp. populations occurred from the catastrophic super-volcanic explosion of
Toba, Indonesia, 75,000 years ago. The massive injection into the atmosphere of >2800 cubic kilometers of rocks and ash (tephra
and pyroclasts) unleashed a drop in global temperature, widespread droughts, collapse of vegetation, and a worldwide ecological
disaster (Robock et al., 2009). Toba was a category 8 eruption (Volcanic Explosivity Index, VEI). For comparison, this is nearly 300
times larger than the 1992 Mount Pinatubo eruption in The Philippines, and roughly 3000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St
Helens eruption in Oregon, USA. The Toba explosion had the thermonuclear force equivalent to several hundred thousand atomic
bombs each the size of the devastating ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Astronomical, geophysical, and extraordinarily destructive natural forces were and are beyond human control. Astrophysicists,
for example, estimate planetary-scale catastrophes putting the entire population of the Earth at risk occur on average several times
per million years (e.g., the Chicxulub explosion 65 million years ago that triggered the extinction of dinosaurs was equivalent to 100
million nuclear bombs) (NASA, 2017). Thankfully, the largest meteorite collision during recorded human history was significantly
smaller; it occurred in 1908 in eastern Siberia, known as the Tunguska event. The bolide, equivalent to the detonation of a thousand
atom bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima, destroyed 88 million trees over 2000 km (Southwood, 2017); if it had landed on one
of today’s megacities it could cause the death of 10–20 million people (Wikipedia, n.d.).
Human-Driven Catastrophic Events

Aside from, or in addition to, the risks posed by natural forces beyond human control, humans have both willingly and unwittingly
propagated risks and threats to human survival over the past dozen millennia.
Expanding populations of humans across the world was neither steady nor without acute disruptions occurring time and again,
not the least of which was fierce warring among and between Homo spp. and Homo sapien populations (Turchin, 2015). The nearly
decade-long An Lushan Revolt and Civil War that occurred during China’s Tang Dynasty in the 8th century CE resulted in the worst
atrocity in recorded human history. Censuses indicate the Dynasty lost two-thirds of its population, roughly 16% of the world
population at the time (White, 2011). Scaled to the mid-20th century population and expressed in death equivalents, MIT professor
Steven Pinker estimates the total at a staggering 429 million deaths (Pinker, 2011) (Fig. 9).
For most of the past dozen millennia the human economy was rather static. Historians, cliodynamic scholars, and cultural
evolutionary researchers richly debate the specifics of reasons and causes, but all agree that hyperbolic economic growth occurred
predominantly over the past dozen generations (Mokyr, 2016). Inventive innovations, especially of general-purpose technologies
Flourishing Sustainably in the Anthropocene? Known Possibilities and Unknown Probabilities
19
Fig. 9 Worst wars and atrocities in human history (500 BCE to 2000 CE). Source: (A) White, M. (2011). Atrocities: The 100 deadliest episodes in human history. New York: W.W. Norton. (B) Source: Data from Matthew White
(2011). Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined (p. 197). Penguin Publishing Group.
Fig. 10 IPAT.
(GPTs), featured predominantly in this growth. As described by Jeremy Rifkin in Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin, 2011), the first
industrial revolution in the 17th century witnessed hyperbolic growth rates subsequent to the inventive innovation of the steam
engine, which harnessed a new energy system (coal), created a new mobility system (railroads), and powered a new communication
system (telegraph). This period of exponential growth was surpassed by the second industrial revolution, with hyperbolic growth
resulting from a new energy system (cheap Texas oil and Saudi oil), new mobility system (roads, cars and trucks), and new
communication system (telephone, radio, and TV). The third industrial revolution now unfolding again promises or portends even
greater hyperbolic growth with the expansion of a new energy system (solar and wind power electrification), a new mobility system
(Internetization of autonomous-driven, plug-in electric vehicles-as-picogrids interoperable with buildings-as-nanogrids), and a new
communication system (Internet of Networks).
It has been these successive inventive innovation transformations to the economy that not only generate hyperbolic growth rates
in expanded GDP and human populations, but have also generated the massive damages, degradation, destruction, destabilization,
Fig. 11 Tipping points. Source: Lenton, T. M. and Williams, H. T. P. (2013). On the origin of planetary-scale tipping points. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28 (7).
Fig. 12 Taxonomy of surprise and ignorance. Source: Faber, M., Manstetten, R., and Proops, J. L. R. Humankind and the environment: An anatomy of surprise and
ignorance. Environmental Values 1 (3), 217–241. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/5467.
and extinction of so many ecosystems and species. The cumulative, ongoing and expanding negative externalities now rival the
planet’s mega-disrupting natural forces noted above. For example, the 400 GtCO2 e humans released the past decade
(2006–2016) would be equivalent to the CO2 e emissions released by 27 Toba super-volcanic eruptions. Climatologist James
Hansen explains this current rate of climate warming as, “... equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day,
365 days per year. That’s how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day” (Hansen, 2012; Romm, 2013) [emphasis in original].
Fig. 13 Future of mobility. Source: Corwin, S., Jameson, N., Pankratz, D. M., and Willigmann, P. (2016). The future of mobility: What’s next? Tomorrow’s mobility
ecosystem—And how to succeed in it. Deloitte University Press.
These Biblical-scale long-term disaster threats are within humanity’s control to largely prevent and avert, at least hypothetically.
The greater uncertainties associated with this new epoch of human-triggered planetary scale catastrophes, the Anthropocene epoch,
command an entirely new envisioning and framing of the human species’ survival and sustainability narratives.
Trouble in Sustainable Cities
At times, the world seems a Tale of Two Cities redux: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us” (Dickens,
1859). Progress and regress coincide.
One often hears that in spite of all the good efforts and successes attested to by hundreds of millions of people and tens of
thousands of public institutions and private organizations actively furthering sustainability worldwide for the past half century,
conditions remain grossly insufficient.
Sustainability initiatives to date, of all manner and sort, public and private, local to global, while essential, critically important,
and immensely valuable, are failing to stem the tide of biosphere deterioration by human activity. As one recent commentary
summed up past efforts, “International environmental policy has failed to reverse climate change, resource depletion and the
generalized decline of biodiversity and ecological life support systems” (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo, 2015).
The rate of success to date is woefully inadequate for the tasks now at hand in solving the clusters of wicked problems
confronting the long-term viability of Homo sapiens. In a perversely ironic situation, as incremental progress in sustainability efforts
took a big step (i.e., the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate commitments), regress took hold in the 2016 U.S. elections. The three
branches of the U.S. government—the Presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court—as well as upwards of two-thirds of U.S. state
Fig. 14 60 biggest market opportunities related to delivering the Global Sustainability Development Goals. Source: BSDC (2017). Better business, better world.
Business and Sustainable Development Commission (p. 14).
legislatures and governorships, were taken control by the self-professed climate denying, antisolar-and-wind power, antisustain-
ability, pro-fossil fuels Republican party (GOP). It was a totally unexpected surprise, and significantly heightens the uncertainty
both of future progress and future regress at the national scale.
The fossil fuel industry has discovered that it is relatively inexpensive (roughly a billion dollars) to buy off (hijack through
legalized graft) an entire political party, and capture key segments of the media. In return, the U.S. fossil fuel industry continues to
be the beneficiary of US$700þ billion per year in subsidies and avoided regulation of externalities (Coady et al., 2015). The fossil
fuel industry also averts threats of multitens of trillions of dollars in stranded assets by forestalling strong caps and taxes imposed on
Fig. 15 Negative profit margins in most of the world’s raw material industries if natural capital costs are included. Source: Trucost PLC (2013). Natural capital at
risk: The top 100 externalities of business. https://www.trucost.com/publication/natural-capital-risk-top-100-externalities-business/, cited in BSDC (2017) Better
Business, Better World, Exhibit 12, Business and Sustainable Development Commission (p. 83).
Fig. 16 Panarchy, increasing spatial and temporal scales. A conceptual diagram showing the relationship between scales of ecological structure and the nested
adaptive cycles comprising a panarchy for a pine dominated ecosystem. Four adaptive cycles, and scales of structure are shown for this system (for convenience
only). Within-scale structures and processes interact across scales at key phases of the adaptive cycle. These cross-scale interactions can take place from lower to
higher levels in the panarchy and vice versa (yellow arrows). Source: Allen, C. R., Angeler, D. G., Garmestani, A. S., Gunderson, L. H., and Holling, C. S. (2014).
Panarchy: Theory and application. Ecosystems. New York: Springer, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cs_Holling/publications.
Fig. 17 Cognitive bias codex. Benson, B. (2016). Cognitive biases cheat sheet, because thinking is hard. Better Humans blog, September 1, 2016. https://
betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b1.8.
carbon emissions (Univ. of Wisconsin, n.d.; Cheuvreux, 2014). Numerous financial institutions have published estimates of
stranded asset losses, such as CITI GPS’s estimate:
Some studies suggest that globally a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and >80% of coal reserves would have to remain unused before 2050 for us
to have a chance of staying below the 2 C limit. We examine the issue of unburnable carbon and stranded assets, in particular in which countries,
industries and companies they are located, and find that at current prices, around US$100 trillion of assets could be ‘carbon stranded’, if not already
economically so. (CITI GPS, 2015)
This radical political regress occurs just as a commanding level of scientific advancements and socio-ecological insights
persuasively documents looming, unparalleled opportunity losses in the many hundreds of trillions of dollars if society delays,
for example, the accelerated reduction of CO2 e emissions to below zero as swiftly as is technically and economically feasible.
There is also the recognition that the myriad concepts associated with Sustainability (sustainable development, environment,
policies, business, markets, products, purchasing, packaging, food, incentives, norms, science, ecosystems, population, digital
ecology, roadmaps, biodiversity, etc.) are colossal in scope, importance, complexity and urgency.
Both in theory and in reality sustainability necessarily encompasses the >400 trillion potential decisions and actions each day by
the planet’s 7.5 billion citizens (NOTE: The daily potential of 432 trillion split-second decisions and actions is an illustrative back-
of-the-envelope calculation: 7.5 billion citizens x 18 hours/waking-day x 60 minutes/hour x 60 seconds/minute ¼ 432 trillion
seconds per day of potential decisions made by the global population.)—swelling two billion more within several decades—and
their interactions (along with their many billions of domesticated animals and prodigious exo-skeletal infrastructure) in and with
the biosphere.
Not even in an ideal world would all people at all times live moment to moment in a sustainable manner. Culturally evolving
norms can help to sustain and raise the bar of behavioral conduct conducive to sustainability outcomes. And civil society enacts
enforceable laws for the very reason that sizable numbers of, if not most citizens are not self-motivated in their personal conduct to
consider socially important challenges like Sustainability.
Cultural evolution is also influenced by, as well as influences, the ceaseless imaginings, designs and creation of new knowledge,
inventions, innovations (and unwitting externalities), which results in an ever-changing stream of socio-ecological dynamics.
Fig. 18 Dimensions of sustainability. Source: Souter, D. (2012). ICTs, the Internet and sustainability: A discussion paper. International Institute for Sustainable
Development, May 2012, Manitoba, CA: IISD. Credit: BNEF.
Intrinsic in this complex process are inherent surprises, probabilities of known risks and unknown uncertainties, and reducible
ignorance and irreducible ignorance (Faber et al., 1992). Or as U.S. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented, “There are known
unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things
we don’t know we don’t know.” The GAIN technologies (Genetics, AutoRobotics, Informatics, and Nanotechnology) are a case in
point, discussed in later sections. (Ray Kurzweil popularizes GAIN growth curve implications in his books, The Singularity is Near
(2005) and The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990); GAIN is alternatively referred to as NBIC, nano-bio-info-cogno technologies
(NSF/DOC, 2006).) (Fig. 12)
Scaling and Accelerating Sustainability

Sustainability in all its permutations must become a ubiquitous, seamless, central force in the Anthropocene epoch if humanity is to
prevent increasingly more frequent and severe disasters, cataclysms and catastrophes, including the very long-term threat of human
extinction (Weitzman, 2012; Weitzman, 2011). Sustainable practices and policies have achieved a wide range of incremental
changes to date, effective and successful to varying degrees. Energy and resource efficiency are primary, if not exemplary, examples.
Using Information to Displace Energy and Materials

It is noteworthy that between 1949 and 1973, the energy required for producing the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (E/GDP) declined
by 0.4% per year. Then, with the price shocks following the oil crisis of 1973, innumerable efficiency improvements to buildings,
vehicles, factories, motors, lights, and appliances accelerated the rate of reduction of Energy/Gross Domestic Product fivefold to
2.1% per year.
Without faster efficiency gains (smarter, more intelligent ways of designing and delivering energy services), energy consumption
in the United States would have risen from 79 exajoules (EJ) in 1973 to 179 EJ in 2005. Instead, energy consumption in 2005 was
only 104 EJ. The difference (75 EJ) also avoided US$700 billion per year in higher energy bills (Rosenfeld, 2006). How much is
75 EJ? Envision a freight train annually hauling nearly 18 million railcars of coal, which would wrap around the world seven times.
Or imagine 8800 oil supertanker shipments per year that are then distributed to gas stations by 70 million delivery trucks. There are
only two nations that consume >75 EJ per year: the United States and China.
Even if one-third of these savings are discounted as being due to structural changes in the economy rather than smart efficiency
improvements to energy-consuming devices, this still represents more than US$460 billion per year in reduced energy bills. By way
of comparison, there were only 16 out of 194 nations whose GDP in 2006 was greater than these energy savings.
Just how impressive these achievements are can be grasped by comparing these efficiency gains with conventional energy supply.
The 39% drop in Energy/GDP from 1975 to 2000 represented, by 2000, “an effective energy ‘source’ 1.7 times as big as U.S. oil
consumption, three times net oil imports, five times domestic oil output, six times net oil imports from Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, and thirteen times net imports from Persian Gulf countries” (Lovins, 2004).
Yet, as impressive as these advancements are, they remain incommensurate with the transformational changes now required,
although the vast pool of inventive innovations in delivering more utility and mobility services with less energy and materials is
Fig. 19 Best-research-solar PV cell efficiencies. Source: NREL (2017). U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, April 14, 2017. Credit: BNEF.
vigorously expanding. Scaling and accelerating efficiency gains through more intelligent, smart, creative, inventive innovations are
the crucial and key means of cost-effectively scaling and accelerating sustainability to an enormous degree.
A stellar example is how to cool down urban heat islands that have proliferated worldwide. A staggering sum of between 25 and
150 billion tons of CO2-e emissions could be prevented through this urban retrofit process, while accruing multitrillion dollar
savings through avoided power plants and air condition equipment. It involves painting flat roofs white, and replacing low-albedo
roof shingles with high-reflecting ones, so the sun’s heat is not absorbed. It also involves resurfacing black asphalt pavements with
white cementitious finish that also reflects away the sun’s heat (Akbari et al., 2012). The roof top efficiency measure is so cost-
effective it has now been integrated into California’s world-leading Title 24 building standards. This is the only benign geoengineer-
ing initiative that makes imminent sense.
Fig. 20 Value of distributed solar (cents per kWh). Maine Public Utilities Commission’s 2015 Maine Distributed Solar Valuation Study (Maine VOS Study), published
March 1, 2015, found that distributed solar in Central Maine Power’s service territory would have a 25-year levelized value of US$0.34 per kWh, including US$0.14
per kWh of avoided market costs and US$0.20 per kWh of societal benefits, as summarized in Fig. ES-2 of the report. Source: Thomas Beach, R., McGuire, P. G.
(2016). Initial update of the maine VOS study. Maine Public Utilities Commission Docket 2016–00120, Crossborder Energy.
Leveraging potential synergisms among and between various delivered mobility and distributed utility services (including
electricity, water, waste, communication) are critical, and Internet platform networks are proving essential for this design process
to progress (see below) (Choudary, 2015; Parker et al., 2016).
How large of economic and environmental opportunities are energy efficiency gains for the world? Extrapolated from a number
of detailed scenario analyses (Ecofys and WWF International, 2011; McKinsey and Company, 2010; McKinsey Global Institute,
2007), energy-saving gains could technically accrue all the following benefits through 2050 worldwide:
Electricity: delivering the equivalent of 12,800 TeraWatt-hours per year (12.8 trillion kWh), compared to 20,000 TWh consumed
in 2009 world-wide;
Heat: delivering the equivalent of 46 ExaJoules (EJ) per year, compared to 160 EJ consumed in 2009 worldwide;
Transport: delivering the equivalent of 80 EJ of liquid fuels per year, compared to 80 EJ consumed in 2009. To put such massive
figures into understandable context, these delivered energy efficiency services would displace the need for ALL THE FOLLOWING
SUPPLY (illustrative purposes only, not in these exact quantities):
Flourishing Sustainably in the Anthropocene? Known Possibilities and Unknown Probabilities
29
Fig. 21 50-Year farm bill transition to perennial crops. Source: Jackson, W. and Kirschenmann, F. (2009). A 50-year farm bill. Salina, KS: The Land Institute. https://www.landinstitute.org.
Fig. 22 Social cost of transportation. Summary estimates of high-end range of external costs by passenger vehicle mode and cost category (2006$ converted to
2018$). Source: Delucchi, M. and McCubbin, D. (2011). External cost of transport in the United States, chapter 15, Table 11. In: De Palma, A., Lindsey, R., Quinet, E.
and Rickerman, R. (eds.) Handbook Of Transport Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Fig. 23 Sprawl versus smart growth. Source: Smart Growth Network (2011). What is smart growth? Smart growth network and US environmental protection
agency. http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/about_sg.htm.
Coal: 28 million rail cars per year carrying 2.8 billion tons of coal; for comparison, China shipped 2 billion tons in 20 million rail
cars, and the U.S. shipped 810 million tons in 8.1 million U.S. rail cars in 2011, with the two nations consuming nearly two-thirds
of global production;
LNG: 355 million cubic meters of LNG delivered by 1775 supertanker shipments (200,000 m3 (Liu, 2013) per shipment); for
comparison, 355 million m3 of LNG were delivered worldwide in 2011;
Fig. 24 Transportation-related fuel consumption versus urban density. Source: Modified graph of “Urban density and transport-related energy consumption”
hyperbolic chart, in Newman, P. and Kenworthy, J. (1990). Cities and automobile dependence: A sourcebook. Farnham, UK: Gower Publishing/Ashgate.
Fig. 25 Cumulative CO2 emissions and global temperature rise. Relationship between the cumulative CO2 emissions and CO2-induced temperature change for two
different estimates of the TCRE [“Transient Climate Response to cumulative CO2 Emissions”]. CO2-only carbon budget ranges for 1.5–2 C associated with this range
of TCRE values are marked on the horizontal axis. The two values of the TCRE illustrated here are the median of the ensemble of CMIP5 Earth system models (1.6 C/
1000 GtC; blue line) and the observationally constrained best estimate (1.35 C/1000 GtC; red line). Source: Matthews, H. D., Landry, J.-S., Partanen, A.-I., Allen, M.,
Eby, M., Forster, P. M., Friedlingstein, P., and Zickfeld, K. (2017). Estimating carbon budgets for ambitious climate targets. Current Climate Change Reports,
February 1, 2017. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG.
Fig. 26 Cumulative global CO2 budget. Source: Rockström, J., Schellnhuber, H. J., Hoskins, B., Ramanathan, V., Schlosser, P., Brasseur, G. P., Gaffney, O.,
Nobre, C., Meinshausen, M., Rogelj, J., and Lucht, W. (2016). The world’s biggest gamble: Zero carbon roadmap key for <2 C limit. Earth’s Future, August 2016.
Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016EF000392.
Petroleum: 17 million barrels per day of offshore oil; for comparison, 30 million barrels per day produced from 150 offshore oil
platforms worldwide in 2011;
Oil palm: 15 million hectares of oil palm plantations for diesel fuel; for comparison, 15 million hectares was the total global oil
palm production in 2011;
Sugar cane: 10.3 million hectares of sugar cane for ethanol; for comparison, 24 million hectares was the total global sugar cane
production in 2010;
Corn: 32.4 million hectares of corn for ethanol, for comparison, 162 million hectares was the total global corn production in
2011;
Nuclear: 372000 MW of nuclear power plants; for comparison, 372,000 MW was the total global installed nuclear capacity in
2012; and
Hydro: 750,000 MW of hydrodams (equivalent to 41-mega-sized Three Gorges dams); for comparison, there were 1 million MW
of global installed hydroelectric capacity in 2010.
Tremendous financial benefits also accrue from these efficiency gains. Given the several-fold lower cost of efficiency improve-
ments compared to supply expansion, the direct cumulative monetary savings amount to many trillions of dollars. The indirect
cumulative savings include preventing hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 emissions at essentially zero cost, while dramatically
reducing impacts on land resources, watersheds and ecosystem services.
China Energy Efficiency Opportunities

Take the case of the world’s largest carbon emitter, China, which released >10 billion tons of CO2 in 2015. China surpassed the
United States as the largest emitter in 2005, and now emits roughly 30% of the worlds CO2, or roughly the same amount of
emissions as the U.S., the European Union, and India combined. On a per capita basis, China emits less than half the U.S. per capita,
but 10% more than the EU per capita, and four times more than India per capita (EC, 2016).
China already has >200 billion square feet of high-rise residential and commercial urban buildings, and projected to reach 300
billion square feet by 2020. According to the detailed assessment, Reinventing Fire: China, jointly prepared by the Rocky Mountain
Institute (RMI), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the Energy Research Institute (ERI) of China’s National
Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), investing in raising the energy performance of China’s existing buildings and
new construction can achieve 1.2 billion tons of carbon reductions by 2030. That is equal to nearly 4% of 2015 global carbon
emissions (Bendewald, 2017).
Reinventing Fire: China assumes China’s economic development growth plan: a nearly sevenfold increase in GDP from $US6
trillion in 2010 to US$41.4 trillion by 2050; population increase from 1.34 billion in 2010 to 1.37 billion by 2050; and
urbanization increase from 50% of the Chinese population in 2010 to 78% by 2050. Even with this remarkable economic growth,
efficiency improvements throughout the economy can decrease China’s fossil fuel dependency by nearly half—from 6.4 billion tons
of coal equivalent per year to 3.4 billion tons—or roughly the same level as China’s economy consumed in 2010! Air pollutants,
which cause an estimated 10% loss of China’s annual economic output, are also significantly reduced by the efficiency gains. The
report estimates “total emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX) drop 85% and 90%, respectively, by 2050
compared with 2010 levels” (ERI, RMI, LBNL, 2016).
In addition to the indirect economic value from emission and pollution reductions—for example, reduced morbidity and
mortality, increased agricultural yields, market advantages from using these cutting-edge efficiency technologies—are substantial
direct financial benefits. The gross savings amount to US$8.3 trillion by 2050, with the efficiency investments costing US$5.2
trillion, for a net savings of US$3.1 trillion (all figures in 2010 dollars).
Efficiency First and Foremost

Efficiency First, prior to expanding any new supply options, has been advocated since the 1970s, subsequent to thermodynamic
efficiency assessments of energy-consuming devices and processes conducted by the American Institute of Physics revealed vast
energy savings potential (Carnahan et al., 1975; APS, 2008).
A plethora of end-use-oriented efficiency assessments have been steadily issued since the APS reports, performed for a range of
scales (city, state, national, regional and global) (Krause et al., 1982; Krause et al., 1995; Goldemberg et al., 1985; Lovins and Lovins,
1981; Lovins et al., 1985).
Despite the enormous multiple benefits derived from efficiency gains, governments have consistently given preference to supply
expansion first and foremost. A snarky remark by one Texas public utility commissioner in the late 1970s opined no nation ever
conserved its way to greatness. And former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney once scoffed that “conservation may be a sign of
personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”
On the contrary, efficiency gains delivering energy services at least-cost-and-risk over the past four decades have accumulated
evidence and impressive empirical results in leadership corporations, cities, states (like California) and nations (notably Germany
and China). The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has played a preeminent role in promoting cutting-
edge public policies and regulations and best-in-practice private initiatives and market innovations for all sectors of the economy.
ACEEE’s recent surveys ranking efficiency progress at the U.S. state level, and ranking nations worldwide, show progress is being
made, but significant gains await being harnessed (ACEEE, 2015; ACEEE, 2016).
Efficiency Unbound and Rebound

It is paradoxical that in spite of all the productivity-enhancing efficiency innovations of the past there still resulted more energy and
resource consumption, pollution, and waste in absolute terms than ever before. An extensive 2000 assessment found a staggering
one-half to three-quarters of the resources consumed annually by industrial economies are returned to the environment as waste
within a year (Matthews et al., 2000).
Related to this massive increase in resource and waste throughput is the so-called rebound or takeback effect. While efficiency
gains are common sense measures, this has not stopped critical commentaries. The prime criticism is that efficiency is not a
panacea—a cure-all. The argument has weak and strong versions.
The weak version is more rhetorical than substantive, arguing that efficiency doesn’t solve the problem of adequate clean energy
supply, let alone total reduction of CO2 emissions. No efficiency expert has ever made such a simplistic claim, and such critics are
guilty of foisting a false dilemma fallacy into the debate.
The strong version of the argument goes by various other names, mainly the snap-back effect, the Jevons Paradox, or the
Khazzoom–Brookes postulate. The phenomenon is real, whereby a person who buys a more energy efficient product that costs less
to use may end up increasing its usage, hence increasing energy consumption. More broadly, as witnessed in each industrial
revolution, as the cost of manufacturing more energy and resource efficient products goes down, individuals make microeconomic
decisions to purchase these efficient products, ironically resulting in macroeconomic expansion of the products and energy
consumed as more people can afford to purchase the lower cost goods.
This is seen in national statistics whereby the absolute amount of energy consumption rises as the economy grows bigger and
bigger, even as the energy used per unit of economic growth steadily declines. Again, the criticism seems to imply that efficiency is
no panacea, and again, that is a straw man fallacy attacking something efficiency proponents have not claimed.
The rebound effect also occurs when, for example, someone purchases a more efficient refrigerator, and also decides to get a
larger model size, potentially canceling out the energy savings. The same holds true for upsizing to efficient, but larger homes, bigger
cars, larger television sets. But this is not always the case.
Take refrigerators as an example. The share of US households with two or more refrigerators increased by 5.2% between 2001
and 2005; however, during the same period the total electricity consumed by the fleet of growing refrigerators declined by 3.3%. The
same trend is true for Canada, also where the total energy needed for household refrigerators declined by 42% since 1990.
California, which is among the more energy efficient economies in the world, has pursued efficiency policies since 1974. They
have achieved dramatic improvements in the average per capita electricity consumption for over three decades. In comparison, if the
rest of the U.S. had followed California’s efficiency leadership, they could have avoided constructing 160,000 MW of unnecessary
coal-fired power plants (Rosenfeld and Poskanzer, 2009).
So, when efficiency critics argue it’s not a panacea, it can be noted that it’s a mesoacea—not a cure-all, but half the cure.
Yet, the snapback effect remains one of the most persistent common criticisms of energy efficiency policies and programs, with
critics arguing that efficiency proponents overstate energy savings by ignoring the direct rebound effect (Inhaber, 1997;
Brookes, 2000).
Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that improvements in energy efficiency could result in an increase, rather than a
decrease, in energy use due to the rebound effect (Khazzoom, 1980).
The key issue is the magnitude of the rebound effect. Does empirical evidence suggest it is large or small? This question has been
addressed in in-depth literature reviews (IEA, 1998; Greening et al., 2000). After examining econometric studies and direct
measurements of the rebound effect for different sectors and major end-uses in the United States, research findings indicate the
effect is very small. It is <10% for residential appliances, residential lighting and commercial lighting, and <20% for industrial
process uses. For residential space heating, water heating and automotive transport, the rebound effect is small to moderate (from
<10% to 40%). And for residential space cooling, the rebound effect is in the range of 0%–50%.
Other assessments looked in more detail at studies of the rebound effect associated with vehicle efficiency improvements in the
United States, that is, the change in vehicle use as the fuel cost per mile declines. The findings showed the overall experience with
fuel price and fuel economy changes over 25 years lead to a short run rebound effect on the order of 10% and a long run effect of
about 20%. The author notes, “the implication is that 80%–90% of the maximum potential reduction in fuel consumption and
greenhouse gas emissions due to a technical change in vehicle efficiency will be realized, even after the increase in vehicle miles due
to lower per mile costs has had its full effect” (Greene, 1998).
In essence, the rebound effect is a dynamic phenomenon. It tends to decline over time as the saturation and quality of energy
services increase. In a 2005 review for the International Energy Agency, leading efficiency expert Howard Geller and co-author
Sophie Attali emphasized,
It is important to note that the direct rebound effect, to the extent that it occurs, is not evidence that energy efficiency is a failure. It simply means that
some consumers choose to respond to reduced energy costs in part by increasing their level of energy service, for example by increasing their level of
space heating or cooling, rather than minimizing energy consumption and energy costs. Energy efficiency improvements still contribute to an
improvement in ‘general welfare’ whether by enabling a higher level of comfort, increased activity, or lower energy cost, or some combination of
these responses. (Geller and Attali, 2005)
Efficiency is the Backbone of Economic Growth

There is another dimension to the rebound issue, however, that seems totally lost on efficiency critics. It has been the ongoing
efficiency revolution that has enabled leaner manufacturing and vast expansion of lower cost goods and services, making them
accessible to an increasing fraction of humanity; goods that were previously limited to kings and queens and the wealthiest
individuals. Efficiency gains are instrumental in lifting all of humanity out of grinding poverty. This is a critically important function
of efficiency, above and beyond, but also integral to, the myriad of sustainability challenges efficiency also addresses.
Bottom of the Pyramid Opportunities
Just how important energy efficiency gains are for improving the lives of billions of impoverished and cash-strapped citizens who
live on one dollar a day or less, can be seen from four examples: power, water, communication, and mobility.
Power—Synergism of Energy Efficiency and Solar Power

For 1.3 billion people without access to electricity, lighting is obtained from burning fuel. Research discovered these poor
individuals spend some $40 billion annually to operate grossly inefficient, poor quality lamps that are dangerous health hazards,
as well as emit nearly 200 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions (Mills, 2005). Devastating health hazards include child
poisoning from ingesting kerosene, infant and child body burns, pneumonia and respiratory illnesses from hazardous indoor air
pollutants, and very poor lighting at just 1% of the level of recommended illumination levels (Mills, 2012). The costs were also
burdensome. For example, a candle costs more than $28 per 1000 lx-hours and a simple kerosene lamp costs nearly $6 per 1000 lx-
hours. In sharp contrast, a solar LED lantern costs one cent per 1000 lx-hours.
Beginning in 2007, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) spearheaded the Lighting Africa initiative, focused on bringing
solar-powered LED lanterns to the 600 million Africans without electricity (Lighting Africa, 2010). Actually solar lighting initiatives
began in the 1990s prior to LED lighting, using compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), pioneered in Bangladesh by Grameen Bank
founder Muhammad Yunas, as well as separately pioneered in India by Sanjit “Bunker” Roy, founder of the Barefoot College. Both
initiatives work with the poorest of the poor women, all illiterate and surviving day-to-day.
Grameen Shakti (village power) provides microloans ($50 to $100 dollars) to village women, creating oases of light surrounded
by a sea of darkness. The women are able to operate the microbusinesses into the evening, while their children are able to learn
school coursework (Wimmer, 2012).
Like Grameen Bank, the Barefoot College brings women together into a trust circle, and then teach them how to assemble and
install solar PV systems that charge the solar lanterns, as well as cell phones. The women then travel from village to village, installing
the systems as part of a microenterprise program. The confidence and exuberance these once downtrodden women exhibit at their
new professions is infectious; they even established the Barefoot Women Solar Engineering Association (Folkevett, 2009). The
Barefoot College initiative has become a proven model for self-sustaining community development, which has gone viral over the
Internet with programs now operating throughout Asia, Africa and South America (Roy, 2011).
Water—Energy Efficiency and Safe, Clean Water

Several billion people in developing countries lack safe, clean water. Every hour 200 children under five years of age die from
drinking dirty water. Every year, 60 million children reach adulthood stunted for good. Each year, there are some four billion
episodes of diarrhea in developing countries that exhaust the physical strength to perform labor, costing billions of dollars in lost
income to the poor. An estimated 10% of the global disease burden could be prevented with clean water. Confronting these
abysmal realities, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Scientist Ashok Gadgil conceived a clean water technology in the 1990s,
that he designed, constructed, field tested, evolved and adapted, and then commercialized in 1995 a rugged, ultra-low cost water
filtering system for families and villages (Gadgil, 1998).
Initially called the UVWater Works (commercialized as WaterHealth International, WHI), the design set rigorous criteria that
were satisfied or surpassed: (1) meet or exceed the criteria for disinfection set by the WHO and the U.S. EPA; (2) energy efficient:
60 W Ultraviolet (UV) lamp disinfects 1 ton of dirty water per hour (1000 L, 264 gal, or one cubic meter, m3); (3) low cost: the
device disinfects 1 ton of water for just four cents (10–50 times cheaper than delivered water costs in most cities); (4) reliable,
mature components; (5) can treat unpressurized water; (6) rapid throughput: 12 s per ton of filtered water; (7) low maintenance:
only requires replacing the UV lamp four times per year; (8) no overdose risk; and (9) fail-safe (Gadgil and Derby, 2003). The
outcome? For less than US$10 per person, WaterHealth can provide a decade of healthy drinking water to communities in need
(Gadgil et al., 2008).
By 2012, WHI was serving >5 million people, from >500 WaterHealth Centers, dispensing >700 million liters of water
annually. Local rural communities have experienced higher productivity from avoiding waterborne diseases, as well as saving
time by eliminating the distance to procure daily water. Economic gains have resulted from new employment and enterprise
opportunities (IFC, 2012).
WHI’s business model reaches underserved rural populations by including financing for the purchase and installation of the
systems. User fees for treated water are used to repay loans and to cover the expenses of operating and maintaining the equipment
and facility. Community members are hired to conduct day-to-day maintenance of these “microutilities,” thus creating employment
and building capacity, as well as generating entrepreneurial opportunities for local residents to provide related services, such as sales
and distribution of the purified water to outlying areas. And because the communities in which they are installed own the facilities,
the user fees become attractive sources of revenue for the community after loans have been repaid (Gadgil, 2008).
Communications—Mobile Phones Going the Distance

Since the 1990s international agencies and institutions have focused increasing attention on the role information and computer
technology (ICT) can play in developing countries. The 1998 World Development Report on Knowledge for Development emphasized
knowledge, not capital, as the key to sustained economic growth and improvements in human well-being. This raised the concern
about the relationship between the unequal distribution in know-how (knowledge gaps) across and within countries and the
difficulties posed by having incomplete knowledge of attributes (information problems).
UNCTAD’s 2008 Information Economy Report noted, “In Africa, where the increase in terms of the number of mobile phone
subscribers and penetration has been greatest, this technology can improve the economic life of the population as a whole”
(UNCTAD, 2008). Mobile phones are the main business tool for many entrepreneurs in developing countries (particularly small
entrepreneurs, and especially women), and have great potential for small and medium-sized enterprises in those countries.
Mobility—Solar Powered Electric Bicycles

There are more than a billion (nonelectric) bicyclists in the world, with nearly half of them in China. In recent decades bicycle sales
hovered around 100 million per year. But the love for the car has led many Chinese to forsake their bikes for cars. In the late 1980s
half the people in Beijing bicycled, by the mid-1990s some 640 million Chinese bicycled, but by 2005 cyclists had declined to 450
million, and in Beijing wide boulevards of bicycle riders gave way to gridlocked congestion with bumper-to-bumper cars. The Great
Bicycle Kingdom may yet make a comeback, particularly with the great advances in electric bicycles.
China is the largest producer of electric bikes, as well as the largest market. There are now >200 million electric bikes and
scooters worldwide, 90% of them in Asia, and most of those in China. World annual sales exceed 35 million electric bikes,
projections of 96 million electric bikes and scooters annually sold by 2035, with two billion electric bicyclists on the roads by 2050
(Jamerson and Benjamin, 2015).
Ideally, every person would grow up with a bicycle, and safe roads to bike. Biking is the most efficient form of transportation yet
invented. A cyclist gets >2000 miles per gallon (0.1 L per 100 km). And for a planet where there are now more obese people than
starving people, medical researchers are singing the praises of bicycling for health, wellbeing and longevity (Celis-Morales
et al., 2017).
For people living in the bottom of the pyramid (nearly three-fourths of humanity), an electric bike, scooter, or three-wheeler
with a storage area, offer among the lower cost mobility options. Gasoline at US$3 per gallon (US 79 cents per liter) is the equivalent
to 36 cents per kWh—two to three times more expensive than solar PV charging.
For at least half of the world population now living in cities, and 75% projected to be living in cities within the next several
decades, solar-powered electric bikes and scooters offer greater speed and ease for commuters at a very small cost. This is especially
the case in those nations, companies, and cities that provide incentives and financing, including no upfront capital requirement and
very low-interest, low-payment arrangements, combined with designing streets and paths that ensure safe cycling free from the
threat of motor vehicle accidents.
Bottom of the Pyramid Policies

Providing access to Power, Water, Communications, Mobility, and Food (discussed later below) could be accelerated and scaled to
the 70% of humanity who live on less than $10 per day, especially the nearly 50% who live on less than $2.50 per day. These vital
services for catalyzing sustainably flourishing livelihoods can be designed to be financially affordable for these five billion citizens
through a portfolio of public and private innovative financial instruments (also discussed in the end section of the paper).
As a starter the world should heed the recommendation of former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, shared at the 2012
UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), also known as Rio þ 20. Mr. Wolfensohn suggested providing a mobile
smartphone to every woman in the bottom of the pyramid. Giving a mobile phone instantly connects each woman to communi-
cation and knowledge networks available locally, regionally, nationally and globally (Wolfensohn, 2012).
There is no doubt and every confidence that such a multipurpose “tool library” device (that also happens to make phone calls)
opens new options and opportunities never dreamed of by these women: peer-to-peer learning in their local dialects—both audibly
and visually—being one of the most important for catalyzing self-education, skills development, capacities and capabilities
building, ongoing assistance in one’s microenterprise, etc. Access to mobile phone banking and microfinance, as well as monitoring
favorable market conditions for their goods and services, learning about available public services and resources, and other key
benefits like free online books. Each woman effectively embarks on a path of knowledge acquisition, richly enabled and supported
by her women’s communication sharing network (Totten, 2010).
Mobile smartphone manufacturing costs have been in continuous free fall for three decades, and price points for the cheapest
mobile smartphones found in India, sub-Saharan Africa, and China as of 2016 were under US$50, including several companies in
India with special offers under $5 per smartphone (Condliffe, 2016; TNN and Agencies, 2016). Even premium smart phones are in
the $100 þ range, and dropping fast in price. Understandably, in the half decade since James Wolfensohn’s call for free phones for
poor women there has been a spectacular leap in mobile phone purchases in developing countries; highest in Asia, but also in Africa
where 40% of the population had mobile smartphones as of 2016 (Kemp, 2017).
Still, the reality is that 300 million fewer women worldwide have mobile phones than men. So, in the spirit of Wolfensohn’s
proposal, Tata Communications and Mastercard announced in 2015 that they are providing 100 million women with free mobile
phones over five years, beginning in India, Nigeria, Indonesia and Guatemala (Goldberg, 2015).
From Centralized and Hierarchical to Distributed and Lateral

If there is a core insight for public policymakers, corporations and civic stakeholders regarding the pathways for transitioning the
bottom of the pyramid population towards sustainably flourishing well-being and livelihoods it is: overhaul all the laws, codes,
rules, regulations, incentives, subsidies, and other policymaking activities from last century’s central, hierarchical development
model to a locally distributed, laterally networked development model. The highlighted suggestions above are clear evidence of a
still largely untapped market ripe for accelerating and scaling.
History is replete with resistance to such transitions—whereby new technologies broaden the opportunities for the powerless
and poor who have no voice, vote, or presumed social value, to new levels of human, social and civic capital assets and vocal power.
One can expect efforts to block, delay, hinder, or derail forward progress by incumbent powers, especially oligarchies, plutocracies,
theocracies, dictatorships, and crony capitalists. Momentum may be deterred in numerous nations for lengthier periods than others.
Let one example illustrate this phenomenon. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa and his crony capitalist political party colleagues
are pushing for construction of an US$80 billion nuclear reactor complex. South Africa’s fiscally prudent Treasury Chief Pravin
Gordhan persistently opposed the immensely expensive mega-energy project, which Zuma reacted to in 2017 by firing the
Treasurer. Rating agency Fitch promptly downgraded South Africa’s credit rating to junk status.
Why? The reactor complex makes no economic sense, is many-fold more expensive than the portfolio of available alternatives,
and is essentially a crony capital get-richer scheme. For example, South Africa has an abundance of solar and wind resources, as well
as end-use efficiency savings opportunities. An assessment of these options indicate the combination—48% from onshore and
offshore wind power, 37% from rooftop, distributed and large-scale solar PV systems, 12% from Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)
systems, plus efficiency gains—would actually result in accruing $10 billion per year in lower utility bills within the next three
decades (Jacobson et al., 2017). A significant percentage of these options would occur as distributed microgrids, which is more
aligned with provisioning citizens with power needs, rather than the giant projects which tend to favor extraction and heavy
industries focused on exports with little if any gain for poor citizens.
Mega-Projects and Mega-Losses

The South African nuclear complex example may be egregious, but it lines up with the past century’s preference for and priority to
mega-projects, especially large centralized energy projects—fossil fuel supply chains, nuclear reactors, hydrodams, vast biofuel
plantations, and the large-scale infrastructure required by these installations (e.g., ports, railroads, highways and transmission
lines). Therein lies the slippery slope to financial fraud, graft, and venal wrongdoing.
According to researchers who track these massive infrastructure projects, which approach US$60 to US$90 trillion per decade
worldwide, “large infrastructure projects almost invariably arrive late, over-budget and fail to perform up to expectations. Cost
overruns and benefit shortfalls of 50% are common; cost overruns above 100% are not uncommon (Flyvbjerg et al., 2009). In fact,
the record of success on mega-projects is abysmal, roughly 1 out of every 1000 (D’Almeida, 2015). Research is also showing many
big projects are fragile, less robust or resilient (Ansar et al., 2017). Not surprisingly, Transparency International, which tracks
corruption in countries, emphasizes that these mega-size projects are among the main means of crony capitalists criminal
exploitation (Roza, 2010).
Blockchain Ledger
Hopefully a resolute combination of moral suasion, political diplomacy, the tenacity of markets, and civil demand will prevail over
the long term to sustain momentum in improving the plight of citizens living at the bottom of the pyramid. One very promising
transaction tracking innovation, blockchain technology, may help to prevent and spot corruption (Smith, 2017). Blockchain is a
digital encrypted microaudit ledger of records (blocks) in which transactions are time-stamped chronologically and linked to
previous blocks. It is designed to prevent hacking, or retroactively altered, while enabling auditing by those with access to the
encryption keys (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016).
Blockchain technology’s distributed ledger design has wide application to the myriad of transaction-based activities, and
especially to distributed interactions and transactions (Wright and De Filippi, 2015). It is applicable to an array of activities
required by citizens living at the bottom of the pyramid (Choudhury, 2016). It also provides a tracking method for implementing
the circular economy, where materials and energy that flow in and through, and waste and pollution flow through and out of any
system (city, factories, buildings), can be harnessed and leveraged in a closed loop manner; or what is variously referred to as waste-
to-nutrients and cradle-to-cradle (McDonough and Braungart, 2010).
GAIN—Genetics, Auto-Robotics, Informatics and Nanotechnologies
The era of digitization and Internetization has been foundational to the accelerated advancements in the so-called GAIN technol-
ogies. They have already generated flourishing industries producing goods and services with multiple benefits, not the least of which
is shrinking ecological footprints through energy and material minimization over the lifecycle. Efficiency gains, in and of themselves
are vital sustainability efforts, but not sufficient, as many commentators have argued, primarily because, paradoxically, efficiency
gains at the microeconomic scale can actually result in scaling absolute increases at the macroeconomic scale (Polimeni et al., 2008).
Efficiency, as well as dematerialization, resulting in reduced energy and materials per unit of delivered service, gives the strong
sense of leading to sustainable conditions. Both in theory and practice, energy and resource efficiency gains do advance sustain-
ability goals at some levels, but not necessarily at all levels. For example, half of all electricity worldwide goes just to power electric
motors, pumps, compressors, and fans. These high-performance electric drive devices have collapsed back-breaking work for
billions of people by reducing to minutes what previously took workers many hours, days or weeks to perform, such as in threshing
grains, pumping and distributing water, washing clothes, lifting and moving massive loads, assembling vehicles, etc.
In China, the potential energy savings from efficiency gains from electric motor drive systems are worth several hundred billion
dollars per decade, displacing the need for 63,000 MW of planned power plants. Jiangsu province is leading the effort, identifying
10,000 MW of motor efficiency gains that can be delivered at a levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of US$ 0.01 per kWh. By
comparison, the Jiangsu electricity price delivered to the industrial sector in 2012 was US$ 0.14 per kWh.
Hypothetically, applied comprehensively to all power-consuming uses throughout China’s residential, commercial, institu-
tional, industrial and agricultural sectors, end-use efficiency could help in avoiding half of an estimated US$ 10 trillion in utility
expenditures incurred from the power plants to be built by 2030. Free ancillary benefits, beyond an order of magnitude reduction in
costs, is eliminating tens of millions of tons of CO2 emissions, plus significant amounts of acid rain and ozone pollutants, black
carbon particles, and an immense amount of cooling water otherwise needed for the thermal power plants (Totten and
Seligmann, 2013).
This is the very promising upside of GAIN technologies, which are already revolutionizing the manufacturing processes for
producing far cleaner energy-powered appliances, equipment, vehicles, etc. with radically less resource input and waste output over
a product’s lifecycle. A veritable revolution in materials science is giving rise to everything from higher performance, declining cost
solar, wind, battery storage technologies, and ultra-light vehicles that are more efficient, durable, longer lasting, to extraordinarily
energy efficient catalysts and membranes used in chemical production and water purification.
More Information and Knowledge, Less Energy and Materials

The powerful informatics technologies are also instrumental in taking efficiency and efficacy to a higher integrated level, as for
example in visualizing more ecologically benign and socially responsive designs, simulations and scenarios of city mobility access
systems. Rather than defaulting to car-centric urban layouts, where vehicles consume more than half of a city’s land area for streets,
parking and garages, instead mobility access is being viewed as a combination of pedestrian and bicycle friendly pathways,
integrated with more flexible transit systems, including telework and telecommuting.
The emergence of autonomous, driverless vehicles, increasingly used in a sharing economy model (NLC, 2015) for satisfying
people’s on-demand needs, could result in the need for far fewer vehicles, garages, parking areas, and road surface, freeing up a
substantial amount of the city land and infrastructure now accommodating vehicles (Corwin et al., 2016). According to a review of
many urban areas, the built infrastructure typically is <20%, and open space and parks often <5%, suggesting very positive
regeneration opportunities (Guala, 2016) (Fig. 13).
Behind all of these extraordinary, rapidly evolving innovations are the near-magic breakthroughs spanning computational
sciences, combinatorial algorithms, software engineering, machine learning, big data lakes, neural networks, and Artificial Intelli-
gence (AI).
Deep learning supercomputer systems already perform powerful computational tasks, such as IBM’s Watson, Google’s Deep-
Mind, Microsoft’s Oxford, Facebook’s FBLearner Flow, Baidu’s Minwa, as well as those being developed by DARPANET for military
use (and by their counterparts in China, Russia and other nations). The commercial and military applications of these exponentially
evolving general-purpose technologies (GPTs) promise hyperbolic economic growth, as well as amplify destabilizing feedback
effects throughout the political economy and socio-ecological landscape (Garreau, 2006).
Nevertheless, the multilevel “rebound” paradox strongly suggests that the intrinsic nature of capitalism to seek ceaseless growth,
regardless of whether it occurs in communist, socialist or capitalist economies, creates the ever-present quandary of when enough is
enough (Dietz and O’Neill, 2013) (Bogle, 2009). There is relatively miniscule recognition, for example, of limits to growth or
planetary boundaries, nor social justice issues, extreme inequality and concentrated wealth/power, under the capital-expanding
economic models (Foster et al., 2010; Kenis and Lievens, 2015).
In this regard, most orthodox economists claim to do objective and fact-based positive economics, and distrust the normative
economics that heterodox economists argue is critical for addressing moral and ethical values. Yet, as articulated over the centuries
by Aristotle, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mills, Karl Marx and many others, values and ethical questions are inescapable parts of
economics. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen has argued, “[T]he nature of modern economics has been substantially
impoverished by the distance that has grown between economics and ethics” (Sen, 1987).
Such moral and ethical questions loom large both for confronting the global challenge of planetary boundaries and social
justice, and in recognizing the disruptive impacts GAIN technologies will create, given they are projected to grow exponentially in
the 21st century, wildly exceeding last century’s smokestack industrial growth. Each of these tech-knowledge domains are
experiencing phenomenal rates of innovation, with increasing realization that synergisms among and between the four technologies
will accelerate even more innovation more rapidly.
Faustian Bargains?
Some GAIN technologies are doubled-edged, including dual civil-military uses, and these dark shadow sides require vigilant due
diligence through ongoing research and assessments, and by constantly monitoring, communicating and engaging civic society (The
U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is one of the world’s largest funders of GAIN/
NBIC technology synergisms research) (RAND, 2006). The military use of robotic and drone warfare (Singer, 2009), the police use
of big data for profiling potential criminals, and security agencies monitoring citizens’ Internet and phone communications, already
are major social concerns.
Other major concerns involve the far-reaching implications of the evolving power of synthetic biology, which is moving into the
uncharted realms of transforming any number of floral and faunal species to create economically desirable attributes (Garreau,
2006; Marris et al., 2014; Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, 2010). Who controls the capital assets of and
profits from GAIN technologies will greatly influence whether inequality will worsen or be mitigated; the projections by some
analysts see auto-robotics, AI and automation resulting in vast unemployment of blue collar workers and white collar professionals,
causing increased stresses and maladaptive social behaviors that deepen the problems of inequality.
Consumption: Consumptive or Consummatum
Another looming peril facing sustainability is whether the vast pool of new inventions and economic opportunities emerging from
GAIN options will be used to promote endless, often mindless consumerism. And that this hyper-consumerism will prevail over
wise and judicious application of these technologies to resolve the mega challenges confronting the world’s citizenry.
Consumption in all the human dimensions we previously noted—Homo sapiens and their domestic animals weight, humanity’s
technosphere, the conversion of NPP, Net Primary Product—constitutes the embodiment of global economic growth. And the
growth has been accelerating with each successive industrial revolution (highlighted earlier). The world economy grew 14-fold
between the start of the First Industrial Revolution around 1600 to the start of the Second Industrial Revolution in 1900. Between
the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions the global economy grew 70-fold.
This historical growth pattern, coupled with a deterministic view of continuous technology advances, leads most economists to
assume global average annual per capita growth rates of 2%–3% in the 21st century. This implies a nearly 10- to 20-fold increase in
world GDP over the century. If attempted with last industrial revolution technologies as most of the incumbents prefer, most
strongly the fossil fuels industry and investors, it will essentially be a strength-through-exhaustion process. It is highly unlikely to
accomplish even the lower growth rates. It will also be accompanied with significantly worsening and deteriorating dimensions of
the biosphere, exceeding planetary boundaries into unstable states, increase the number of destabilizing tipping points—some with
teleconnections (Cai et al., 2016), and collapsing a considerable amount of humanity’s economic and technosphere capital (Fig.
11).
In sharp contrast, the Third Industrial Revolution that has emerged out of the interactive networks of existing and new general
purpose technologies (GPTs)—digitization, Internetization, mass minimization and miniaturization, modularization, and
electrification—give innumerable signs (as many of the footnote citations attest) of greatly exceeding the economic growth rates.
The detailed speculation—including publications, simulations, scenarios, complexity modeling, and an endless flow of inven-
tive innovations flooding the market—make a compelling case that:
(1) Humans will increasingly be displaced from most jobs that now exist by automation, machines, robots and GAIN technologies;
(2) New jobs are emerging and businesses expanding, although our education systems are not in alignment with the operational
needs of these new growth sectors, nor designed to assist citizens in learning a valuable aptitude for a world without full or part-
time work, which is learning how to learn;
(3) Capital availability in many forms will experience an enormous rise—financial, knowledge, intelligence, civic, social, cooper-
ative, human, spiritual, political, and importantly, natural capital;
(4) Education systems at all scales—essentially over the human life time—need to both broaden and focus their interactions with
students, parents, teachers, administrators and the civic community, in leveraging the portfolio of expanding capital availability
to further enrich each person’s life-long learning experiences;
(5) Strong Sustainability is an integral and fundamental component of learning, given both the expanding opportunities for the
kinds of ecological, equitable and economic sustainability gains highlighted and cited throughout this paper, as well as the
possible misuses that arise with serious consequences (e.g., cyber-WMD, cyber-terrorism, cyber-crime, cyber-surveillance of
citizen behavior);
(6) Mobile phone interaction (24/7 worldwide) on and through Internet platforms is becoming the mainstream activity that, at its
best, involves and facilitates deep learning, deep play, and deep work, especially as AI advances result in highly intelligent,
personalized voicebots with personality (knowbots, tutorbots, scholarbots, carebots, etc.).
Deep Learning, Deep Play, Deep Work—The New Lifespan

There are many implications stemming from these escalating trends. Work will not be the central defining life experience for most
laborers or professionals (Brynjolfsson, 2011; Susskind and Susskind, 2015). Certainly new jobs will continue to be created in the
AI-accelerated future of auto-robotics and machine intelligence, as has been true with previous industrial revolutions that collapsed
and superseded predecessor industries.
But the ubiquitous and pervasive presence of the nonhuman work force will leave most humans with time on their hands, and
little or no income in their pockets. This raises the twin questions of: (1) how individuals (and society) will find sustenance for the
mind, body, spirit, heart and soul; and, (2) find sources of income for maintaining a sustainably flourishing life?
Mindshift for Sustenance

Possibilities are discussed throughout this paper, and undoubtedly many more will emerge with humanity muddling forward
(Allenby and Sarewitz, 2011). Given such an uncertain future full of surprises, many that simply cannot be foreseen, there are
critically important roles for local leaders and their citizen supporters—political, educational, spiritual, business and civic—to be
proactive in examining where their city resides on the spectrum from antifragility to vulnerability in the face of the rapid
advancements of disrupting and destabilizing technologies.
Cultivating a love of life-long learning, infused by boundless curiosity, are the attributes for deep learning, as well as deep play
(avocations) and work (vocations). Educational institutions need to seize this transformational demand. Academicians, instructors,
teachers, and administrators need to break radically from the schooling structured to train students for the second industrial
revolution’s assembly lines and secretarial pools. Mobile smartphones, particularly with embedded conversational tutorbots/
scholarbots, are now the single most important asset for transforming human learning. Learning not only from interacting with
parents, teachers, friends and peers, but by accessing from and interacting with the world’s largest open-source resource repository
and network. Educators and educational institutions have new functions to perform in supporting, inspiring and guiding self-
motivated learning and curiosity, and engaging in peer-directed learning initiatives.
Real learning, as espoused by pragmatist educators like John Dewey, offer guidance: immerse students in active learning-and-
doing through applied activities and practical skills development, engaged in the experiences of the community rather than
anchored to a classroom desk. Cultivating a continuously evolving and enriched portfolio of skills, capabilities, and capacities, will
be vital, with a core one of learning-how-to-learn (Oakley, 2017).
The experiential portfolio of time spent in deep learning, play and work is likely to have fuzzy boundaries, with less distinct
separations in space and time, and often entangled and intermingling. The rote memorizing that filled school days and homework
needs to give way to a myriad of learning modes: increased experiences with the practicing mind (Sterner, 2012), mindfulness
(Winston and Smalley, 2010), flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008), presence (Senge et al., 2005), conversations among and between
reflective practitioners (Schon, 1984), sensemaking (Flewelling, 2003), observations (Maria Konnikova, 2012), experimentation
(Christensen, 2015), the exercise and exploration of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2000), multilingual in other cultures’
languages and other specialized disciplines (e.g., coding, music, science) (ACTFL, n.d.; Kafai and Burke, 2016; Beerer, n.d.),
interaction with new virtual reality (VR) (Jerald, 2015) and augmented reality (AR) (Aukstakalnis, 2017) Internet technologies,
tools and games (Sandanayake, 2016) (Scoble and Israel, 2016), physical activity, gardening, and walking in nature (Lu and
Montague, 2015; Louv, 2012; Waters, 2008). Preferably this learning process serves to enhance and enrich the myriad sources of
capital—human, social-cooperative, civic, spiritual, and intelligence.
Economics (Household Stewardship) for Sustainably Flourishing

Articulate and cogent arguments are made both pro and con on whether the nonhuman workforce of AI, autorobotics and machine
intelligence will or will not displace most human employment in the coming decades. In either case, given the favorable
probabilities to the 1% of humanity who own most of the total wealth in the world, they are most likely to control most of the
capital assets of GAIN technologies.
This goes to the second question of how do citizens derive a sustainably flourishing lifespan if wage and salary positions are
declining, and have no assets paying dividends or royalties. There are strong indications that the concentrated wealth influences
political decisions to an extraordinary degree, resulting in lawmakers sustaining favorable tax and regulatory policies for the rich. If
income inequalities are allowed to become too extreme, public outrage, clashes and conflicts and widespread destabilization may
unleash chaotic and destructive outcomes, as many analyses and publications describe.
Cities as Muddlers
In their book, The Techno-Human Condition, Professors Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, parse the meanings of an era in which
humans find themselves with incomprehensible technological complexity and accelerated change. They make an important
observation that, “[W]hen problems are wicked, no belief system, however rooted in analysis of facts it may be, can provide a
universally accepted answer... [and] muddling through is not a second-best process to be dropped when appropriate optimization
techniques are developed: it is the best we can do” (p. 110) (Allenby, 2016).
Black Swans
There is another dimension that must be taken into account, as lessons reveal from the history of technologies, including financial
instruments. Society is akin to those families and businesses that forego insurance while constructing buildings on flood plains or in
hurricane pathways. We persuade ourselves that the inevitable will never occur; despite ongoing evidence to the contrary. A central
challenge in assembling a healthy portfolio of technologies, whether for energy, food, mobility, water, infrastructure, etc., can be
gleaned from finance portfolio theory. The core insight is to assemble the portfolio so as to make it robust and resilient
(“antifragile”) to volatility and black swan (fat-tail probability) events (Taleb, 2010a; Taleb, 2012).
History is replete with black swan disasters, most recently the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors disaster triggered by an
earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
The reactor planners made multiple mistakes ranging from inaccurate risk analysis and poor siting (Rodriguez-Vidal et al., 2012),
failure in government oversight and enforcement (Onishi and Glanz, 2011), to performing sub-optimal operations and mainte-
nance procedures. The multihundred billion dollar disaster “vaporized the balance sheet of the world’s No. 4 power company,
TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company],” in effect making them a ward of the state (Schneider et al., 2011).
But the corporate planners and regulatory officials also entirely failed to think through the financial consequences of such a
disaster collapsing the overnight value in the Japan’s fleet of 54 nuclear reactors. Nor did the global nuclear industry contemplate the
viral spiral to other nations in the wake of such a disaster. The accident was of sufficient magnitude to serve as a tipping point for a
number of nations to end their nuclear programs. Germany immediately and permanently closed eight nuclear reactors, and the
remaining nine are to be permanently shut by 2022. Four other nations are ending their nuclear programs, and 15 other nations
reaffirmed their no nuclear power positions (Nuclear Phase-Out, n.d.).
To the risk list of fat-tail black swan disasters due to human or technical error and unexpected natural disasters must now be
added the ever-present threat posed in a post-911 world by terrorists and hostile nations with access to cyber-weapons of mass
destruction (cyber-WMD). This potential risk entered the world consciousness in 2010 when the Stuxnet virus attacked Iran’s
nuclear facility. The ultra-sophisticated virus revealed generic aspects that could be applied to attacks on a wide range of critical
infrastructure, in addition to nuclear reactors. Nor is this the only virus malware that poses such threats, as discussed in three TED
talks by cyber-WMD experts Ralph Langner, Mikko Hypponnen and Guy-Philippe Goldstein (Langner, 2011; Hypponnen, 2011;
Goldstein, 2010).
Another black swan of mega consequence was the global financial crisis of 2008, which reduced gross world product by US$30
trillion in a matter of months (Taleb, 2011). To get a sense of what financial analysts wrongly assumed about their supposedly safe
hedge fund and derivatives investments leading up to the 2008 crisis, Goldman Sachs chief financial officer David Viniar said ‘We
were seeing things that were 25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row’ (Thal, 2007).
The Director for Financial Stability of the Bank of England noted that, under a normal distribution, “a 25-sigma event would be
expected to occur once every 6 million lives [recurrences] of the universe.” Even a 7.3 standard deviation event should occur only
once every 13 billion years. And Goldman Sachs experienced 25-sigma events several days in a row! Even by cosmological standards
this is a massive number. A 20-sigma event surpasses the number of particles in the universe (Dowd et al., 2008).
A major underlying error leading to the 2008 financial meltdown, as it is in the case of most black swan disasters, is a false
assumption on the part of planners and modelers that fat-tail probability distribution curves with ultra-rare but extreme impact
occurrences fall so far outside the normal distribution bell curve as to be statistically impossible, hence irrelevant and ignorable
(Taleb, 2012).
Time and again, however, planners’ and investors’ statistical models are unable to account for all the levels of uncertainty and
ignorance of hidden risks, unsurprising given the reality of the world’s nested hierarchies of nonlinear, complex dynamic systems
that defy accurate predictability. This leads to unanticipated or unknown exposure to explosive stochastic shocks, the “Black Swan”
effects, as they are not part of the common risks foreseen by the institution or the entity involved.
A more effective, resilient, and antifragile risk management approach has been referred to as a ‘barbell’ strategy, which is based
on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes. These are deemed more robust to estimation errors. This strategy
bypasses ‘medium risk’ investments because risk is difficult if not impossible to compute and, instead strategically investing in both
hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive options at the same time (Taleb, 2010c).
Complex systems expert Robert Ulanowicz explains the situation as, “The measure of indeterminacy is largest for probabilities in
the middle range because outcomes with probabilities near either extreme are assumed to be under strong constraints keeping them
near those extremes” (Ulanowicz, 2009).
For the barbell investment strategy, put 80%–90% of investment in extremely safe instruments with the remainder going into
highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets that are insured against
losses of more than a specified amount. By adopting these strategies a portfolio can be “robust”, that is, gain a positive exposure to
black swan events while limiting losses suffered by such random events. This antifragile capital asset portfolio strategy is directly
applicable to addressing the multiple, unprecedented global perils confronting humanity and nature.
In the case of delivering energy services, the pool of end-use efficiency opportunities comprise the extremely safe investments,
coupled with onsite and distributed solar power, and regional wind farms. When they fail, they fail gracefully, not catastrophically.
And they are less vulnerable to price volatilities because they require no fuel and water inputs and have no discharges of emissions,
pollutants or contaminants. In sharp contrast, fossil and nuclear resource options are not insured against the mega-losses in the fat-
tail mega-catastrophes they will propagate (Fig. 20).
Life-Long Learning Imperative

Fundamentally and necessarily, then, sustainability is a continuous learning process unfolding simultaneously at multiple levels,
connected through feedback loops in a vast network of nonlinear complex dynamic systems. And as H.G. Wells memorably said,
“civilization is a race between education and catastrophe”. The new kinds of risks and threats that humanity is spawning have been
foreshadowed in the cautionary mythic tales of Prometheus, Pandora and Cassandra, and in the risk-taking literary figures like
Frankenstein and Faust.
The most recent literature of the Anthropocene epoch, both fictional and nonfictional, is replete with the double-edged, Faustian
bargain nature of unfettered human invention and mass commercialization. The unparalleled techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil sees
this invention revolution giving birth to a new cyber species that will initially supplement then supplant its human originators, in
what he and others call the technological Singularity (Kurzweil, 2006).
Other notables like Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and a host of AI experts, have raised serious concerns
about unbridled expansion of AI, expressed in an Open Letter on Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence.
(Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence, Wikipedia (Accessed April 22, 2017) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_on_Artifi
cial_Intelligence.) A proliferation of examinations and explorations around the AI dilemma (Danaylov, 2017; Bostrom, 2014;
Fillard, 2017; Harari, 2017; Kaplan, 2015; Barrat, 2015), while raising the spectrum of concerns society faces going forward this
century, remains in the public eye as mainly fodder for Hollywood action movies (IndieWire, 2015).
From Peripheral to Central

The consistent shortcoming in sustainability discussions and measures taken is that they have remained largely peripheral to the
political-economic driving forces of the power centers controlled by central governments, global financial institutions, and power
elites. The social inequality/justice and ecological issues encapsulated in the Sustainable Development Goals receive significantly
less attention, support, and pursuit than do the economic issues. And as a burgeoning literature has abundantly documented in
recent decades, the concentration of economic power in the hands of a fraction of a percent of the populace have given rise to
extreme inequality, as well as the use of this economic clout to corrupt and coopt political systems and democratic processes for
sustaining these increasingly destabilizing conditions (Oxfam, 2017; Chomsky, 2017; Bollier, 2003; Potter and Penniman, 2017;
Frank and Cook, 1996; Hudson, 2016; Hacker and Pierson, 2011; Stiglitz, 2015; Galbraith, 2016; Piketty, 2014; Lessig, 2015; Nader,
2016; Nichols and McChesney, 2013).
The Business and Sustainable Development Commission launched in Davos in 2016, is seeking to tackle this basket of wicked
problems, and has issued an impressively detailed report in collaboration with aid agencies and foundations—Better Business, Better
World (BSDC, 2017)—on the positive economic opportunities of achieving the SDGs. In the report, “some 35 business leaders and
civil society representatives offer our prescription for a new, socially focused business model that reaches parts of the global
economy previously left largely to public aid” (BSDC, 2017). The potential payoff is immense:
Our research shows achieving the Global Goals in just four economic systems could open 60 market “hot spots” worth an estimated US$12 trillion by
2030 in business savings and revenue (Fig. 14). The total economic prize from implementing the Global Goals could be 2–3 times bigger, assuming
that the benefits are captured across the whole economy and accompanied by much higher labour and resource productivity. That’s a fair
assumption. Consider that achieving the single goal of gender equality could contribute up to US$28 trillion to global GDP by 2025, according to
one estimate. (p. 13)
Integrating SDGs into the mainstream of corporate strategic growth is a risky and disruptive business proposition, as the report
explicitly discusses. However, as the report also points out, the beginning of business supply chains occur in the same rural locations
where 75% of the world’s poorest live, and many companies have been involved over the past decade promoting redesigned
products for local markets at the “bottom of the pyramid” (Prahalad, 2009).
Corporations can potentially unlock the level of additional investment required—several trillion dollars per year—that is well
beyond the capabilities of aid agencies and philanthropic foundations. Total financial assets worldwide approach US$300 trillion,
with one-third invested in pension funds, insurance companies and investment funds (UNEP, 2015). As the report points out, “over
US$11 trillion was invested in negative yielding sovereign bonds—capital that could be invested more productively elsewhere”
(Cox, 2016) (Fig. 14).
As of 2015, nearly US$60 trillion of assets under management have become signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible
Investment (PRI, 2016). The report identified three critical foci of action for business leaders regarding accessing these potential
investment resources:
(1) Creating an open-access and standardised system for companies to report on their performance on the Global Goals and enable
sustainability benchmarking;
(2) Plugging the global infrastructure gap with a massive scale-up in the availability of blended finance to share risks between
public and private investors; and
(3) Aligning financial regulation with the Global Goals, extending the work of the Financial Stability Board’s Taskforce on Climate-
Related Disclosures, and helping to make sustainable asset classes more investible at lower cost (p. 68).
Given the littered history of good intentions gone terribly wrong—the ‘tyranny of experts and incumbents’ to paraphrase
development economist William Easterly (Easterly, 2014)—the devil is in the details. Even in the BSDC’s far-sweeping, magisterial
initiatives, where considerable goodwill and best of intentions are being manifested in a passionate effort to arouse public and
private support for transformational actions for achieving SDGs, close scrutiny and attention to details are vital. There is often a gap
or chasm between best-designed plans and effective accomplishments.
Field research scientists on poverty, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee at the MIT Poverty Action Lab, describe how seemingly
excellent plans addressing poverty have gone awry in their book, Poor Economics (Banerjee and Duflo, 2012). The Poverty Action Lab
has pioneered Random Control Trials (RCTs) that undertake large-scale experiments with local partners to test and verify various
theories of what works and what doesn’t work (Karlan and Appel, 2011).
In parallel manner, socio-ecological field researchers have been pioneering for decades the imperative of including adaptive
management processes and integrative sciences into initiatives for monitoring, evaluating and then adaptively modifying ongoing
plans so as to ensure the likelihood of resilience and sustainability integral to outcomes (Gunderson and Holling, 2001; Boyd and
Folke, 2011; Berkes et al., 2008) (Fig. 16). Whether focusing on poverty or sustainability, or both, the reality of launching grand
plans in the world of nonlinear complex adaptive systems requires such rigorous feedback mechanisms to traverse the chasm.
What kind of narrative and framing can be sufficiently compelling so as to compel the concentrated political and economic
powers to become open and responsive to what public opinion surveys indicate is strong popular support across the political
spectrum for strong and stricter environmental policies (healthy, safe, clean air, water, soil and food), and a solar and wind based
clean energy economy? (Kennedy, 2017; World Bank, 2010)
Effectively answering this question will be vital in achieving and surpassing the SDG goals, and shaping and influencing the
actions of 7 þ billion actors across the planet, to live in ways that prevent converting valuable, many irreplaceable ecosystems into
exchange currencies, while leaving in its wake the irreversible loss of species, burgeoning wastes, and an endless stream of pollutants,
contaminants, and accumulating toxins.
Quadruple Helix of Knowledge Innovation Systems
There has been a historical progression in policymaking from highly concentrated in a single or small cluster of decisionmakers
(e.g., Kings and Queens, Dictators, the Pope and heads of other religions) to encompassing a widening circle of decisionmakers
(e.g., federations of states, unions of nations, representative governance, markets, ecumenical religious councils, and secular
freethinkers). Within the past half-century scholars of innovation research and innovation policy have examined and proposed
novel methods and methodologies for better informing the policymaking process.
The sheer complexity of technosphere and biosphere/ecosphere nonlinear dynamics places a premium on the need for
innovative innovation systems. This includes, for example, accruing multilevel perspectives and transdisciplinary assessments of
complex systems (Gunderson and Holling, 2001), and recognition of the role and importance of polycentric systems governance
(Ostrom, 2010). This is imperative given the unprecedented possibilities and probabilities of catastrophic and cataclysmic disasters
confronting humanity (Galaz et al., 2011). Planetary boundaries research, for instance, is first and foremost designed to advance
Earth System science for exactly informing these kinds of governance and policymaking assessments (Rockström et al., 2009c). As
essential is discovering new linkages such as combining planetary boundaries research with global catastrophic risk assessments
(Baum and Handoh, 2014).
The quadruple helix of knowledge innovation systems is another relevant and potentially very rewarding methodological tool
for making better-informed and hopefully wiser sets of recommendations and policymaking decisions. The Quadruple Helix theory
has been described as a nation’s economic structure involving four helices, including academia, business firms, government, and the
“talented and productive User Community,“ (Füzi, 2013) or more broadly, civil stakeholders (Arnkil et al., 2010). It has also been
felicitously viewed as (MacGregor and Carleton, 2012):
In many ways, the process of innovation is a constant social dance, where the best dancers thrive by adapting new steps with multiple partners. The
systematic and continuous generation of value in any innovation system relies on collaboration between different groups, who must overcome
multiple, often competing agendas and needs to work together fruitfully over the long term.
Quadruple Helix Facilitated by Internet Platform Networks

It would not be exaggeration, nor can one over emphasize the pervasive role and value generation likely to emerge from Internet
Platform Networks (further described in Part 2) (Choudary, 2015; Parker et al., 2016). For the specific purposes of catalyzing highly
productive quadruple helix knowledge innovation systems, platform networks are essential for integrating with the common face-
to-face meetings and interactions of participants. The platform network is designed to actively promote interaction among and
between the “dancers.”
Simultaneously, and to the degree that it remains an open source, open access platform, the quadruple helix draws in and
provides as part of the expanding memory of the particular issues being addressed by the quadruple helix, additional insights and
knowledge resources from interested professionals, experts, and citizens not officially part of the quadruple helix. The platform’s
apps, algorithms and recommendation engines can help organize, index, store, filter, share, suggest, data mine and pattern extract,
and perform other relevant functions that raise (hopefully) the quality, effectiveness, and value of the quadruple helix’s mission and
goals.
An example can help illustrate these possibilities. A city committed to transforming from a fossil fuel-based to a solar power-
based local energy economy could set up a platform providing space for numerous quadruple helices, each focused on major
aspects of this grand undertaking. One could focus on the data lake compilation that enables maintaining the GPS mapping
inventory of solar assets in the city, that is, all the available solar capable rooftops and ground spots, combined with how much
power is available in real-time.
A related group could focus on the economics and financing of this identified potential, reviewing the numerous effective (and
less effective) financing arrangements already being used around the world, from low-cost cooperative bank financing to various
third-party investor finance options. Another group might focus on the local skills, capacities and capabilities required, and the
training methods being used by other cities found highly effective. Another might focus on innovative procurement protocols and
procedures. As a platform-based process, the digitally accumulated memory and knowledge resources of the quadruple helix can
become part of the global sharing network among and between cities also undertaking this transformation, which accrues ongoing
value through network exchanges of lessons learned and what works and doesn’t work.
Quadruple helix knowledge innovation systems already are being used throughout the European Union as part of their next
economy (third industrial revolution) initiatives, as well as in other parts of the world.
Part 2: Attaining Sustainability at City Scale

Networking City Assets
From pipes to networks
Last century’s smokestack industries and mass manufacturers achieved spectacular productivity gains and cost reductions through
economies of scale by constructing increasingly larger and larger centralized, hierarchical operations (e.g., steel, chemicals, autos,
food processing) coincident with the scaling of core-enabling industries like giant electric power plants, as well as immense,
centralized finance institutions. These get-big-or-get-out trends were further enabled by a plethora of government initiatives:
incentives and subsidies, laws, regulations, and program funding for education, RandD, export promotion, etc.
The 21st century industries are pursuing a radically different, distributed, lateral kind of economies of scale enabled by the
digitization, Internetization, mass minimization/miniaturization, modularization, mathematization, and electrification technolo-
gies becoming pervasive and ubiquitous throughout society.
The proverbial students launching and growing a global company on a laptop and smartphone from their campus bedrooms has
been made popular by the successes of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Stanford U.), Facebook founder Mark
Zuckenberg (Harvard), and a long list of other young platform entrepreneurs (Benkler, 2007; Chase, 2015).
At the core of this radical, revolutionary change in business and market economics is the shift underway from pipes to networks,
as cogently explained by Sangeet Paul Choudary and his colleagues (Choudary, 2015; Parker et al., 2016). The traditional linear,
hierarchical, one-way supply-to-demand, resource-to-waste pipeline model of the last industrial revolution is being transformed by
and into the platform network model facilitated by pervasive Internet connectivity. The narrow role of citizens as consumers has
widened into prosumers (along with many other new roles), who are now capable of creating, generating and marketing products
and services with low-threshold entry capital requirements while leveraging zero marginal cost network effects (Rifkin, 2014).
The society-wide implications are daunting—for threatened incumbent industries, for hopeful citizens-as-entrepreneurs, for new
governance rules superseding obsolete and counter-productive ones, as well as empowering myriad new participatory roles for all
citizenry (Shirky, 2010; Landemore, 2012; Pentland, 2015; Malone and Bernstein, 2015).
Cognitive biases and willful ignorance—Insurmountable or malleable?

If wisely designed, well crafted, effectively implemented, and adaptively managed for ongoing efficacy—admittedly, all wildcards
given the great uncertainties associated with human behavior and social interaction (unknown probabilities)—then there are
immense advances to be gained (known possibilities) for the broad spectrum of wicked problems, issues, and challenges
confronting a flourishing sustainable future (Totten, 2012).
What is required is sufficient motivation by a sufficient level of society to sustain momentum for these transformational changes.
Uncertainty pervades whether forms of persuasion can induce changes and overcome human nature’s predisposition to cognitive
biases (Pohl, 2017; Kahneman and Tversky, 1996; Haselton et al., 2005; Hilbert, 2012; Atie et al., 2012), and how social cultures
inculcate and shape these cognitive biases (Benson, 2016; Yudkowsky, 2008), which in its worst forms encourage and reinforce
willful blindness and willful ignorance (Heffernan, 2011; Weisberg, 2014).
Hostile incumbent industries to disruptive change have been highly effective in feeding and influencing preferred biases through
misinformation and disinformation campaigns, increasingly through “bought” media and politicians (Fig. 17).
Mega-Transformations Opportunities at City Scale

Given the historical trends discussed earlier providing some context of the risks and uncertainties confronting humanity in the
Anthropocene epoch, we now describe how the ongoing Internet platform evolution in technology, institutions and social
organization offer robust, resilient, and flourishing sustainability opportunities for society as a whole.
The sustainability mantra “think global, act local,” or the more recent term, Act Glocally, has become both easier to understand
(e.g., planetary threats and risks) and undertake (tangible daily actions), as a result of the ubiquitous presence of Internet
connectivity via smartphones. Citizens, campuses, cities and companies of every size have all become Internet platforms at different
scales, beginning with each individual who essentially has a networked supercomputer in his/her pocket. This is now the case for
more than half the world’s population, with effortless universal access to an unlimited well of human knowledge and expertise via
smartphones (and other devices, e.g., wearables) by nearly all human beings within the decade or sooner (Pew Research
Center, 2014).
We focus on three mega-transformational opportunities: energy, food and mobility. They collectively represent the greater part
of drivers causing climate destabilization, air and water pollution, marine acidification, ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss,
military wars and conflicts, and health impacts. The three sectors comprise the most significant “footprints” of humanity’s
unsustainability activities, processes and impacts that are most immediately in need of attenuating by shifting to superior options
now available.
We conclude with a promising perspective of networked cities as flourishing platforms playing pivotal and vital roles in
accelerating strong sustainability as an integrated mainstream part of society.
Energy
More than 80% of global energy supplies are derived from the use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and burned biomass. The
extraction, transporting, refining and combustion processes release unparalleled amounts of carbon emissions and toxic cauldrons
of air, water and soil pollutants. Ten percent of the global economy goes for purchasing the equivalent of roughly 13 billion barrels
of oil per year, releasing nearly 50 billion tons of CO2 e emissions in the process.
Efficiency—The Low-Hanging Fruit

As already noted above, end-use efficiency gains continue to offer the least-cost-and-risk option for delivering half to three-fourths
of all energy services to the point of use by several factor to an order of magnitude lower cost than new supply, along with the free
ancillary benefits of no CO2 emissions or toxic brews of pollutants and contaminants during use.
Far from diminishing in importance over time, the pool of end-use, or demand-side, efficiency gains continues expanding, leading
to the witticism that the best thing about low-hanging fruit (like efficiency gains) is they keep growing back. That is clearly the case
with the ongoing advances in GAIN technologies and Internet platform technologies. Obsolete public policies, regulatory practices,
government subsidies, and a number of market barriers have persistently undervalued and willfully ignored the full availability of
competitive efficiency gains for deeply reducing the need for fossil and biomass resources (ERI, RMI, LBNL, 2016; Lovins, 2013;
Lovins et al., 2002; McKinsey and Company, 2010).
Solar PV and Wind Power

In the past decade, the explosive global growth in solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind power has caught most energy experts by
complete surprise, as experience and learning curves have rapidly dropped the cost of production, while at the same time steadily
increasing the productive output of these two renewable energy systems. Solar and wind power are now the least-cost-and-risk new
(marginal) energy supply option in most of the world, and in all the world if the negative externalities intrinsic to other energy supply
options were fully monetized or regulated.
In fact, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of large-scale solar PV and wind power systems are lower than a significant
percentage of currently operating fossil and nuclear power plants. A strong economic case has been made that the fiscally prudent
action by utility regulators would be to order early retirement of tens to hundreds of gigawatts of these overly expensive existing
thermal power plants, and displaced with combinations of lower cost-and-risk end-use efficiency, solar PV and wind power. This
would result in simultaneously lowering utility customer bills while also reducing social costs from fewer CO2 emissions, air
pollutants and water contaminants (Lovins, 2017).
100% Renewable Powered Global Economy

The dramatic declines in the cost of solar power and wind power, and rises in productive output, are projected to continue for
decades (Nagy et al., 2012; McNerney et al., 2011; Bettencourt et al., 2013). The most recent annual assessment by Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) of Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) contracts for U.S. utility-scale onshore wind turbine and
solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in good sites found the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) to be just US 2.5 cents per kWh and US
3.8 cents per kWh, respectively (LBNL, 2017; LBNL, 2016).
By comparison, new U.S. natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plant generating LCOEs range from US 5–15 cents per kWh. Just
the fuel and OandM (running) costs of many aging coal and nuclear power plants incur US 3–6 cents per kWh, making them
excellent candidates, as noted above, for early shutdown to reduce ratepayers’ unnecessarily high utility bills through efficiency
improvements, and solar PV and wind power (IEA, 2016; Lovins, 2016).
Electric generating costs vary many-fold worldwide (due to differences in taxes, regulatory policies, incentives, fuel costs, etc.),
but wind power is the most competitive option, as is solar power in sunny locations with low weighted average cost of capital
(WACC). Moreover, according to the 2015 assessment by the Fraunhofer Institute, “Depending on annual sunshine, power costs of
4-6 cents/kWh are expected in Europe by 2025, reaching 2-4 cents/kWh by 2050. For the next decade, this represents a cost reduction
of roughly one third below the 2015 level [6-9 cents/kWh]” (Fraunhofer ISE, 2015).
Wind and solar deep cost reductions—recent past, current, and future—make all energy assessments conducted even 12 months
ago out of date. Wind power is now at grid parity worldwide, and Deutsche Bank projects 80% of the world would see solar power
grid parity by 2017.
The 2017 joint report by Frankfurt School—UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance and
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (Frankfurt School-UNEP Centre and BNEF, 2017), Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment
2017, bullishly commented that winning auction bids in 2016 were, “at tariffs that would have seemed inconceivably low only a few
years ago. . .US$60 per MWh for solar in Rajasthan, India, in January; US$30 per MWh for wind in Morocco, in January; US$37.70
per MWh for wind in Peru, in February; US$40.50 for solar in Mexico, in March; US$29.90 for solar in Dubai, in May; US$60 for
solar in Zambia, in June; US$80 for offshore wind in the Netherlands, in July; US$29.10 for solar in Chile, in August; US$55 for
offshore wind in Denmark, in November” (p. 18).
2030 and 2050 roadmaps

Roadmaps for converting the all-purpose energy infrastructures (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry, and agricul-
ture/forestry/fishing) of each of 139 countries worldwide to ones powered by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) were developed as
part of a new emission-free global energy assessment with monetary savings and benefits, released by a joint Stanford-UC Berkeley
team at the end of 2016 (Jacobson et al., 2017).
The country-by-country roadmaps envision 80%–85% conversion by 2030, and 100% conversion of all countries by 2050.
Transforming to smart electrification may reduce 2050 global power demand relative to Business-as-Usual (BAU) by 35%,
resulting just from the exergetic efficiency of electricity over thermal combustion. The roadmaps also conservatively include another
7% from improved end-use efficiency beyond that already occurring in the BAU case.
The WWS electrification transformation would create an estimated 24.3 million net new jobs more than lost by the fossil and
nuclear industries. The shift may also avert an estimated 4.6 million premature air pollution mortalities per year in the 139
countries, avoiding roughly US$23 trillion per year in 2050 health costs, as well as preventing US$28.5 trillion per year in 2050
global warming costs (2016 dollars) otherwise due to 139-country emissions.
Multiple Ancillary Benefits

There is a rich literature produced in the wake of innumerable energy crises over the past half century that emphasizes important
attributes that should be sought in energy services in order to achieve a high probability of not giving rise to adverse impacts and
unintended negative consequences (Lovins and Hunter Lovins, 1981; Smil, 2004). A dozen criteria that recur as important attributes
to covet in each option include:
(1) Economically affordable—including for the poorest of the poor and cash-strapped;
(2) Safe—through the entire life cycle;
(3) Clean—through the entire lifespan;
(4) Risk is low and manageable—from error, financial instability and price volatility;
(5) Resilient and flexible—to volatility, surprises, miscalculations, human error;
(6) Ecologically sustainable—no adverse impacts on biodiversity;
(7) Environmentally benign—maintains air, water, soil quality;
(8) Fail gracefully, not catastrophically—adaptable to abrupt surprises or crises;
(9) Rebounds easily and swiftly from failures—low recovery cost and lost time;
(10) Endogenous learning capacity—intrinsic new productivity opportunities;
(11) Robust experience curve for reducing negative externalities and amplifying positive externalities—scalable innovation
possibilities;
(12) Uninteresting target for malicious disruption—off the radar of terrorists, military planners.
These were all identified prior to public concerns over climate change that began taking place in the late 1980s, although it turns out
that the energy options with the composite of least impacts and multiple benefits rank at the top for climate mitigation actions as
well. Among the range of available energy options only energy services derived from efficiency gains rank at the top in every
attribute. All other options are deficient or weak in one or more of these attributes, although solar PV and wind power rank closely
behind efficiency, and well ahead of all other supply options (Jacobson, 2009).
For many decades energy analysts, economists, politicians, regulators and financial investors held steadfast to the belief that
solar and wind power would never be competitive with fossil and nuclear resources. Two trillion dollars of investment in nonhydro
renewables between 2010 and 2016 are turning many former skeptics into enthusiasts, especially given their remarkably low cost
per MWh noted above.
The one remaining criticism put forward by a number of analysts is that solar and wind are “Variable Renewable Energy” (VRE)
supplies, given that the sun is not always shining nor the wind always blowing (Jenkins and Thernstrom, 2017; Heard et al., 2017).
Traditional utility planning has focused primarily on base load power plants with dispatchable large-scale capacity, and assumed
that nondispatchable VREs must be curtailed to a small percentage of the total power system in order to maintain grid stability and
reliability. This was once thought to be 10%, then expanded to roughly 30% of total. However, actual real-world utility experience,
plus detailed modeling, indicates significantly higher VRE penetration rates are manageable, and in fact can add to system integrity.
Consider the detailed model of the PJM interconnection, a Transmission System Operator that interconnects several hundred
GigaWatts (GW) of generation serving 13 eastern states—20% of total U.S. power (Budischak et al., 2013). The model performed
28 billion combinations of three types of VRE (solar PV, onshore wind, and offshore wind) and two types of electrochemical storage
(batteries and fuel cells), each tested over four years (35,040 h) of load and weather data. The purpose was twofold. First, “although
a single renewable generator at one site produces intermittent power, we seek combinations of diverse renewables at diverse sites,
with storage, that are not intermittent and satisfy need a given fraction of hours.” And second, to derive a least-cost electricity mix,
“calculating true cost of electricity without subsidies and with inclusion of external costs” (p. 60). The analysis found 99.9% of load
hours throughout the year could be satisfied with these VREs while requiring just 9–72 h of storage; and at 2030 technology costs,
90% of load hours are met at electric costs below today’s!
Similarly robust technical and economic findings have been analyzed by numerous institutions, as for example: Stanford
University (Frew et al., 2016), Rocky Mountain Institute (Lovins, 2014), Stanford-UC Berkeley (Jacobson et al., 2015), NOAA
(MacDonald et al., 2016), Ecofys and Delft University of Technology (Papaefthymiou and Dragoon, 2016), Lappeenranta
University of Technology, Finland (Koskinen and Breyer, 2016), Technische Universität München and Aarhus University
(Rasmussen et al., 2012), Europa-Universität Flensburg (Hohmeyer and Bohm, 2015), and the University of New South Wales
(Elliston et al., 2013). All the assessments emphasize the need for sustaining and expanding vigorous public-private partnerships in
RandD, demonstration and commercialization initiatives addressing a range of relevant scientific, technical, engineering, economic,
financial, environmental and ecological, policy, regulatory, legal, and cultural issues.
Whereas the overwhelming funding in the 20th century went to fossil and nuclear fuel systems—some 90%, and to large
hydropower dams and bioenergy feedstock for most of the other 10 percent (GSI and IISD, 2017)—the focus going forward should
be on onsite, distributed and regional solar PV, small-scale CSP (dishes) and large-scale CSP (parabolic troughs and central power
towers), onshore and offshore wind power, end-use efficiency gains and demand-side management, solar thermal cooling/heating,
geothermal, wave, tidal, a myriad of battery and thermal energy storage options, hydrogen fuel production from these renewable
resources, all connected to a smart electric grid network. Given the current multitrillion dollar level of fossil fuel subsidies (Coady
et al., 2015), making the transition to 100% solar and wind generated electrification and hydrogen fuel production “must be
designed to ensure that winners are maximized and losers minimized” (Sovacool, 2017).
Particularly important is to support ongoing RandD and commercialization of mapping inventories of city-scale opportunities
for use of rooftop and ground-spot solar PV and CSP dishes. An assessment of California, for example, found “[A]reas for small- and
utility- scale solar energy development within the built environment comprise 11,000–15,000 and 6,000 TWh per year of PV and
CSP generation-based potential, respectively, and could meet the state of California’s energy consumptive demand three to five
times over” (Hernandez et al., 2015).
RandD network
RandD is the proverbial goose laying golden eggs, and (Fig. 19) is a case in point. Since the mid-1970s public and private research
labs have been steadily improving the efficiency of solar cells made from different material combinations of atoms and design types.
Emerging new cell material designs have appeared roughly every decade. There are now 24 solar cell types stemming from five basic
categories of cells. Which one of these solar cell types, or cluster of types, will become the long-term major engine of humanity’s
technosphere remains to be seen. These ongoing RandD efforts are yielding higher performing feedstock for commercialization of
solar PV systems, with stunning results. In the mid-1970s the cost of a solar PV panel was a stupefying US$76 per Watt; by 2015 it
had collapsed to US 30 cents per Watt. Even more commanding is the fact that solar PV systems are generating electricity in good
insolation sites at 3–4 cents per kWh. Continued progress in a robust global public and private RandD network promises to deliver
solar electricity at such low prices even in the lower insolation sites of the far northern and southern latitudes.
Learning effects
RandD is necessary and essential, but only one of the main drivers for achieving higher performing and declining cost solar PV
systems. Another main driver is the level of PV manufacturing production. Technological change research by the Santa Fe Institute
and MIT building upon the insights of Wright’s Law and Moore’s Law, combined with a database of cost and production for
62 different technologies, lead the authors to conclude (abstrusely for most readers).
We show for the first time that. . .the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with
the square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications
for theories of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation. (Nagy et al., 2013)
More tangibly, they compare future growth curves for solar PV and coal power, showing robust steep ongoing declines in PV
costs that are absent from coal’s future, the PV gaining from the combination of learning effects in annual production, cumulative
production, and economies-of-scale (Fig. 19). The future is bright from technology and economic-engineering perspectives. What is
less clear is the will and determination of both policymakers and voters who elect policymakers, to sustain the manifold of policies,
regulations, incentives, codes and standards vital for spurring the transformation to solar power.
Utility regulatory transformation

The monolithic monopoly utilities of the past century that generated, transmitted and distributed electricity from central power
stations have been undergoing regulatory change for four decades, as civil stakeholders challenged the fiscal irresponsibility of
building the large fossil and nuclear power plants while dismissing and excluding rigorous lifecyle least-cost-and-risk criteria in
ranking priority options. For 40 years a very large pool of end-use efficiency improvements were undeniably the least-cost-risk
options, some five times lower in cost. Yet regulatory policies neglected to consistently and comprehensively prioritize them first.
Even solar and wind power should have been high priority options since the 1990s, if regulatory commissions had followed
both cost and risk-minimizing financial portfolio theory (Awerbuch, 1995; Awerbuch, 2006). Both solar PV and wind do not
require fuels pipelined or delivered by train, do not require nearly 100-fold more water per unit of generation, and do not create or
release any CO2 emissions, air pollutants, waste contaminants, or toxic effluents during generation, unlike fossil and nuclear
thermal power plants which face price volatility risks over the plants’ lifespans (Lazar et al., 2016).
This essential argument, counting the full costs and risks for each option, continues to be fought by monopoly utilities, who have
long received a 10%–12% guaranteed rate of return when building large fuel-powered thermal plants (Totten et al., 2010).
Evidence accumulating from a growing number of city, state and national leaders where such market-based innovative incentive
regulations have been implemented, are beacons of best in play regulations for adoption by lagging institutions (Rábago and Keyes,
2013; Perez et al., 2016). In the absence of such changes, those monopoly utilities are risking the hollowing out of their revenues by
lower price competitors, and saddling regulatory commissioners with apportioning the costs of stranded assets between ratepayers,
shareholders and taxpayers (Cheuvreux, 2014).
Nutritious, Secure, Sustainable Food

Climate Impacts on Food Security and Quality
Three recent global modeling assessments indicate the planet faces a 5–7 C increase in world average temperature this century,
assuming “business-as-usual”. This is a drastically large and rapid change unprecedented in the history of Homo sapiens (Hansen
et al., 2013; New et al., 2011; Sokolov et al., 2009). Implications include desertification of roughly a quarter of global agricultural
lands (half of Africa) (Cline, 2007), as well as resulting in largely irreversible changes in global ecosystems for 1000 years after
emissions stop (Solomon et al., 2009).
Given the closing window of opportunity for worldwide action to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, short of a miracle or a
tipping point (depending on one’s religious or secular beliefs), even monumental efforts resulting from a global consensus for
taking comprehensive climate action have a low probability of preventing a 2 C increase. This will raise the probability of 100 and
500-year weather disasters recurring at decadal intervals in increasing locations worldwide, as well as ocean acidification levels not
experienced in 300 million years. At 2 C climate research indicates drylands will expand to more than half the planet’s land area,
including nearly 80% of that expansion occurring in developing nations where half the human population resides (Schlaepfer et al.,
2017; Huang et al., 2015).
Storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, pest attacks and disease epidemics will disrupt large-scale agriculture output, triggering
sudden price surges, increased hunger and starvation, dislocation of people into ‘unimaginable’ refugee crises, increased military
conflicts and wars, (Military experts: Climate change could lead to humanitarian crisis, London, UK: Energy and Climate Intelligence
Unit, December 2016, http://eciu.net/press-releases/2016/military-experts-climate-change-could-lead-to-humanitarian-crisis.) and
rises in premature morbidity and mortality (WHO, 2016).
Perverse Biofuel Subsidies Drive GHG Emissions

Poorly planned expansion of biofuels to displace fossil fuels have already exacerbated food shortages, price shocks, ecosystem
destruction, extirpation of floral and faunal species populations, as well as over-consuming vast amounts of freshwater, requiring
immense tracts of land, and dependent upon continuous applications of agrichemical fertilizers and pesticides. In short, biofuels are
proving to have excessively high externalities associated with their production and consumption.
As subsidy expert Doug Koplow has warned, “[E]xisting biofuel policies make little sense. Tax credits, tariffs and mandates alone
are expected to provide roughly US$420 billion in [U.S.] federal subsidies to the biofuels sector between 2008 and 2022. Because
they scale linearly with production levels, the cumulative subsidy will top US$1 trillion between 2008 and 2030” (Koplow, 2009).
Almost all subsidy reports entirely exclude monetized estimates of the direct and indirect GHG emissions resulting from land
clearing for biofuel production. A series of studies indicate that deforestation and degradation of intact rainforests, peatlands,
savannas, or grasslands incur immense “biofuel carbon debt” due to GHG emissions (Ecofys, IIASA and E4Tech, 2015), “releasing
17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual [GHG] reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels” (Fargione
et al., 2008). Setting biofuel consumption targets, as the U.S., European Union, and many other nations have done, can perversely
increase GHG emissions by shifting the displaced crops (e.g., wheat and soy) to tropical nations, which in turn drives deforestation
and GHG emissions (Searchinger et al., 2008).
Given the significantly lower lifecycle cost and risk of efficiency, solar and wind power options noted above, hopefully nations
that are currently subsidizing and promoting bioenergy feedstock will make a shift to these preferable electrification options.
Carbon-Negative Biomass on Abandoned Lands

Given that humanity is overshooting what scientists believe to be a planetary boundary regarding rapid global temperature rise
beyond 1.5 Celsius, or beyond 350 ppm CO2 e (407 ppm as of April 2017), considerable scientific discussion is ongoing as to
what methods and technologies offer the best way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. One potential exception to large-scale
biomass production that is being promoted by some ecologists is the production of carbon-negative biofuels.
This would be accomplished through reliance on polycultures of low-input, high-density (LIHD) native grassland perennials,
cultivated on degraded and abandoned fields unfit for food production and posing no threat to biodiversity loss. Field researchers
have found, “[H]igh-diversity grasslands had increasingly higher bioenergy yields that were 238% greater than monoculture yields
after a decade. LIHD biofuels are carbon negative because net ecosystem CO2 sequestration in soil and roots (4.4 megagrams per
hectare per year of CO2) [metric tons/ha/yr CO2] exceeds fossil CO2 release during biofuel production [0.32 t/ha/yr CO2]” (Tilman
et al., 2006) (p. 1598).
Satellite mapping analyses compiled by field ecologists have determined a large amount of abandoned lands may be available
for carbon-negative biomass production. The worldwide area of abandoned agriculture lands is estimated to be 385–472 million
hectares. While the area is between 66% and—110% higher than previous estimates, the aboveground biomass is nearly 60% lower
than prior estimates—“The area-weighted mean production of above-ground biomass is 4.3 tons per hectare per year [t/ha/yr], in
contrast to estimates of up to 10 t/ha/yr in previous assessments” (Campbell et al., 2008). The energy content yielded from these
lands would constitute less than one-tenth of primary energy for most countries located in Asia, Europe or North America, but could
satisfy several-fold the current demand in African nations.
The authors propose using biofuels for seasonal energy storage that can be used to generate electricity and integrated with the use
of solar and wind power (Campbell et al., 2013). Given the very low LCOEs of wind and solar, more study will have to determine
the economic feasibility of this option. In a similar vein, growing perennial polycultures on these abandoned lands could be
assessed for regeneration of soil nutrients to then produce human food, animal feed, or resources for use in displacing fossil-fueled
carbon-based materials (e.g., insulating construction materials for high-efficiency strawbale buildings) (Chaussinand et al., 2015).
Greater Resilience Through Polycultures of Perennial Grasslands

More broadly, research around the world on polycultures of deep-rooting herbaceous, nonwoody perennial native prairie grasses
holds tremendous promise as ecologically superior alternatives to monoculture annual crops like corn and soybeans (FAO, 2013;
Pimentel et al., 2012). Pioneering plant scientist Wes Jackson and his colleagues at The Land Institute in Kansas have been
conducting cutting edge perennial plant breeding research since the 1970s showing that relative to conventional monoculture
crops, the deep-rooting perennial grasses absorb and retain more water, reduce soil erosion from wind and rain while enhancing soil
carbon and humus content, reduce agrichemical fertilizer applications and pesticide use, and tend to be more robust to weather
extremes, including drought-tolerant (Glover et al., 2010; Cox et al., 2010).
Feed and Fuel Farm Subsidies

Large-scale agriculture systems that dominate the farm landscape worldwide are overwhelmingly monoculture based. This is
reinforced and promoted by national subsidies, policies, rules, regulations, extension services, aid agencies and multilateral bank
financing. In the USA, for example, farm subsidies from commodity, crop insurance, disaster programs and conservation payments
paid between 1995 and 2014 amounted to US$322 billion (EWG, 2013). Globally, agricultural subsidies in the top 21 food-
producing nations, accounting for 80% of global production, amounted to nearly half a trillion dollars in 2014 (Potter, 2014). Even
with these immense subsidies and support systems a very modest amount goes towards agroecological and regenerative farming
methods, despite many recommendations and compelling assessments of field experience and results for more than half a century
(Foundation Earth, 2015).
Agriculture subsidies contribute to obesity epidemic

Not only do most of these subsidies fail to promote, and frequently worsen, sustainable farming methods, but also they also
unwittingly contribute to the obesity epidemic, as well as medical illnesses associated with premature morbidity and mortality (Pan
et al., 2012). Medical practitioners argue for a change towards sustainable agriculture practices (Franck et al., 2015):
Government-issued agricultural subsidies are worsening obesity trends in America. Current agricultural policy remains largely uninformed by public
health discourse. Although findings suggest that eliminating all subsidies would have a mild impact on the prevalence of obesity, a revision of
commodity programs could have a measurable public health impact on a population scale, over time. Policy reforms will be important determinants of
the future of obesity in America, primarily through indemnity program revisions, and the allocation of increasing amounts of resources to sustainable
agriculture.
Agriculture for direct human food consumption

The majority of agriculture subsidies and crops go to feed livestock, and increasingly to feed vehicles (i.e., biofuels). If crops were
grown for direct human consumption, not only would agriculture’s ecological footprint dramatically decline (e.g., water use, GHG
emissions, soil erosion, chemical run-off, etc.), but “in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could
feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2–3 billion people arriving through population growth)” (Cassidy
et al., 2013).
Promotion of beef consumption has dramatically increased agriculture’s GHG footprint (Shepon et al., 2016; Eshel et al., 2016),
and is projected to greatly expand as developing country populations shift their sources of protein from insects, grains, legumes and
vegetables to meat. The climate impact will be devastating, as research indicates:
What kind of beef consumption and production scenarios are compatible with a 2 C warming target? If consumption were to grow by a factor of three
from its present 58 [million tons per year] value, and the beef were produced by the [U.S.] midwest feedlot system, the equivalent cumulative carbon
would be 504 Gt, which all by itself is enough to use up the remaining allocation of cumulative carbon corresponding to a probable warming below
2 C. (Pierrehumbert and Eshel, 2015)
Mini, Milli, and Micro Animal Food and Feed

In addition to eating less meat, as well as selecting animal products with the smallest ecological footprints (Eshel et al., 2014), and
while continuing to promote medical recommendations of eating healthy meals comparable to the “Mediterranean diet” (Mayo
Clinic Staff, n.d.), the billions of people on the planet who currently derive substantial protein from consumption of insects should
be encouraged to continue this ecologically sustainable, secure food and feed practice (Kelemu et al., 2015) (van Huis et al., 2013).
This traditional food source is even proving appealing to Westerners, as “entopreneurs” are proving (Halloran et al., 2014).
Some 1900 insect species provide daily protein and food security for several billion people worldwide (Van Huis, 2013).
Numerous insect species—with higher protein than commonly used fish and soybean meals—are effectively used as animal feed for
fish and poultry (Bukkens, 2005; Anand et al., 2008). Moreover, some insect species, such as black soldier fly (BSF), Hermetica
illucens, yellow mealworm, Tenebrio molitor, and the common housefly, Musca domestica, serve double roles: (1) recycling food
cková et al., 2012).
wastes into first-rate compost-fertilizers; and, (2) use of their larva stage as animal feed (Ci
“The supreme irony,” note researchers, “is that all over the world monies worth [tens of billions of dollars] are spent every year to
save crops that contain no more than 14% of plant protein by killing another food source (insects) that may contain up to 75% of
high quality animal protein” (Premalatha et al., 2011) (p. 4358). For example, some Mexican farming communities, instead of
using pesticides to control the grasshopper crop pest, Sphenarium purpurascens, capture and consume or sell it as food. It is a
profitable source of income for hundreds of families, annually accruing some US$3000 per family, with the extracted food source
nearly 100 t (Cerritos and Cano-Santana, 2008).
Long-Term Farm Policies

With most budgets and decisions made on five-year appropriation cycles or less, it is extremely difficult for farmers to transition to
ecologically sustainable and resilient perennial crops. The transition requires a 50-year farm bill cycle, which The Land Institute
developed in 2009, concluding (Jackson and Kirschenmann, 2009) (Fig. 26):
Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or
hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change.
Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries, as
well as saving and maintaining the quality of scarce surface and ground water. U.S. food security will improve. Social stability and ecological
sustainability resulting from secure food supplies will buy time as we are forced to confront the intersecting issues of climate, population, water and
biodiversity.
Farmers tend to be conservative about changing their conventional farming techniques, particularly when the transition process
may take five-plus years, raising cash-flow problems, and the federal subsidies they receive reinforce conventional farming methods
and crops. Vast areas now planted in corn, for example, are driven by subsidies for ethanol fuel production. A far more ecologically
sustainable opportunity at hand is to integrate wind turbines on farms and ranches as a superior “cash crop.” For example, >90% of
U.S. terrestrial wind resources occur in the Great Plains. Hypothetically, 100% of current U.S. electricity consumption could be
satisfied by 200,000 five-megawatt-capacity wind turbines strategically placed over the Great Plains’ 1.2 million square miles (or 3.1
million km, Southwood, 2017) (Fig. 21).
The actual footprint of these turbines, hypothetically squeezed into one space, would occupy just 6 mile2—about the size of a
single large Wyoming strip mine. And even when spaced for optimum wind capture, they would occupy just several percent of the
Great Plains (37,500 mi2 or 97,125 km2). Even then, the other 90% of the land surrounding the wind turbines would continue to be
available for ranching, farming and restoration of native prairie grasses (35,000 mi2 or 90,650 km2). For rural communities, this
could be an extraordinary financial boom. With a farm or ranch typically receiving a several-percent annual royalty from the wind
farm, the income would, on average, exceed the earnings from farming or ranching. In the U.S., for example, Class 4 winds produce
roughly 20 kWh per m2 per year. Assuming that the royalty rate to the landowner is 2.5 percent of revenues generated, the wind
royalty amounts to about US$200 per hectare per year. For comparison, net U.S. farm income in 2000 was about US$125/ha, half of
which were direct government payments - US$60/ha. (R.H. Williams, Nuclear and Alternative Energy Supply Options for an
Environmentally Constrained World: A Long-Term Perspective, prepared for the Nuclear Control Institute Conference Nuclear
Power and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons: Can We Have One Without the Other? Washington, DC, April 2001, www.nci.org/conf/
williams/williams.pdf.) This amount of land is very modest relative to the income that can be generated. Currently, farms and
ranches occupy 70% of the Great Plains, yet they generate only about 5% of the region’s GDP. (The region does currently produce
much of the nation’s grain, meat, and fiber, including over 60% of the wheat, 87% of the sorghum, and 36% of the cotton. The
region is also home to over 60% of the nation’s livestock, including both grazing and grain-fed-cattle operations.)
This wind-royalty financing strategy would enable farming and ranching communities to make the transition to carbon-negative,
deep-rooting perennial crops. It would foster other co-benefits including restoring key wildlife and biodiversity habitat, as well as
migratory bird staging areas. Nearly 60% of the bird species that breed in the US do so in the Great Plains (Forrest et al., 2004).
Such a multifaceted carbon mitigation and soil carbon regeneration strategy may also be one of the more resilient climate
adaptation strategies to address the region’s likely increase in severe climate-triggered droughts. The strategy would have major water
conservation benefits as well. The wind farms require two orders of magnitude less water per MWh generated than large-scale fossil
fuel or nuclear power plants. And the deep-rooted native prairie grasses that the strategy would support are designed to retain
moisture through even the worst of prolonged drought conditions.
In addition to restoring the Great Plains which lost a billion tons of soil carbon since first being plowed, and reducing pressure
on the over-drafted ground water aquifers, ecologists point to an additional source of revenue: re-introducing free-ranging bison
into these prairie grasslands, which naturally co-evolved for millennia (Great Plains Restoration Council, n.d.; Fuhlendorf and
Engle, 2001; Knapp et al., 1999; Rutley, 2003). (Bison Restoration Developments Among Inter Tribal Bison Cooperative Members,
www.bisoncentre.com/, 2000.) The potential revenues could result from marketing organic, free-range beef, as well as entice greater
eco-tourism.
Similar mapping assessments should be examined in other grassland regions of the world, where multibeneficial, risk-mitigation
outcomes could be achieved.
From Burning Field Straw to Building Efficient Strawbale Schools

Open field burning of agricultural wastes has been a serious health issue in many countries, as well as the black soot causing
atmospheric changes that have worsened regional droughts. Compounding the black soot and rural land impacts is brick house
construction, which is still widely used in many rural areas.
Brick factories occupy one million acres of land, destroy 60,000 ha of arable land every year, and burn 100 million tons of coal
per year. The inefficient brick homes consume high levels of coal for heating and cooking, with high pollution levels causing chronic
health problems, hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, and reduce crop yields.
Many proposals have resulted in gathering these agriculture wastes to combust and generated electricity. However, a much
higher value use of crop straw wastes is for farmers to earn income by selling the wastes for constructing strawbale buildings. For
example, in Northeast China, strawbale walls reduced the use of bricks by two-thirds, while also reducing the need for burning coal
indoors by 68%. According to a UN Habitat case study, “When using an alternative construction method to locally produced bricks,
top-soils are saved which decreases air pollution, slows down desertification process, and increases resilience against earthquakes.
Additionally, the project uses passive solar design” (Hannula, 2012).
Negative emission technologies (NET)

There is a finite amount of carbon emissions that can be released if society is to retain a >50% probability of not exceeding 2
Celsius average global temperature rise; and in fact, must pursue negative emission technologies (NET) sufficient to reverse
atmosphere emissions in order to achieve a 1.5 C average global temperature rise. Multiple uncertainties are associated with
making such a determination, resulting in scientific estimates that span a factor of two or more (Matthews et al., 2017).
According to the IPCC Fifth Assessment report released in 2014, if we are to sustain a 66% probability of staying below 2 C then
this will require humanity to constrain total carbon emissions since 1860 to no more than a trillion tons of carbon (equivalent to
3.67 trillion tons of CO2), of which more than half has already been released (IPCC, 2014a).
Summarized more starkly by Rogelj et al., “The reality is that limiting warming to well below 2 ∘C, or even to 1.5 ∘C, requires
global emissions to peak by 2020 and a full decarbonisation of the world’s economy by 2040–2060, with net negative emissions in
the second half of this century” (Rogelj et al., 2015). Higher levels of negative emissions will be necessary if lesser reductions occur
in the coming decades; this is highly likely to incur both greater costs and risks.
There are two figures of merit—CO2-only emissions (roughly 71% of total) and non-CO2 greenhouse gases, of which methane
(CH4) and nitrous oxides (N2O) make up nearly 28%, and the remaining percent is from CFCs, HCFCs, SF6 and other high Global
Warming Potential (GWP) gases (Fig. 25).
Higher levels of negative emissions will be necessary if lesser reductions occur in the coming decades—more than one trillion
tons of CO2-e. Delaying deep, rapid and continuous reductions is highly likely to incur both greater costs and risks (Xua and
Ramanathan, 2016).
Land-Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC)—Critical NET Recent research has recalculated multi-centennial CO2-e emissions projected from land-use
and land cover change (LULCC), and find they are significantly higher than estimates presented by the IPCC and used in climate models. “Because of the
multicentury carbon cycle legacy of current land use decisions, a globally averaged amplification factor of 2.6 must be applied to 2015 land use carbon
losses to adjust for indirect effects” (Mahowald et al., 2017). Taking the indirect effects due to feedback dynamics into account, as well as the
significantly longer time-frame during which these indirect effects accumulate, LULCC emissions are estimated to be upwards of a quarter trillion
tons of CO2-e greater than IPCC and climate model estimates. This leads the authors to propose, “that protection of natural forested lands could be an
effective method of reducing CO2 concentrations.”
BECCS—Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is one of the primary NET
possibilities included in both the IPCC’s future scenarios for staying under 2 degrees C global warming, and in the Paris Agreement. Upon closer
scrutiny of the implications of these scenarios consistent with 2 C rely on BECCS to deliver up to roughly 10 GtCO2 annually by the end of the century
(i.e., about 25% of year-2010 CO2 emissions). Given the oceans currently remove about 10 GtCO2 the expectation is that anthropogenic BECCS can
establish an additional carbon sink on the order of magnitude of the world’s oceans. (Rockström et al., 2016) [Italics in original] BECCS has the theoretical
potential to remove up to 18 GtCO2/yr; however, this removal rate would require 1,000 million acres of arable land for biomass cultivation, which
represents nearly three-quarters of the planet’s available arable land, and thus is not realistic under any plausible scenario. (NAS, 2015; Smith and Torn,
2013)
There are also severe ecological limits to BECCS expansion, in addition to real serious trade-offs with other competing needs (food, fiber, feed). For
example, growing a high-yield perennial crop like Switchgrass, Panicum virgatum, to annually remove one Petagram (Pg, billion metric ton) would
consume more than two billion hectares of farmland. This is 50 times greater than U.S. area currently under corn production. In addition, it would
require 20 millions tons of nitrogen, equivalent to one-fifth of total global fertilizer nitrogen production, as well as consuming four trillion cubic meters
(m3) of water per year, which is equal to roughly total annual global water extraction for all uses (Smith and Torn, 2013).
City Garden-Farming for Health, Well-Being, and Food Security

Urban and periurban micro- and minifarms can greatly enhance local resilience and buffer dislocations, especially for impoverished
and low-income communities. More than half the world population now resides in cities, and 70 þ percent of humanity (6 þ
billion) will live in urban areas in the coming decades. Most urban areas were once prime farmland. Putting some of the remaining
open space back into agricultural production can yield both climate mitigation and adaption gains, and other multiple benefits,
notably greater food security, more job creation, and availability of nutritious foods for vulnerable populations.
More immediately, urban farming for many population clusters around the world is literally an insurance hedge against the
threat of persistent hunger (Koc et al., 1999). Quite positively, urban grown food worldwide could deliver a significant percentage of
the US$7 trillion-plus annual food market. Urban microfarming currently accounts for an estimated 15% of total global food
production (FAO, 2010).
Urban agriculture offers a source of employment for a very large and rapidly increasing population of young people and
unemployed poor (Ilieva, 2016). Local production also retains and recirculates food revenues within the community, leveraging the
economic multiplier effect that further enhances local quality of life (Duany, 2012).
High-yield sustainable microfarming methods enable growing many urban and periurban food crops with a smaller ecological
footprint than large-scale commercial farms, especially when integrated with locally available rainwater and recycled water
resources, and utilizing local food wastes and landscape pruning and trimmings for compost and mulch (Jeavons, 2010).
Building on the past century’s accumulated experience with low-input, high-yield microfarming methods, urban agriculturalists
have the potential to grow complete vegetarian diets sufficient for 100 people on one hectare of land. This represents a several-fold
greater yield of produce than grown with large-scale commercial methods.
Biointensive minifarming techniques make it possible to grow food requiring a fraction of the resources than commercial
agriculture: using three-quarters less water, 50%–100% less fertilizer, 99% less energy, and several-fold less land area. Empirical
results and accumulated evidence from practitioners in > 100 countries indicate high-yield micro- and minifarming methods are
capable of producing two to six times more food, while building the soil up to 60 times faster than in nature, if properly used, and
reducing by half or more the amount of land needed (Grow Biointensive, n.d.).
As an illustration, there is an estimated 350 million ha of urban land worldwide. Current trends indicate a growth of 50 million
new urbanites each year—150,000 per day; urban land area is projected to swell by >150 million ha by 2030, given intermediate
economic growth rates (Seto et al., 2011). Most of this new urban land will be converted farmland, and many of the new urbanites
former rural farmers. Hypothetically, a majority of world urban food needs could be grown on 5%–10% of these 500 million
hectares, based on high-yield sustainable microfarming production.
The UN estimates that some 15% of food is currently grown in urban areas, with >800 million people involved in urban
agriculture contributing to feeding urban residents (FAO, 2010). Urban and periurban agriculture expands the employment and
economic base of the city, both in food production as well as by spurring value-added entrepreneurial activities in processing,
packaging, marketing and recycling of consumable products (Smit et al., 2001). This informal economic sector is especially positive
for the vast number of unemployed, underemployed, poor, youth, and a significant percentage of women with household and
childcare duties.
The world’s current youth cohort — 1.1 billion young people ages 15–25 — is the largest in human history, according to the
International Youth Foundation. In India, alone, half the population is under 25 years. Of this cohort, some 90 million can’t find a
job. A staggering 300 million youth are working, but earning US$2 per day or less. This “youth bulge” wraps itself around the center
of the globe, with nearly 90% of today’s young people growing up in developing countries where barriers to opportunity remain
high. Halving the world’s youth unemployment rate (from 14% to 7%), could add an estimated US$3.5 trillion to the world
economy. By 2015, 660 million young people will either be working or looking for work.
What makes harnessing urban minifarming so promising is the worldwide availability of low-cost digital technology, with
widespread adoption of mobile phones and Web social networks, all being driven by youth. Young people are engaging in extensive
peer-to-peer interaction, especially through visual-enhanced audio and video communication and sharing with Web-based phones.
Skills, talents, practices, mastery, and proficiency methods are being accessed and exchanged verbally in local dialects, along with
visual displays over smart phones.
Enabling engagement in one’s local cultural language dramatically increases engagement by a vast pool of people without formal
education, literacy or numeracy skills. This is occurring through one-to-one and many-to-many SMS texting communications, as
well as through the more advanced Internet-sharing networks like YouTube and via Web map mashups.
The sharing spawns more sharing, greater experimentation, innovation, and novel enhancements in both content and presen-
tation, and into an ongoing viral spiral. All of this remains at the earliest stages of full future opportunities, offering great hope that
food security and sustainable livelihood creation can positively and simultaneously address the scourge of mass poverty and climate
risks.
Slow farming, gardening and food

As accelerating technology innovations speed up the pace and rhythms of human lives it has given rise to counter-motions, the most
popular one being the slow movement culture (Honoré, 2006; Honoré, 2013). It has been around for decades, initially arising in
the 1980s as a counter-reaction to fast food outlets, with more than one million members and supporters from some 1500 ‘convivia’
(local chapters) across 150 countries. Slow Food’s mission is to “prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions,
counteract the rise of fast food and fast life, combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from and how
our food choices affect the world around us” (Slow Food, n.d.).
Following the launch of the Cittaslow (slow city) movement in 1999, to resist the homogenization and globalization of towns
and cities, other aspects of slow movement have been launched against “time poverty”, including: slow aging, architecture, fashion,
gardens, goods, marketing, media, money, parenting, photography, religion, school, science, technology, and travel. In short, slow
culture (Berthelsen, 2017).
There are similar, parallel movements, such as beyond growth (Daly, 1997), prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2016),
degrowth (D’Alisa et al., 2015), postgrowth (Blewitt and Cunningham, 2014), downshifting (Saltzman, 1991), simple living
(Merkel, 2003), voluntary simplicity (Duane, 1981), Transition Town Movement (Hopkins, 2014), Plentitude-True Wealth (Schor
and Thompson, 2014; Schor, 2010), and many more. Interest in these interrelated initiatives has rapidly expanded with the distaste
for addictive behavior associated with ceaseless computer work, electronic games, mobile phone immersion in social media,
combined with the near-frenzy of continuous consumerism and consumption.
One of the longest predecessors to the slow culture movement, and long prior to fast food outlets, has been food gardeners, the
guardians of the soil, flora and fauna; gardening is one of the oldest circle economy activities, exemplifying waste-into-nutrients,
closed loop dynamics. The second industrial revolution decisively collapsed farming families and the labor force working in
agriculture. Less than 5% of an industrialized nation’s population works in agriculture; in sharp contrast, poor countries have two-
thirds of their populations laboring in agriculture. Yet, gardening and lawn care are one of the most widespread, popular recreations
and hobbies citizens enjoy doing.
In the 2014 survey of U.S. citizen gardening involvement, 36% of all households, or 42 million households, grow food in their
yards, neighborhoods or community gardens (Sinnes, 2014). Another 40% grow flowers, and maintain lawns. Gardening is a $36
billion annual U.S. market; three times the size of Hollywood box office receipts.
More sustainably flourishing landscapes

Apart from organic gardeners, a considerable amount of agrichemicals are used to “green” and care 40.5 million acres (16.4 million
ha) of U.S. lawns at an annual cost of $30 billion. Lawns consume most of the 7 billion gallons of residential and commercial
landscape water each day, and 3 million tons of fertilizers are used on lawns each year. More than 66 million pounds of pesticides
are applied to lawns annually, costing more than $2 billion. Quite surprisingly, the average homeowner applies 10 times higher
levels of pesticides than the average farmer on a per acre basis.
The 30 þ most commonly used lawn pesticides include known or suspected endocrine disruptors, reproductive toxins,
carcinogens, banned ingredients; and accidentally spill 17 million gallons of gasoline a year refilling gas mowers, as well as
combusting 800 million gallons during lawn care (Chameides, 2008).
This is clearly not a sustainably flourishing landscape, and represents an enormous opportunity in redesigning and making it
one. There is a very large body of experience, evidence, and daily observations and activities on how this can be accomplished that
can be better organized through an Internet Platform for interactive sharing of and accessing insights via mobile phones. There is
also a new imperative for cities to take seriously the amount of local food cultivation that is promoted, given the uncertainties and
surprises noted above regarding climate-triggered weather disasters impacting food supplies and prices (Brownlee, 2016).
Kinder gartens for life-long learning and earning

When children start kindergarten in many parts of the world, they have their first educational experience growing and tending a
small garden of plants. It is an educational tool and often a voluntary part of the elementary school curriculum.
Gaining experience in the art and practice of gardening ranks as one of the finest applied learning opportunities, opening a
potentially life-long interest in healthy, nutrious food cultivation, whether pursued as a career or becoming a recreational past time.
A long-standing effort by many schools in developed and developing countries is enriching the educational learning experience
by providing each student with a square foot or meter of land to grow and nurture her/his own “biological textbook.” Expanding the
duration of this experience throughout the course of elementary and high school semesters and seasons until graduating, would
demonstrably deepen and enrich the learning experience for all students.
Gardening is at once a personal and peer collaborative experience. The process of growing ensembles of seeds into thriving
gardens involves natural feedback dynamics. Students exploring and exchanging perceptions about variations in results instill a feel
for the experimental processes of science: the consequences of watering too much or too little; differences in soil texture, pH levels,
and nutrient content; the effects of shaded versus sunny exposures; the applications of STEM knowledge (science, technology,
engineering and mathematics); the process of composting wastes into soil amendment; as well providing students with an
awareness of the range of scientific disciplines and research fields such as botany, entomology, beekeeping, pollination, climatol-
ogy, microbiology, mycology, ecology; substantially enriching their understanding and know-how of composting, soil mulching,
plant grafting, seed saving and other hands-on activities. By the time they leave school, youth will have become better-informed
citizens regarding food, land and agriculture issues, while having deepened their competences and broadened their horizons on a
range of future opportunities, from engaging in recreational hobbies to vocational pursuit as master horticulturalists, research
scientists, or professional agriculturalists.
Given the high percentage of households that garden, there is considerable scope for engaging the students with the community.
This is being facilitated in a number of cities by establishing Internet-based collaborative innovation network platform that enables
citizens, teachers and students, community organizations, and business employees to map the locality’s available land resources
where community gardens can be grown. Such web platforms, accessible by mobile phone, build out the site to include a suite of
knowledge resources, tools, and apps that help citizens learn how to start and sustain high yield, low-input organic gardening
practices and techniques. Some platforms are used to facilitate distribution of excess plants and food products for the elderly and
poor. Platforms also enable linking together local school programs, community gardens, company employee programs, and venues
for under- and unemployed individuals to participate. Similarly, such city-scale networks readily link with other cities to share the
innovations resulting in higher participation by citizens, and greater productivity of the gardens.
Cooperative garden and minifarming platform

Internet platform networks are scalable transformer systems. That is to say, as the level of user interaction increases there is a scalar
effect—due to Metcalfe’s law, where “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of
connected users of the system (n2)” (Metcalfe’s Law, n.d.). It is this scaled activity where value emerges, surges, and occasionally goes
viral-spiral; however, the scaling activity can as well, if not most often, go nowhere and wither away on the long tail (Long Tail, n.d.).
It is in the surging value that transformational changes occur.
Cooperative gardens of all scales in the City and around the edges—micro- and minifarms—could become one case in point.
What platforms can do is to originate and immediately propagate globally, the additions, editions, and corrections, to the digital
resources available to any city to aid in determining how much food could, should and would be grown based on the best-in-play
practices and protocols. Clearly there will be leading and lagging cities that range in local food production between a few percent
and 100%. The open-source transparency enables comparisons among and between cities, providing civic capital for citizens to
promote more forceful evidence-based cases for greater local food production. And failing that, making the case to fellow citizens to
support and vote for candidates who support locally produced healthy and secure food (Steel, 2013; Ilieva, 2016; Bosso, 2017;
Roggema, 2016).
To provide a sense of the larger opportunity, given the potential to grow complete organic vegetarian diets sufficient for
40 people on each acre (100 people per ha) of city land, and the fact that there are 40.5 million acres (16.4 million ha) of lawns
and gardens in U.S. cities, suggests a total potential for feeding 1.6 billion citizens—nearly five times the current U.S. population.
Obviously not everyone will embrace such a shift, but it is clear that even converting 20% of current lawns would have a major
impact on city-scale fresh, nutritious and secure food availability.
City organic gardens and minifarms are the natural complement to local solar power systems, using chloroplasts instead of
photovoltaic materials to transform the sun’s photons into fuel. Encouraging such city-scale transformations could also helpfully
enlarge citizen understandings of the complex and often controversial food issues with which humanity must contend (e.g., hunger,
obesity, excessive use of agrichemical biocides and fertilizers, classical breeding versus genetic engineering, climate impacts on food
production, etc.) (Yosef, 2016; Denkenberger and Pearce, 2015; Hayes-Conroy, 2014; Hayes-Conroy, 2013).
Mobility Access
Fuels, engines, wheels and wings have enabled humans to penetrate every location of the planet and beyond, providing unprec-
edented degrees of freedom for billions of people to go farther distances more rapidly, frequently and economically, as well as move
shipments of unimaginable amounts of goods. This transportation consumed 100 Exajoules in 2010, or 45 million barrels of oil
per day (MMBOE/d) out of the global total production of 93 MMBOE/d (IEA, 2014). This fuels >50,000 ships, 20,000 aircraft, 800
million vehicles and one-third of a billion trucks and buses worldwide; plus nearly 90 million new vehicles and trucks are produced
annually (Davis et al., 2016).
In the most vehicle-centric nation on the planet, U.S. citizens covered roughly 3.2 trillion “vehicle miles traveled” (VMTs) in
2016 (US DOT, 2017), while globally aircraft carried 3.8 billion persons worldwide and 188 billion ton-kilometers of goods in
2016. Ships moved nearly 700 million 20-ft containers worldwide, while railroads transported goods >5 billion ton-kilometers and
carried passengers 3 billion passenger-kilometers (World Bank, n.d.). And all of these trends are projected to increase with the rise of
per capita GDP in developing nations. For example, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) projects 7.2 billion
passengers will be traveling in 2035; (IATA, 2016) and the scenarios by the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicate global
transport fuels could increase 70% to 170 EJ (76 MMBOE/d) by 2050 in the absence of efficiency improvements, alternative
vehicles, and modal shifting (IEA, 2014).
Crude oil accounts for one-third of world maritime shipping, coal accounts for one-third of total railroad shipments in the USA,
and 100,000 tanker trucks deliver fuels to 150,000 U.S. retail gas stations. By all accounts, the energy system of the second industrial
revolution is massively complex, spanning the globe like a gigantic, thick spider web.
That freedom of movement of people, goods and fuels, however, has come with increasing costs, risks and losses, including
innumerable wars over energy resources, illness-generating pollution of cities and agriculture crop declines in the countryside,
climate destabilization, marine acidification, mountainous heaps of accumulating waste, contaminated aquifers and watersheds,
soil erosion, ecosystem degradation, deforestation, and vehicle-centric designed cities where more than half the land is taken up
with roads, highways, garages, and parking lots. The costs are so substantial that if incorporated into the price of delivered fuels are
estimated to more than double the cost.
Social costs of mobility

Numerous studies over the past 50 years have attempted to assess the social costs of transportation (Murphy and Delucchi, 1998).
One of most comprehensive assessments, the 20-volume report by transportation expert Mark Delucchi, concluded that the U.S.
social cost of transportation amounted to between US$1.9 and US$3.3 trillion (in 1991 dollars) (Delucchi et al., 1996). The
assessment doesn’t look at transportation’s benefits, but rather, informs us of how much we are paying for those benefits, and
enables us to compare our current auto-centric transport system with the wider pool of available mobility access options largely left
untapped by most cities (Fig. 22).
Sprawl versus smart growth

More recent analyses have estimated the costs for various aspects and parts of these social costs. For example, a 2015 assessment of
the U.S. public policies that unintentionally promote and subsidize urban sprawl indicated they exceeded US$1 trillion per year—
“more than US$400 billion dollars in external costs and US$625 billion in internal costs” (Litman, 2015). The authors note that
even though the analysis focused on North American circumstances, the results are applicable to developing countries (Fig. 23).
Social cost and risks of CO2 emissions

One of the major social costs of mobility is CO2e emissions. Transportation emissions amounted to between 7 and 8 billion tons of
CO2e in 2010 (the 8 GtCO2e figure, IEA, 2014; the 7.1GtCO2e figure, IPCC, 2014b). Assuming a conservative, lower bound
estimate of US$125 per ton CO2 social cost of carbon (SCC) indicates unmonetized costs of roughly US$887 billion to US$ 1
trillion per year worldwide, or roughly US$1.25 per gallon of gasoline (US 33 cents per liter).
Many climate scientists and economists argue emissions incur significantly higher SCC given new research indicating greater
climate sensitivity that raises the probability of extreme fat-tail black swan catastrophes. For example, van den Bergh and Botzen
conclude, “the value associated with extreme climate change might have an order of magnitude that corresponds to SCC values that
have been estimated under uncertain large consequences of climate change, such as the SCC value of US$346 per tCO2 reported by
Dietz (Dietz, 2011), or values between US$241 and US$445, reported by Ackerman and Stanton (Ackerman and Stanton, 2012)
(both for a low discount rate of 1.5%)” (van den Bergh and Botzen, 2014). This would raise the global total SCC unmonetized costs
to between US$1.7 and US$3.6 trillion per year. Ackerman and Stanton also estimate the SCC could rise to $1500/tCO2 by 2050 in
the absence of significant GHG reductions.
Social costs of military for energy security

According to a 2008 assessment of U.S. military expenditures, just the military expenditures to protect oil supplies from the Persian
Gulf amount to upwards of US$96 billion a year (in 2017 dollars). The costs attributed to motor-vehicle use would add 20 cents per
gallon to the price (Delucchi and Murphy, 2009).
Major wars—the fat-tail black swans—dramatically raise the social costs of oil, as in the case of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
and Iraq raging for nearly two decades. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated the combined direct and indirect
costs of the war exceed US$6 trillion (Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2011; Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2008). While many reasons were given for
starting the war, the clearest statement about U.S. military presence in the Middle East was the 1992 draft of Defense Planning
Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994–1999, which clearly stated America’s “overall objective” in the Gulf: “to remain the predominant
outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil” (Klare, 2002). Large U.S. military bases now
cover the region. Military historian Andrew Bacevich gets to the core reason (Bacevich, 2016):
From the outset, America’s War for the Greater Middle East was a war to preserve the American way of life, rooted in a specific understanding of freedom
and requiring an abundance of cheap energy. In that sense, just as the American Revolution was about independence and the Civil War was about
slavery, oil has always defined the raison d’être of the War for the Greater Middle East.
Transportation Business-as-Usual (BAU) Costs and Risks to 2050

One cannot presume to know, let alone accurately predict, what mobility conditions will turn out to be in 2050. A range of scenarios
is based on a set of various assumptions, which provide a range of outcomes. If the world muddles forward without making
significant changes to its fossil-fueled transport sector, then this will drive higher fuel consumption, higher emissions, and higher
costs, along with higher probabilities of nasty climate destabilization catastrophes and extreme economic disruption.
The IEA projects $500 trillion will be spent on the BAU transportation path to 2050, pushing mobile emissions to rise steeply to
14 GtCO2e. The Social Cost of Carbon could skyrocket to US$21 trillion per year, based on the Ackerman and Stanton SCC estimate
of US$1500 per tCO2e. This is a staggering sum, equivalent to the combined GDP of 188 of the world’s 199 nations in 2015 (World
Bank, 2017). And this is just mobility emissions, comprising one-fifth or so of the total BAU projected emissions in 2050.
Mobility Solution Space

A tremendous wealth of options is available to provide all of humanity with access to cost-effective mobility services while at the
same time dramatically collapsing transportation’s ecological and planetary footprints. Like the accumulated experience and strong
evidence in successfully using end-use efficiency gains to deliver an immense pool of utility services with radically smaller footprints
and lifecycle costs and risks (Rosenfeld, 2005; ERI, RMI, LBNL, 2016; Lovins, 2013; Lovins et al., 2002; McKinsey and Company,
2010), the same is applicable in provisioning mobility access services.
The bricolage of inventive innovations spawning the third industrial revolution—the convergence of electrification, digitization,
Internetization, Mass minimization/miniaturization, and Modularization—is shifting the traditional transportation paradigm to a
radically new one.
Mobile Travel by Phone

Arguably, the mobile smartphone platform is a conditio sine qua non of this new paradigm. As a wit once opined, the best mobility
solution is to already be where you want to go. Mobile smartphones do exactly that for an increasing number of services once
requiring vehicular transportation.
With a handheld mobile device a person can swiftly and easily: bank; prepare and pay taxes, fines and bills; browse merchandise
and comparison shop (including gleaning recommendations from other buyers) at an endless variety of stores; order and ship; post
letters and documents; browse and check out (download) library books; select from and listen to an endless stream of music (no
visiting music store booths—now store headphones); take a myriad of courses, MOOCs and SOOCs (Bonk et al., 2015), offered by
colleges around the world; play chess matches or multiplayer games with individuals located across town or around the world; go
real estate or rental hunting with visual walkthroughs; access design plans and programs for performing home or office 3D printing
of an expanding list of toys, tools and components; telecommute to work; virtually attend conferences, meetings, presentations, and
working groups; make new friends and meet new colleagues interested in similar topics; obtain regulatory licenses; download legal
templates for preparing your own will, divorce, business incorporation, etc.; and the opportunities go on and on.
As futurist Ray Kurzweil aptly points out, people are walking around with trillion dollar supercomputers in their pockets,
networked to a sea of people also with trillion dollar pocket supercomputers, and linked to the world’s repositories of knowledge;
and these pocket supercomputers also just happen to make phone calls.
Such mobile travel by mobile phones can be performed virtually anytime and anywhere, no longer constrained by geographical
distances, saving considerable time traveling and waiting in line. Monetary savings also mount up, given that smart phones and
connection plans have become cheaper and cheaper, while the cost of travel remains expensive—in the U.S. it cost 57 cents per mile
to operate a vehicle in 2016 (AAA, 2017). Moreover, the smart phone now performs the functions that previously required
hundreds of devices and items, eliminating travel hassles and storage requirements, with near zero marginal cost to add additional
features (apps) (Mims, 2012; Rifkin, 2014).
One beneficial expansion of apps ties in directly with furthering mobility management options, as in accessing pedestrian and
bicycle routes, transit routes and schedule times, and use of apps like Waze, which describes itself as the “world’s largest community-
based traffic and navigation app,” that you can join with “drivers in your area who share real-time traffic and road info, saving
everyone time and gas money on their daily commute” (Waze, n.d.).
Location efficient mortgages and smart growth communities

So many essential daily tasks can be performed by mobile phone, that for many individuals who are cash-strapped, foregoing a car is
proving to be quite practical in transit-, pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly cities. This is especially happening in, but hardly limited to,
smart growth communities and regions (Growth, 2016; UN-Habitat, 2016), and in EcoDistricts within cities (EcoDistricts, 2017).
These initiatives are fundamentally focused on all aspects of what goes into creating sustainably flourishing neighborhoods and
cities. The public-private technology push for smart cities (the global market may hit $1.4 trillion by 2020)–which involves
implementing Internets of networks filling data lakes drawing from mass-connected smart wireless sensor networks of cities’
physical, data and knowledge assets—while focused on enhancing city services to and for citizens (EC, 2017; IEEE, 2017; Razani,
2016) would produce far more effective and sustainably flourishing outcomes by integrating their efforts with smart growth,
EcoDistricts and other relevant initiatives.
From a financial perspective, lenders are realizing that home buyers who don’t own a vehicle have more discretionary income to
go towards a more expensive property located in transit-connected higher density neighborhoods, and now offer location-efficient
mortgages that were first pioneered by several nonprofit groups in forming the Institute for Location Efficiency to promote Location
Efficient Mortgages (LEM). As they explain the model (CNT, 2017):
Standard loan underwriting is based on a buyer’s ability to afford to spend 28% of gross monthly income on a mortgage payment, whereas the LEM
increased this to up to 39% by factoring in transportation-related cost savings. For example, a household earning $50,000 a year could qualify for a
$163,000 mortgage under standard lending practices. But, if a household in a compact, transit-accessible and pedestrian-friendly neighborhood could
save $200 per month on transportation in relation to the national average, they could qualify for a $213,000 loan.
Mobility Management (MM)

Mobility Management (also referred to as Transportation Demand Management, TDM) is the umbrella term encompassing the
options, strategies, designs, initiatives and programs that facilitate efficient application of transport resources for provisioning
effective mobility services and access. According to Todd Litman, one of the world’s foremost authorities on MM/TDM, and the
curator of possibly the largest MM/TDM Internet open platform (VTPI, 2017), mobility management includes “strategies that
improve the transport options available to users, incentives that encourage travelers to use more efficient transport options, more
accessible land use patterns, planning reforms and various support programs” (Litman, 2003).
In short, citizens need to design and redesign cities to be pedestrian-, bicycle-, and transit-friendly, rather than dominated by
vehicle-centric landscapes commanding more than half a city’s total area. What is particularly striking about cities that have
undertaken extensive MM/TDM initiatives as integral components of city and land planning is the enhanced aesthetic value of
cities as perceived by their citizens and visitors.
Challenges of generating and sustaining aesthetic cities

The overlap of aesthetically pleasing cities and sustainably flourishing ones is not surprising, and predate the commercialization of
motorized transportation. Cities emerged during the Neolithic period >10,000 years ago, although Aristotle, who could be called
the earliest critic of city planning, declared the 5th century BCE architect, mathematician, urban planner Hippodamus of Miletus
“the father of city planning”, known for the ‘Hippodamian plan’ or grid layout of a city (Aristotle, 1912).
For millennia cities have evolved and adapted as resource availability, new technologies, and increasing population posed new
threats and opportunities. Dwindling resource availability, such as deforested countryside, led to invading other lands for timber
resources (Perlin, 2005) [this past century the resource sought and fought for has been oil] (Klare, 2001). New military weaponry
led cities to construct defensive protection designs (Van Creveld, 2010) [this century faces cyber-attacks] (Clarke and Knake, 2010),
while expanding trade led to functional and structural changes within and between cities (Mumford, 1962; Kostof, 1986;
Morris, 1994).
The first and second industrial revolutions, powered with fossil fuels, dramatically changed urban designs, with motorized
vehicles radically reshaping cities over the past century. Modern critics of urban planning have tempered the boosterism for
economic growth resulting from pervasive fossil-fueled transportation, persuasively documenting the myriad disruptions to cities
and neigborhoods—atomization, decline in communitas, speed overwhelming the human-centric “eyes on the street” and other
social rhythms important for sustaining social cohesion, loss of social capital, ghettoization of minority populations (Rothstein,
2017), expanding sprawl, reducing city aesthetics, etc. (Jacobs, 1961; Mumford, 1938; Alexander, 1977).
In their trilogy of books on city sustainability, Australian professors Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy compiled and
analyzed a prolific amount of data and insights on transportation and land-use patterns found in scores of cities around the
world (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Newman and Kenworthy, 2015; Newman and Kenworthy, 1990). Their well-recognized
hyperbolic curve comparing transport-related fuel consumption to urban population density, shows that as density goes down, fuel
consumption rises; total transport-related fuel use in low-density cities is four to seven times greater than in high density cities
(although European cities fall at an intermediate position with both low fuel consumption and lower density. As the authors
emphasize (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999) (Fig. 24):
The biggest force still driving the Auto City to build large freeways and accommodate the automobile rather than providing other options is the standard
“black box” transportation/land use model for calculating benefit-cost ratios on road projects. These are based on how a new or widened road will save
time, reduce fuel, and lower emissions and road accidents. (p. 297)
However, as experience has repeatedly shown, these proffered benefits turn out to be illusory, since the outcome results in
inducing more traffic growth, congestion, pollution, and costs.
Moving beyond the auto-centric city through implementation of MM/TDMs, smart growth design practices, EcoDistrict pro-
tocols, Transit Oriented Development (TOD) like the Dutch ABC Location policy (Martens and Griethuysen, 1999), and similar
models, can result in dramatic reductions in traffic congestion, emissions, air pollution, and lost time, while provisioning a full
panoply of mobility services and access. The expansion into the new industrial revolution now unfolding, however, raises these
opportunities to entirely new levels: the revisioning of the transport sector as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).
Collaborative Mobility in the Sharing Economy

The freeway and Route 66 became celebrated iconic images of transportation in the second industrial revolution. Now, the
emergence of the autonomous (driverless) electric vehicle and the on-demand and last-minute ridesharing and car-sharing
enterprises of the sharing economy’s trusted community marketplace, are fast becoming the iconic images of the third industrial
revolution (Lipson and Kurman, 2016). In the span of a decade there has been a surge of these alternative mobility options.
Statistics on the trends for increasing users, miles traveled, costs saved, congestion and pollution reduced, are reported in
fragments, limiting an overview of current global totals. The tracking performed by UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability
Research Center, indicates that as of Fall 2014 car-sharing was on five continents, in 33 countries, >1500 cities, with over 100,000
shared vehicles (Shaheen and Cohen, 2016).
Estimates by various analysts project that by 2024 the global market will reach $35 billion (Gerram and Gartner, 2015). ZipCar
founder Robin Chase also estimates one well-used shared car equals 30–50 people, 15–20 cars, and 40–60 parking spaces
(Chase, 2015).
Peer-to-peer ridesharing
Ridesharing has traditionally encompassed carpools, vanpools, and public transport systems. That has all changed with GPS
mapping, mobile smartphones, and social media platforms on the one hand, and the recognition that idle capacity of assets like
cars (typically only operating 10% of the time) can be monetized as a mobility service in the trust-based sharing economy.
A diversity of business models are in play worldwide encompassing cars, rickshaws, and bicycles, and more models emerge
each year.
BlaBlaCar, the ridesharing enterprise launched in Paris and now operating in 22 countries, connects motorists and travelers
willing to ride together between cities and share the trip costs. The US$1.6 billion ride-sharing enterprise, BlaBlaCar, is currently
considered the “world’s largest long-distance ridesharing community,” with 40 million members. Its members share travel 1 billion
km (620 million miles) monthly, and is saving the aggregated members hundreds of millions of dollars per year in avoided fuel
costs and lower-cost mobility services. Drivers charge passengers an average of US 10 cents per mile (6 cents per km), and rides
average 200 miles (320 km). It is one of a growing number of such ridesharing enterprises.
On-demand driverless electric vehicles

As rapid as the growth of the car-sharing economy has been this past decade, analysts believe growth of self-driving vehicles will
boom in the coming decade. In 2015, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated prevalent use of autonomous vehicles (gas and
electric) could prevent the 30,000 yearly traffic fatalities in the U.S., see a 40% improvement in travel time, recapture some
80 billion hours currently lost to traffic congestion, and save 40% of fuel consumption. “Those societal benefits could be worth as
much as $1.3 trillion in the U.S. alone” (Mosquet et al., 2015).
By 1917, BCG was predicting that by 2030 one-fourth of miles driven in the United States could be in self-driving electric
vehicles (BCG, 2017). Global car companies are positioning themselves for market share. Tesla’s sold fleet of autopilot-capable
vehicles, for example, had accumulated several hundred million miles of open road driving by 2016 (but <1000 miles of more
complex urban driving).
Similar projections are being made by a number of investment firms. Commenting on EV growth trends (which many if not
most EV companies are planning to implement with autopilot and self-driving capabilities), GoldmanSachs Equity division issued a
report to investors in 2015, concluding that “Grid connected vehicles (electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids) grow from US$12
billion in sales in 2015 to US$88 billion by 2020 and US$244 billion by 2025” (GoldmanSachs, 2015).
Waymo, the spinoff autonomous car company of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has driven its fleet 1.7 million miles (2.8
million km) by 2016. Daimler Truck has 365,000 autonomous-capable vehicles on the road. Daimler is expanding the function of
trucks beyond shipping goods; trucks are becoming platform servers-on-wheels, telematically feeding continuous information on
road conditions, weather conditions, and monitoring warehouses’ availability to improve shipping logistics (e.g., backhauling)
(Daimler, 2016).
Rethinking Transportation—Radical Disruption

As already noted earlier, the detailed assessments by the Stanford-UC Berkeley team have documented state-by-state, and nation-by-
nation the number of solar PV systems, wind turbines, efficiency gains, and miscellaneous other renewable resources to electrically
power 100% of the global economy (with an estimated $50 trillion of benefits from cost savings and avoided negative externalities).
Augmenting this clean, safe, secure and affordable energy system is the boldest assessment as of May 2017, by RethinkX, on the
exponential growth over the next decade of driverless electric vehicles. It is co-authored by UK Technology Investor James Arbib and
Stanford University Entrepreneur Instructor Tony Seba, author of Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will
Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030. The assessment conservatively assumes
existing technologies and use well-accepted cost curves, combined with “detailed analysis of data, market, consumer and regulatory
dynamics” (RethinkX, 2017). Three major projections include:
(1) 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand Autonomous Electric Vehicles (A-EVs) owned by companies
providing Transport as a Service (TaaS);
(2) A-EVs engaged in TaaS will make up 60% of U.S vehicle stock;
(3) As fewer cars travel more miles, the number of passenger vehicles on American roads will drop from 247 million in 2020 to
44 million in 2030.
The benefits are huge. Just in the United States, productivity gains from freed up and saved time during commutes could amount to
between US$500 billion and US$2.5 trillion per year. They estimate average annual consumer income gains equivalent to a tax cut
or income benefit of $5600 per household from 2021 on, or $1 trillion per year by 2030 nationwide (Arbib and Seba, 2017).
And, as noted from other studies, a substantial amount of auto-centric urban area will be freed up for use as additional built
infrastructure and open spaces and parks (Guala, 2016).
Policymakers can accelerate or retard transition

However, local, state and national policymakers will play significant roles in either accelerating or retarding the transition of this
transformation. Policymakers representing incumbent corporations—for example, oil companies, manufacturers and suppliers of
gas-fueled vehicles— not profiting from the innovations may resist the transition. Such powerful opposition is already being
mounted by the fossil fuel industry against the energy shift to 100% solar and wind power. The RethinkX report estimates 5 million
jobs and income of $200 billion per year could be lost by incumbent industries. Many new jobs will be created, but it will be
important to assist displaced workers in up-skilling, reskilling, and learning new capabilities.
China policymakers
China is already the world’s largest market for electric vehicles (46% of the all electric vehicles sold in 2016 were registered in
China), and the largest maker of them, with 43% of all electric vehicles produced globally were made in China. China is also the
undisputed largest manufacturer and exporter both of solar PV panels and wind turbines, as well as having the largest installed
capacity in both of these renewables. China’s national policymakers have set aggressive targets in all these technologies, and
continue to increase these targets, while moving to reduce the nation’s dependency on coal. The European Union is also intensely
focused on accelerating these technology trends as integral parts of the EU’s next economy growth plan.
The speed at which actions are taken and implemented in China, and to a similar degree in the EU, are in sharp contrast to the
policy roller coaster experienced for wind and solar power in the United States for most of the past half century. Whether the U.S.
will remain in the game for this massive global transformation opportunity, will likely turn on the leadership shown by a number of
states and cities, working with leading companies, to keep positive trends developing.
As the RethinkX authors emphasize, the transition is most likely to take off at the city level, and radiate out from there. This is an
observation being made by many analysts from a broad range of disciplines and fields (Steffen, 2013; Rifkin, 2011; McLaren and
Agyeman, 2015; Benfield, 2014; Rose, 2016).
City-Scale Sustainably Flourishing Solutions
“The 21st century will be the century of the cities.” So begins the 2016 Flagship report by the German Advisory Council on Global
Change (WGBU), Humanity on the move: Unlocking the transformative power of cities. “Urban areas are becoming the central
organizational form for almost all human societies” (WBGU—German Advisory Council on Global Change, 2016) (p. 1).
Cities are becoming the new scale for designing, creating, and generating sustainably flourishing communities. The reason is the
collapse of hierarchy scale to lateral scale, due to the infusion of citizen and city-scale Internet platform networks for catalyzing
social interactions and conducting transactions. This is the third industrial revolution emerging and evolving (speciating). And over
the long term, given some wise leadership in the public and private sectors, and civic support and demand for such leadership, cities
can increase the dynamics for sustainably flourishing (Ehrenfeld, 2014). In a subsequent 2017 WGBU conference report, The
Transformative Power of Cities, concludes (WGBU—German Advisory Council on Global Change, 2017):
It will be decided in cities whether the transformation towards sustainability succeeds worldwide or not. Urban areas are playing a decisive role in this
‘century of the cities’: cities and their populations are thus drivers of global environmental change, while at the same time being affected by it. The
progress of the transformation towards sustainability will depend substantially on the decisions that will be taken in cities over the next few years and
decades. We need a paradigm shift away from incremental approaches that are essentially driven by short-term requirements, towards transformative
changes with a strategic, long-term view of humanity’s natural life-support systems and the creation of a form of urbanity that promotes human quality
of life.
Fractal-like networks
It is more than a metaphor, but a design tool, to envision the city-scale as a fractal pattern nested and connected between higher and
lower complex systems. States and nations operate above, other cities operate laterally, and neighborhoods and community
organizations function within or below (Batty and Longley, 1994; Batty, 2005). A key feature of a fractal pattern is that similar
patterns recur at progressively smaller scales (Batty, 2013). Even with the immense diversity that exists in cities in terms of citizenry,
enterprises, activities, and social interactions, there is at the same time similar patterns in deriving a city’s myriad functions as
discussed above, for example, energy sources and technologies, and delivery systems for utilities, mobility, food.
Antifragile city design

It is the hypothesis, based on accumulating evidence from innovative neighborhoods and cities across the planet, that fractal
patterns in cities can be innovatively designed and shaped so as to be decidedly resilient, even antifragile. That is, despite a city’s
increasing socio-economic complexity, with increasing network connections laterally with other cities, and nested and linked in to
regional and global networks, the city can become extraordinarily resilient to shocks, perturbations and disruptions, whether
internal, external or both; and not only survive but thrive. It is what financial professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “positive black
swans,” abrupt surprise events that can actually result in bursts of growth even in the midst of surrounding adversity (Taleb, 2012).
Cities have been and remain the crucibles and predominant engines of humanity’s innovations and wealth creation. Complexity
scholars explain this economic growth as the result of scaling or power laws involving increasing social interaction (Lobo et al.,
2013; Bettencourt et al., 2007). That is not to say all cities are necessarily guaranteed to be engines of innovation and prosperity,
given that cities are also the main magnets for crime, disease, pollution and cultural polarization on socio-economic and political
issues, and how effectively these are addressed will determine levels of progress (Bettencourt et al., 2010).
Physicist and complex systems scientist Geoffrey West performs a deep dive on the key and critical role of the city in furthering
sustainability in his book, Scale, emphasizing the point (West, 2016):
Given the special, unique role of cities as the originators of many of our present problems and their continuing role as the superexponential driver
toward potential disaster, understanding their dynamics, growth, and evolution in a scientifically predictable, quantitative framework is crucial to
achieving long-term sustainability on the planet. Perhaps of even greater importance for the immediate future is to develop such a theory within the
context of a grand unified theory of sustainability by bringing together the multiple studies, simulations, databases, models, theories, and speculations
concerning global warming, the environment, financial markets, risk, economies, health care, social conflict, and the myriad other characteristics of man
as a social being interacting with his environment. (pp. 425–426)
Cities collectively throughout a state, region or nation are also instrumental in creating the conditions for generating economic
complexity that resiliently sustain economic prosperity, as expressed in the locality’s market diversity of production, services, and
skills. As summed by the authors of the MIT Atlas on Economic Complexity, Mapping Paths to Prosperity (Hausmann et al., 2014):
Modern societies can amass large amounts of productive knowledge because they distribute bits and pieces of it among its many members. But to make
use of it, this knowledge has to be put back together through organizations and markets. Thus, individual specialization begets diversity at the national
and global level. Our most prosperous modern societies are wiser, not because their citizens are individually brilliant, but because these societies hold a
diversity of knowhow and because they are able to recombine it to create a larger variety of smarter and better products. . .The amount of knowledge
embedded in a society. . .depends. . .on the diversity of knowledge across individuals and on their ability to combine this knowledge, and make use of it,
through complex webs of interaction.”
Network platforms for cultivating human, social, civic, knowledge and natural capital
It has become commonplace to single out the current era as unprecedented in the extraordinarily powerful ICT tools now accessible
to individuals, even those living at the bottom of the pyramid, previously unavailable even to Kings, Queens, Presidents and titans
of industry. In this still early phase of becoming familiar with the powerful capabilities that Internet connectivity and trillion dollar
pocket supercomputers endow individuals, it is easy to criticize their widespread misuse and underuse.
Although these powerful knowledge-sharing and global communication networks can be and are being used for viral spread of
disinformation, propaganda, prejudices, hatred, fallacies, scams, endless advertising for click-and-ship consumerism, gambling,
pornography, sexual predation, and a broad range of deviant or addictive behaviors, it is also emerging as an especially potent
system of and for social cooperation.
COINs—collaborative/collective intelligence networks

Witness the proliferation of self-organizing open source initiatives, also known as collaborative or collective intelligence networks
(COINs). An exemplary model is the breathtaking formation of Wikipedia, daily growing and error correcting the world’s largest
publicly accessible pool of accumulated knowledge and learning resources.
Since it was launched in 2001, Wikipedia swiftly established itself as the world’s largest encyclopedia. Within 60 months and six
employees, Wikipedia grew to 10 times the size of the largest encyclopedia. There are >34 million free usable articles in 288
languages that have been written by over 50 million registered users and numerous anonymous contributors worldwide. It would
be equivalent to 15,000 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
An IBM research team estimated it took around 100 million hours to self-organize and maintain this open source public
knowledge asset over the first decade. By comparison, Americans spend 132 million hours each day on Facebook (430 million
hours each day worldwide); and Americans watch 100 million hours of TV ads every weekend. New Media Professor Clay Shirky
makes a compelling case that there are >1 trillion hours of television viewed each year, representing a pool of ‘cognitive surplus’ that
could be harnessed to create other open source public collaboration assets (Shirky, 2010).
The numbers of citizens who are voluntarily interacting with COINs is staggering. YouTube, for example, went from a start-up in
2005 to a decade later: having more than one billion users; becoming the planet’s second largest search engine, and third most
visited site after Google and Facebook; having five hours of video uploaded every second; viewers watch >300 million hours of
video every day, with half viewed on mobile devices; and YouTube can be navigated in 77 languages, as well as establishing local
versions in 88 countries. One hundred million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc.) every week,
and >50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community (YouTube, 2016).
Half of China’s 1.3 billion population has Internet access, making China first among total Internet users worldwide. One-third of
China’s mobile Internet users use domestic microblogging applications like Sina Weibo and Tencent’s Weixin (Freedom
House, 2016).
These examples and scores of other social networks with millions of users provide overwhelming evidence of the growth of
citizen engagement in web networks. It was a phenomena the public-at-large hardly envisioned even 15 years ago; or as Bill Gates
notoriously said in 1993, ‘The Internet? We are not interested in it’ (Totten, 2012).
Affording and Financing a Sustainably Flourishing Planet

Over the past half century a rich literature has accumulated examining what has been accomplished with sustainability initiatives,
what is currently evolving and adapting from this cumulative experience, and densely detailed modeling of what can be achieved in
the years and decades ahead, all with an eye towards sustainably flourishing and averting ignobly disintegrating. As this paper has
described, immense monetary gains with massive ancillary benefits stand to be gained by transitioning from the world’s fossil-fuel
dominated energy system to a solar power-based system. Similarly large benefits and values could accrue by significantly increasing
city-scale gardening and microfarming as a major percentage of total food requirements.
While the evidence provides robust results that indicate if these myriad initiatives and actions scale and take root worldwide in
the coming decades they would deliver healthier wellbeing for humans and nature, now and for generations to come, nonetheless
there is no assurance, let alone guarantee, that these positive possibilities will in fact occur. Countervailing forces abound and
remain ever-present threats—politically, religiously, economically, technologically, and culturally.
Policy wonks well know that in the “sausage-making” process of politics the most outstanding ideas going in can be so
transmogrified by power brokers and legacy incumbent industries, derailing the best laid plans. There is also truth in pointing to
the inabilities of humans to coalesce into a consensus for action, leaving outstanding prospects to wilt and rot into lost
opportunities.
But what may be difficult at the national and international scales can be more rapidly undertaken at the local level. Not all local
levels will move at the same pace or thoroughness, and most likely be a variant of Pareto’s Law—the 80/20 rule—that roughly 80%
of the effects come from 20% of the causes. We see this with the numerous city-level declarations, goals, and targets by a committed
number of leading edge Mayors, far fewer in number than lagging edge Mayors.
What is different moving forward in the 21st century is the platform revolution which enables accelerating scaling at a pace and
thoroughness unprecedented in history (Choudary, 2015; Parker et al., 2016).
National-level Economics
As noted above, economically attractive and financially rewarding activities that offer considerable gains towards sustainably
flourishing citizens and cities frequently get thwarted because of multiple barriers and market imperfections. National politics is
slow and cumbersome in undertaking any substantive changes; not surprising given there are two-dozen corporate lobbyists for
each elected member of the U.S. Congress, who provide a sizable percentage of the more than US4 billion Congress spends each
reelection cycle.
Lobbying results can be formidable, as the financial, fossil fuels, defense, and medical management industries prove: subsidies
and subventions that tilt the market to incumbents; inconsistent and inequitable public policies that preferentially skew outcomes
resulting in economic inequalities falling most heavily on those who cannot afford to play the game of legalized graft to politicians;
and the failure to fully account for the negative externalities caused by legacy industries which stall the large pool of cost-effective
alternatives offering greater promise of delivering sustainably flourishing outcomes.
Much of current public argument and political debate is polarized over the concentration of wealth among a small number of
extremely rich individuals. As President Obama expressed before the UN General Assembly in a farewell speech in September 2016,
living in “A world where 1% of humanity controls as much wealth as the bottom 99% will never be stable.” Oxfam expressed it in
equally stark terms, “Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world” and “the incomes of the
poorest 10% of people (650 million) increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1%
increased 182 times as much” (Oxfam, 2017).
Political upheaval in the United States turns to a considerable degree on economic inequality. Economist Thomas Piketty and
colleagues woke up citizens with the startling reality that over the past 30 years income growth of the bottom half of U.S. society has
been zero, while the income growth of the top 1% has soared 300% (Piketty et al., 2016).
In theory, there is no financial shortage for spurring sustainably flourishing outcomes. The combined Gross Development
Product (GDP) of all nations exceeded US$75 trillion in 2014 (the Gross World Product, GWP), or US$107 trillion in purchasing
power parity (PPP). That is a nominal US$16000 per capita, which disguises the fact that 70% of humans live on less than US$900
per year.
Not all the taxes owed on this massive wealth are ever paid. Joseph Henry, one of the world’s foremost experts on offshore secret
tax havens concludes, “A significant fraction of global private financial wealth—by our estimates, at least $21 to $32 trillion as of
2010—has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 offshore secrecy
jurisdictions. We believe this range to be conservative” (Henry, 2012) [emphasis in original].
There are other costly categories, notably the military-industrial-financial complex, that many civilian and military analysts argue
could be significantly reduced. In 2016 global military expenditure was $1.7 trillion (Tian et al., 2017). For example, the U.S.
maintains >800 military bases around the world, which has led to the growth of insurgents and mired the U.S. and other nations in
multidecadal conflicts (Vine, 2015). Empire building and imperial overreach also have repercussions on domestic economies.
Former cold warrior, Professor Chalmers Johnson, examines this in three volumes of the Empire Project (Johnson, 2005) (Johnson,
2004), cautioning:
A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on
which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship. (Johnson, 2008)
This is not to diminish the role of other nations, especially those with possible imperial aspirations, or subnational groups intent
on undermining national states. Rather, it is a call for recognizing the value of pursuing global security without war (Shifferd et al.,
2016; Fry, 2009).
City-Scale Economics
This paper has illustrated significant financial benefits can accrue at the city level, which platform networks and COINs can help
flesh out by GPS mapping these various city assets, as well as provide the venue for citizens to access and share knowledge resources,
inspiring insights and suggestions, and how to overcome barriers. The platform can also provide up-to-date status and progress on
numerous sustainability metrics and indicators.
The financial capital and operating funds for these projects can be secured from a pool of options, each offering different interest
rates, terms, and conditions. They are too numerous to describe, encompassing many traditional and conventional government and
private profit and nonprofit financial instruments, as well as new and emerging methods of financing; (Kelly, 2012) and given also
the innumerable kinds, scope and scale of possible projects and initiatives.
The profusion of new options and concepts can be gleaned from a number of initiatives: slow money (Tasch, 2008; Hewitt,
2013), local currencies (Lietaer et al., 2012; Hallsmith and Lietaer, 2011), local exchange trading systems (LETS) and mutual credit
systems (Greco, 1994), locavesting (Cortese, 2011), local self-financing (Shuman, 2015), profit-sharing (Blasi et al., 2014),
employee ownership (Rosen et al., 2005), local action for sustainable economic renewal (Hallsmith et al., 2006), sharing economy
(Orsi, 2012), public banks (Brown, 2013), cooperatives (Restakis, 2012; Nadeau, 2013), and many more.
Author and director of research and economic development at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) Michael
Shuman makes a compelling case that U.S. citizens’ long-term savings in bonds, life insurance funds, pension funds, mutual funds
and stocks total about $30 trillion. “But not even 1 percent of these savings touch local small business-even though roughly half the
jobs and the output in the private economy come from them.” This is a huge capital failure, he emphasizes, and that if capital
markets were working properly there would be a $15 trillion shift from Wall Street to Main Street. That’s $50,000 per person, or for a
city of 50,000 represents an infusion of US$2.5 billion of investment funds.
The bottom line is that rather than accepting poor returns from Wall Street, and passively watching the devastating consequences
of global corporate actions on their communities, Shuman and others are showing how average citizens can invest in Main Street
(Shuman, 2012).
Community cooperatives
Cooperatives are particularly noteworthy, both because of the long history of experience operating them worldwide, and because of
the considerable size of the global cooperative movement. There are 2.6 million cooperatives located in 155 countries with more
than one billion memberships and clients. The cooperatives employ 12.6 million people in 770,000 cooperative offices and outlets.
Cooperative assets amount to US$20 trillion and generate US$3 trillion in annual revenues (Dave Grace Associates, 2014).
Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. Co-operative
principles emphasize the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others. Maintaining a financially
viable business is important, but so are its community, workers and members.
Citizens would do well to focus on breathing more life into local public cooperative banks and cooperative businesses
(insurance, farms, food markets, city electric and Internet utilities, mobility services, etc.). For example, in 2010, Michael Shuman
and his colleagues produced an assessment for metro Cleveland examining the impact of a 25% shift toward local food. They found
it would “generate 27,000 new jobs, $250 million more of tax revenues, and nearly $1 billion more in wages. The job impact is so
profound that it would reemploy 1 in 8 unemployed residents of the region” (Dubb, 2015).
Financing a Global Deal for Nature
The dueling narratives between the need for planetary boundaries and the drive for endless material growth appear far from a
meeting of the minds. However, there are indications of some common ground, as well as some agreement of actions to take now—
even as the long-term remains uncertain on whether a greater consensus can be reached regarding the character of humanity’s and
the biosphere’s sustainably flourishing future.
The surfeit of citations in this publication attest to the unremitting flow of evidence, facts, and figures emanating from scores of
diverse disciplines in the physical and social sciences, and humanities, on the wicked problems besetting our planet. A looming
question (unknown probabilities) is whether a sufficient majority of citizens can open their minds to the knowledge about these
myriad perils and the very hopeful solutions (known possibilities) available to us.
Homo sapiens are the direct cause of the sixth mass extinction to occur in the last half billion years (Kolbert, 2014), due to a global
environmental crisis ironically caused by our species’ monumentally successful accomplishments (Hamilton et al., 2015) across the
continents (Issberner and Léna, 2016; Sample et al., 2016) and throughout the oceans (Levin and Poe, 2017; Earle, 2009; Pauly and
Zeller, 2016). Succumbing to fatalism is a risk that is ever present and never productive (Scranton, 2015; Glikson, 2017), and it is
incumbent upon our spiritual and secular leaders and institutions to sustain the motivation and inspiration for humans to strive
and thrive (Deane-Drummond et al., 2017; Pattberg and Zelli, 2016).
Conserving and Protecting Nature

World efforts to date have resulted in protecting 15.3% of the terrestrial biosphere, and roughly 3% of the marine biosphere is also
protected. This is far below what scientists are estimating is needed for long-term ecological integrity. Nearly half a century ago, the
esteemed ecosystem ecologists Eugene and Howard Odum emphasized that it is in humanity’s long-term self-interest to sustain the
ecological health and integrity of ecosystem services by conserving and protecting half the planet’s terrestrial biosphere (Odum and
Odum, 1972).
Global deal for nature

One important step humanity as a whole, or as close to a whole consensus that can be reached as rapidly as possible, is to set up
financial trusts for supporting the Global Deal for Nature. The Global Deal for Nature is for protecting the planet’s biodiversity rich
ecosystems from extinction what the Paris Climate Agreement is for protecting the planet’s climate system from destabilization. In
the case of protecting nature, the Global Deal focuses on “protection of 50% of the terrestrial biosphere to address the species-
extinction crisis and conserve a global ecological heritage for future generations.”
The progress to date towards protection of half the planet’s terrestrial biosphere by 2050 is described in a Bioscience article by
50 prominent scientists:
Using a map of Earth’s 846 terrestrial ecoregions, we show that 98 ecoregions (12%) exceed Half Protected; 313 ecoregions (37%) fall short of Half
Protected but have sufficient unaltered habitat remaining to reach the target; and 207 ecoregions (24%) are in peril, where an average of only 4% of
natural habitat remains. (Dinerstein et al., 2017)
Funds would go towards “promoting increased habitat protection and restoration, national- and ecoregion-scale conservation
strategies, and the empowerment of indigenous peoples to protect their sovereign lands.” Exactly how much remains conjecture,
with estimates in 2016 ranging between $8 and $80 billion per year for terrestrial protection and between $5 billion and $19 billion
per year for protecting 20%–30% of the marine realm [in 2000 US$].
An analysis published in 2003 using data from 139 ecosystems led to estimates of the yearly field-based conservation costs
varying over seven orders of magnitude, from less than US 10 cents to more than $1000,000 per square kilometer [in 2000 US$)
(Balmford et al., 2003). For Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) the yearly operating expenses per unit area spanned six orders of
magnitude; costs were highest in MPAs that were small, near to coasts, and in high-cost, developed nations (Balmford et al., 2004).
The Global Deal for Nature is endorsed by 30 organizations (as of mid-2017). Currently, the rate of increase of formal land
protection is about 4% per decade. The Global Deal for Nature has the ambitious goal of increasing the decadal rate to 10%, which
would enable achieving the 2050 target.
If humanity does summon the courage and conviction to maintain its vision and efforts on pursuit of a sustainably flourishing
technosphere and biosphere, for all humans and nature, now and for generations to come, it will be one of the greatest stories
humankind survived and thrived to recount.
Cities Scaling Solar Power Internet ASSET Platforms
As indicated throughout this paper, the unparalleled and unprecedented “wicked problem” challenges of global and historical
magnitude confronting humanity necessarily demands extraordinarily more effective tools of communication, interaction, ongoing
evaluation and adapted courses of action that are commensurate to addressing these mega risks and threats.
Despite half a century of efforts to eliminate counter-productive fossil fuel subsidies and replace them with incentives, policies,
regulations, codes and procedures fostering emission-free energy options, progress remains staggeringly small. A veritable Gordian
knot of innumerable transaction costs curtail and restrain superseding this damaging energy system with emission-free options.
However, all of this could change, and rapidly, by leveraging the combination of two proven, powerful Internet-based engines of
wealth generation to unleash an “Alexandrian Solution” that undoes the transaction costs and enables communities, businesses and
markets to flourish. The needed change can be catalyzed through the power of a COIN infused with ASSETs.
COINing ASSETs
COIN is the technical acronym for Internet-based “COllaboration Innovation Networks” or “Collective Intelligence Networks”—
broadly defined as a voluntary, self-organized network of self-motivated individuals, geographically dispersed, joined in the pursuit of
a focused and well-defined mission, target or goal. Wikipedia, the world’s largest and fastest growing encyclopedia, is the premier
example to date, one of the top 5 Internet sites in the world, and there are thousands of open source COINs currently operating.
ASSETs is the acronym for “Apps for Spurring Solar and Efficiency Tech-knowledge”—purposely meant to prompt multiple
financial connotations. It literally refers to the knowledge applications (many already accessible) that can be created, shared, used
and communicated through a COIN with the focused mission of accelerating and scaling city and countryside transitions to
emission-free landscapes.
In plain language, the COIN and ASSETs “reside on” and are accessed through an open source web platform that is globally
available 24/7 by any person with access to a smartphone or other computer device (over 5 billion now, and nearly all people
worldwide within the decade). Citizens anywhere on the planet can participate in adding to, improving upon, sharing and
translating, as well as locally using and applying the expanding pool of knowledge resources to accelerate emissions-free delivered
energy services.
Over time, the continuous process of globally exchanging local outcomes and accomplishments (and innovative ways of
overcoming barriers and impasses) leads to raising the bar or benchmark of what is being achieved more rapidly and at lower
and lower cost and risk.
COINed ASSETs are the 21st Century’s shared tool libraries and cooperative exchanges operating on Internet-based platforms
(Choudary, 2015; Parker et al., 2016). Internet platforms are remarkably versatile tools offering scalability, network effects, store-
and-retrieval of illimitable knowledge resources, many-to-many communication, and provide near-seamless interaction opportu-
nities regardless of geography (Totten, 2012).
Platforms enable meshups, combining a myriad of functions, applications (apps), and capabilities proven to be very useful in
networking isolated silos and disciplines within and across knowledge domains, as well as among and between public and private
institutions and citizenry. (MeshUp is an Internet information and communication network concept. As defined by the European
Consen Group, “MeshUp technologies allow using available data, mobiles devices, Web applications, and wireless networks to
create infinity of new information services. MeshUp technologies merge many forms of data and content loosely adding knowledge
in a practical information service for all. The basic concept behind MeshUp technologies is to create Open-InfoSpace where
individuals and organizations gain free and simplified access to an integrated open base of information services, contents,
platforms, and infrastructures and are free to integrate and modify them, as the whole resource environment evolves. By satisfying
their needs, users and resource providers enhance and upgrade the system.” Source: European Cooperative Society (SCE) innovative
Alliance of European high technological SMEs, http://consen.org/.)
As we have emphasized, with the advent of the iPhone, and the super-exponential spread of smartphones to more than half the
world’s population over the past decade, citizens figuratively and literally now possess the equivalent of trillion dollar pocket
supercomputer platforms, networked to a boundless number of other platforms, both human and (IPv6 addressable) machines.
In essence, the global Internet has become an Internet of Networks (IoNs) that in turn are embracing Internets of Everything,
spawning networks of platforms, both laterally, as well as fractally in nested hierarchies (e.g., apps like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia
operating on smartphones are also platforms, built and operating on other platforms). Like many technologies, these powerful tools
can be used wisely or wickedly, for good and for ill, for benevolent or malevolent acts.
What is outlined here is a positive, constructive, productive and scalable use of these networking tools to engage self-motivated
citizens and whole cities of citizens globally at the local (glocal) level for accelerating implementation of Solar Power Internet ASSET
Platforms. Think of it as one valuable means of smartphoning our way to emission free cities and countrysides (Totten, 2014).
Bricolage Innovation
The key of this initiative is bricolage innovation (Arthur, 2011) with proven components; there is no need to prove any technical
elements or components, whether platforms or applications.
There are three interacting parts comprising the COINing ASSETs process.
Geospatial visual mapping

Among a myriad of existing Internet map and tool apps, here are random examples for illustrative purposes:
• Visually mapping all solar capable rooftops and ground spots in any city (Illustrative solar power apps: Mapdwell (https://www.
mapdwell.com/en/solar); Project Sunroof (https://www.google.com/get/sunroof#p¼0); List of solar mapping apps (https://
energy.gov/eere/sunshot/solar-mapping-resources));
• Visually mapping optimum wind farm sites (Illustrative wind power apps: AWS Wind (http://www.awsopenwind.org/);
Envision (http://www.envisioncn.com/en/wise_windfield.aspx) DTU Wind Energy, Wind Assessment, Siting and Power yield
calculation (WAsP) (http://www.wasp.dk/));
• Visually mapping high-performance, energy efficient buildings (Illustrative building efficiency apps: Open Studio (e.g., http://
openstudio.nrel.gov/); Sefaira Collaborative High-Performance Building tools (http://sefaira.com/sefaira-architecture/); Sketch-
up (https://www.sketchup.com/); Autodesk Building Design and Performance tools (https://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.
com/buildings/autodesk-building-design-tools); Onuma Building Informed Environment (http://www.onuma-bim.com/);
Building Energy Software tools (https://www.buildingenergysoftwaretools.com/));
• Visually mapping urban shade trees, and lighter colored rooftops and roads, for reducing urban heat island costs (Illustrative
urban tree and shade cooling apps: Urban Forest map (e.g., http://urbanforestmap.org/ or http://www.azavea.com/products/
opentreemap/; i-Tree Applications (https://www.itreetools.org/applications.php); Global Cool Cities (http://www.
globalcoolcities.org/); Open Tree map LA (https://www.opentreemap.org/latreemap/map/));
• Visually mapping complete streets (pedestrian and bicycle-friendly) (Illustrative pedestrian and bicycling street maps: Complete
the Streets policy atlas (http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/changing-policy/complete-streets-atlas); Amster-
dam Bike Route mapping (https://www.bikingamsterdam.com/en/map/) Rails-to-Trails Conservancy T-MAP platform (https://
www.railstotrails.org/our-work/trail-mapping-and-gis/)): and
• Visually mapping urban and periurban garden and microfarm land availability for local food production, sharing of food
(Illustrative food apps: Falling Fruit (https://fallingfruit.org/; Ripe Near Me (http://www.ripenear.me/); Colorado Community
Food System (https://www.communitycommons.org/groups/colorado-food-system/; NY City Green Thumb (http://www.green
thumbnyc.org/gardensearch.html); Harvest Mark (http://www.harvestmark.com/); Locavore (http://www.getlocavore.com/);
and Philadelphia Urban Agriculture Land Inventory (https://codeforphilly.org/projects/FPAC_Urban_Agriculture_Land_
Inventory)).
Road-map creation from tech-knowledge for leveraging local assets

Geospatial visual mapping of the key ways to deliver emission-free energy services are powerful for communicating opportunities
for harnessing any city’s solar and efficiency resource assets. But for greater value, these mappings can be further integrated with
other key apps and algorithms for performing critical analyses of:
• Energy available hourly, daily and seasonally;

• Economic assessment of the levelized cost of electricity of solar and efficiency opportunities compared to fossil fuels, including
monetization of externalities and price volatilities (e.g., fuels, water, emissions, pollution), and use of “value of solar” tariff
methodologies (http://www.cleanpower.com/);
• Financial engineering calculations selected from a number of available financing options (e.g., 1%–2% interest rates Program
Related Investments/PRIs, 2.5% rural federal financing, 3%–4% sustainable energy bonds, 5% REITs and commercial PACE, 8%
Feed-in Tariffs/FITs, 10% Pay-on-the-Bill, Power Purchasing Agreements/PPAs,)
• Priority ranking a city’s solar and efficiency opportunities for implementation over time (NREL estimates 15% of existing
urban land area covered in solar PV systems could provide 100% of total power and fuel needs)
• Accessing the wealth of knowledge and evidence on best-in-play policies, codes, regulations aligned to reduce the time, cost and
risk of getting these opportunities implemented
• In-depth details and multimedia presentations (e.g., YouTube videos, Flickr visuals, RSA-type animations) of successful case
studies, skills development, capacity building, technical training, and other learning tools).
This extensive, richly-textured, dynamically growing body of knowledge in greater breadth and depth, capable of being accessed by
neophyte, specialist and polymath through relevant hyper-links, coupled with the geospatial visual mappings, are absolutely
necessary, but certainly not sufficient.
This initiative goes light-years beyond the pervasive passive, static, and often difficult-to-locate web sites with patches of this
diverse information. The object of this initiative is to continuously generate and seamlessly exchange a wealth of knowledge assets
that can be applied to harnessing local natural assets (solar and efficiency), steadily and accumulatively. Action Mapping, the third
interactive part, facilitates this process.
Action mapping—Getting it accomplished

Action Mapping is all about pursuing the goal—emission free localities. The previous two COIN functions, accumulating geospatial
visualization and road-mapping from tech-knowledge, serve as the effective information for identifying what needs doing, and the
actions people can undertake to complete the series of actions.
The action map adapts and evolves as valuable new knowledge is continuously fed back into the COIN indicating better
opportunities. Intrinsic to the collaborative sharing design process is to encourage and capture the ongoing innovation of evolving
apps (appcessories) by users. These are directly relevant and useful for developing, refining, maintaining, and advocating the myriad
of implementations that go into a customized, locally relevant action roadmap for becoming emission free; counter-intuitively
drawing upon a global network of expertise, tools and resources.
The multiple-purpose platform helps facilitate multimodal and multimedia venues (e.g., peer-to-peer, MOOCs, apps, webinars
and audiocasts) for learning and applying new skills, abilities, knowledge, competencies, training, practice, capabilities, experience,
mastery, expertise, along with re-tooling and superseding outmoded ones.
Campuses and cities as test-beds

In kick-starting the initiative, the intention is to leverage those campuses and cities already committed to transitioning to emission-
free landscapes; they will be engaged as anchors and hubs, respectively. In the USA, alone, there are 700þ college and university
Presidents who are signatories to the climate commitment of pursuing emission-free campuses (ACUPCC, Assoc. of College and
University Presidents Climate Commitment).
The object is to tap the campuses’ pools of human, intellectual and social capital. They have clusters of passionate faculty and
students with diverse skills, talents and interests (web and app programmers, mechanical-electrical-civil-computer engineering
adepts, savvy communication and media curators, civic-political leaders and aspirants, designers and media content producers, and
other resources). It also involves harnessing and leveraging the physical and financial capital overseen by administrators and boards
in pursuit of the emission-free goal. For example, the 30 þ% average ROIs from energy efficiency projects by > 50 college Green
Revolving Funds, are superior to the financial returns from school endowments (10-year averages of 5% annual ROI), and offer
direct means of financing a significant percentage of the goal to become an emission- free campus (Orlowski and
Thomashow, 2015).
Nearly all of these campuses are anchored in cities committed to reducing emissions. There are now 1400 þ signatory cities to the
U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Declaration, comprising three-fourths of all cities with 30,000 citizens or more. In the wake of
U.S. President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, > 7400 Mayors of cities worldwide joined the Global Covenant of
Mayors, pledging commitment to the Paris Agreement target goals (Pulse, 2017).
There is a powerful synergism to leverage between a school’s learning curve on reducing emissions spilling over in furthering the
city’s transition. Students actually create the applied knowledge conditions and work positions essential for the local transition
through their learning-by-doing processes.
The Solar Power Internet Platform is still in the early stage of formation, but it offers the kinds of potent tools (known
possibilities) for citizenry, their appointed and elected officials, and private sector businesses of all sizes to seize and use steadfastly
for progressing humanity towards flourishing sustainably in the Anthropocene. It is one of the best opportunities for addressing the
planet’s unknown probabilities.
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Waze https://www.waze.com/. Accessed 3 May 2017.
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WHO (2016) Climate change and health. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization.http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/.
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Wilson DS (2015) Does altruism exist? Culture, genes, and the welfare of others. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Wilson EO (2016) Half-earth, our planet’s fight for life. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co.
Wimmer N (2012) Green energy for a billion poor: How Grameen Shakti created a winning model for social business. Vaterstetten, Germany: MCRE Verlag UG.
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Zalasiewicz J, Williams M, Waters CN, Barnosky AD, et al. (2017) Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective. The Anthropocene Review 4(1): 9–22.
https://doi.org/10.177/20530196166743.http://journals.sagepub.com/home/anr.
Ziegler R and Ott K (2011) The quality of sustainability science: A philosophical perspective. Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 7(1). http://sspp.proquest.com.
Further Reading
Taleb NN (2010b) Why did the crisis of 2008 happen? http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/crisis.pdf.
Totten MP (2015) COINing ASSETs for Exponential Scaling of Reinventing Fire, (COllaborative Intelligence Network (COIN) platform for scaling Apps for Spurring Solar and Efficiency
Techknowledge (ASSETs)). Rocky Mountain Institute.
Relevant Websites
Cities
http://citiscope.org/—CitiScope.
https://www.citylab.com/—Citylab.
http://www.citymetric.com/—CityMetric.
http://cnt.org—CNT—Center for Neighborhood Technologies.
http://www.covenantofmayors.eu/index_en.html—Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.
http://www.globalcovenantofmayors.org/—Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.
https://globalparliamentofmayors.org/—Global Parliament of Mayors.
http://iclei.org—ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability.
https://ilsr.org/—Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
https://www.planetizen.com/—Planetizen.
http://www.sustainablecities.eu/—European Sustainable Cities Platform.
https://smartgrowthamerica.org/—Smart Growth America.
http://theglobalgrid.org/—Global Grid—urbanist news, local views.
https://unhabitat.org/—UN Habitat.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/brief/global-platform-for-sustainable-cities—Global Platform for Sustainable Cities—World Bank.
http://www.100resilientcities.org/—100 Resilient Cities.
Climate
http://www.climatecentral.org/—Climate Central: A Science and News Organization.
http://www.dailyclimate.org/—The Daily Climate.
http://www.ipcc.ch/—IPCC—Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
http://www.wbgu.de/en/—WBGU German Advisory Council on Global Change.
Ecologically Sustainable and Just Economy

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/overview—The Circular Economy Concept—Regenerative Economy.
http://www.greattransition.org/—Great Transition Initiative.
https://www.nesta.org.uk/—Nesta—the innovation foundation.
https://www.sei-international.org/—SEI Stockholm Environment Institute.
https://www.shareable.net/—Shareable.
https://thenextsystem.org/—The Next System Project—We can create the kind of society—and.
Ecosystems
https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/—Ecology and Society.
https://www.ipbes.net/—IPBES | Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem.
https://www.resalliance.org/—Resilience Alliance—Home.
http://web.unep.org/geo/—Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) UNEP.
http://www.millenniumassessment.org/—Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

http://www.teebweb.org/—TEEB: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity.
http://www.worldoceanassessment.org/—United Nations World Ocean Assessment.
https://worldoceanreview.com/en/—World Ocean Review.
Energy
http://aceee.org/—ACEEE American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.
https://eta.lbl.gov/—Energy Technologies Area—Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en.html—Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE—Fraunhofer ISE.
http://www.irena.org/—IRENA—The International Renewable Energy Agency.
https://www.rmi.org/—Rocky Mountain Institute.
http://thesolutionsproject.org/—The Solutions Project—100% Renewable Energy.
Finance
http://www.grameen.com/—Grameen Bank | Bank for the Poor.
https://ica.coop/—International Co-operative Alliance.
http://www.unepfi.org/—United Nations Environment—Finance Initiative.
https://www.unpri.org/—Principles for Responsible Investment: PRI Homepage.
Land and Food

https://www.bountifulgardens.org/—Bountiful Gardens.
http://www.fao.org/forestry/publications/en/—State of the World’s Forests—FAO.
http://www.fao.org/publications/sofa/2016/en/—The State of Food and Agriculture 2016 | FAO | Food and Agriculture.
http://www.foodwastealliance.org/—FWRA—Food Waste Reduction Alliance—Reduce Waste—Reuse.
https://landinstitute.org/—The Land Institute: Natural Systems Agriculture.
https://www.localharvest.org/csa/—Community Supported Agriculture—LocalHarvest.
http://www.ruaf.org/—The RUAF Foundation (Resources for Urban Agriculture and Food Security).
Mobility
http://www.bikewalkalliance.org/—Alliance for Biking and Walking.
https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/national-complete-streets-coalition/—National Complete Streets Coalition | Smart Growth America.
http://www.vtpi.org/—VTPI Victoria Transport Policy Institute.
Poverty
http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/—The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015.
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi—Human Development Index (HDI) | Human Development Reports.
https://www.oxfam.org/—Oxfam International | The power of people against poverty.
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs—SDGs Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform.
https://www.who.int/gho/publications/en/—WHO World Health Organization Reports.
Water
http://www.unwater.org/publications/world-water-development-report/en/—UN-Water: World Water Development Report.

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Flourishing Sustainably in the Anthropocene?

Known Possibilities and Unknown

Part 1. Is “Sustainable” Attainable? 3

Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-409548-9.10910-8 1

City-Scale Sustainably Flourishing Solutions 59

Part 1. Is “Sustainable” Attainable?

Positive Progress Trend

Pessimistic Trend—Planetary Boundaries

Earth’s climate dominant states

Humans incapable of planetary-scale changes?

Evolving Towards a Stationary (But Dynamic) State?

Sustaining Earth’s Biodiversity Richness

Manifesting Wisdom to Flourish

Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s

Path Dependency and Lock-In

Solar Fusion Solution

Solar Power Internet

Weak Versus Strong Sustainability

1. Dealing transparently and systemically with risk, uncertainty and irreversibility.

Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs)

Fig. 4 Global poverty pyramid (Prahalad, 2009).

Fig. 5 Sustainable development goals (SDGs). Source: UN SDG, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs.

The SuperExponentiator: General Purpose Technology

Hyperbolic Growth, GPTs and Cultural Evolution

NPP (net primary productivity)

Unpriced natural capital

Beyond Natural Catastrophic Events

Human-Driven Catastrophic Events

Trouble in Sustainable Cities

Scaling and Accelerating Sustainability

Using Information to Displace Energy and Materials

China Energy Efficiency Opportunities

Efficiency First and Foremost

Efficiency Unbound and Rebound

Efficiency is the Backbone of Economic Growth

Bottom of the Pyramid Opportunities

Power—Synergism of Energy Efficiency and Solar Power

Water—Energy Efficiency and Safe, Clean Water

Communications—Mobile Phones Going the Distance

Mobility—Solar Powered Electric Bicycles

Bottom of the Pyramid Policies

From Centralized and Hierarchical to Distributed and Lateral

Mega-Projects and Mega-Losses

GAIN—Genetics, Auto-Robotics, Informatics and Nanotechnologies

More Information and Knowledge, Less Energy and Materials

Consumption: Consumptive or Consummatum

Deep Learning, Deep Play, Deep Work—The New Lifespan

Mindshift for Sustenance

Economics (Household Stewardship) for Sustainably Flourishing

Life-Long Learning Imperative

From Peripheral to Central

Quadruple Helix of Knowledge Innovation Systems

Quadruple Helix Facilitated by Internet Platform Networks

Part 2: Attaining Sustainability at City Scale

Cognitive biases and willful ignorance—Insurmountable or malleable?

Mega-Transformations Opportunities at City Scale

Efficiency—The Low-Hanging Fruit

Solar PV and Wind Power

100% Renewable Powered Global Economy

2030 and 2050 roadmaps

Multiple Ancillary Benefits

Utility regulatory transformation

Nutritious, Secure, Sustainable Food

Perverse Biofuel Subsidies Drive GHG Emissions