If we expand our existing sustainability measures 20% per year, every year, the entire world will be 100% sustainable by 2025. (This does not mean x% now, x + 20% next year x + 40% the year after, etc.--that's unrealistic. This simply means x% now, x + .2x% next year, etc.) This small increase, compounded over fourteen years, would get us to a 100% green world.
That's a big oversimplification, but let me explain why it comes closer than you might think to being true, and why it might be a better policy goal than many in place now.
For example, currently, 6% of Europe's electricity generation is from renewable sources. If they wanted it to be 100% by 2025, they should expand renewable energy generation by about 15% per year, every year, compared to other power sources. (This does not mean 6% now, 21% next year, 36% the year after, etc. It only means 6% now, 6.9% next year, 8% the year after, etc.) This sounds small, and in fact is less ambitious than their current plan to grow renewables from 6% to 12% by 2010. That would require increasing renewables' share by 17% per year. But if Europe kept growing its percentage of renewables by 15% per year until 2025, they would be at 100% green power. Perhaps such a policy would be both more ambitious and easier to achieve.
Governments and think-tanks worldwide speculate about what's needed to become sustainable, and what can be set as realistic policy goals. Too often, these goals are stated like "reduce CO2 emissions 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2010", or "by 2003, 10% of all cars sold in California shall be electric". The most common outcome in situations like this is the school kid's cram-and-burn scenario: nothing happens until the deadline looms, at which point a frantic flurry of activity erupts, usually resulting in the deadline being missed. (Or, in the case of the California electric car legislation as with so many other cases, the legislation gets dropped altogether, for being an "unrealistically high expectation".)
So let's take the same goals and rewrite them to be incremental deadlines: you need to be a little better by the end of this year, and then next year improve by the same amount, ad infinitum. This may not sound exciting at first, but if you improve by the same percentage every year, you skyrocket into exponential growth. It's Moore's Law for sustainability, the law of accelerating returns.
One big advantage of this approach is that if the improvements have to be constant over years, they can be planned for--companies can set up programs or departments to deal with them in a way that's integrated into normal production and R&D, rather than throwing together a one-time task-force to change things from the outside. Truly effective institutional change often requires years, and often requires systemic measures. Setting small but frequent deadlines also tightens the feedback loop so you know whether you're on track and can correct earlier. It's like Kaizen, the Japanese method of continuous improvement (which is a large part of what's made Japanese manufacturing the highest quality in the world).
The other main advantage of this Moore's Law approach is that it's an easy back-of-the-envelope way of making policy targets, using backcasting with simple exponential-growth math. Just decide your desired target amount (of toxins, of power use, of whatever) and your target year; then find the current amount, and plug it into the exponential growth equation.
For another example, about 9% of US electricity generation is renewable, so the US only needs to improve by about 13% per year to reach 100% by 2025. ...Well, it's not quite that simple. Of that 9% renewable energy, more than 7% is hydroelectric and about 1% is biomass, which means wind and solar account for around 0.4%. (Similar figures are true for Europe, though it's not quite so skewed towards hydro.) So if hydro & biomass count as renewables in your book, the US only needs to improve by about 13% per year as mentioned above; but if only wind and solar count for you, then a 34% annual improvement is needed. This may sound unattainable, but statistics from the American Wind Energy Institute say that the country's installed base of wind power increased by 35% last year, so even this audacious-sounding target is clearly viable.
The same exercise can be done for other important metrics, like efficiency, meat eating, water use, organic food, use of toxins, etc. For instance, let's say we want to eliminate the use of PBDE's in consumer products. If you assume that today 100% of products contain them, but you want less than 1% to contain them by 2025, your policy should be to reduce PBDE use by about 22% per year.
In the case of hazardous materials like PBDE, simply banning the material is often effective, because as long as a suitable replacement chemical is known, it can be swapped for the banned chemical 100% right away. Exponential-growth policies would lend themselves more to problems like oil, where it is difficult to go cold-turkey because no swap-in replacement exists. If we (as individuals, or as countries) reduced oil use by 21% per year, swapping out a little at a time here and there for different fuels or for efficiency, we would be able to eliminate 99% of our oil use by 2025. If we reduced oil use by just 10% a year, we would be 99% oil-free by 2050.
In the case of food, about 2.5% of all food sold in the US is organic. If organic food sales grew 21% per year, we would have 100% organic food by 2025; according to the Organic Trade Association, in 2005 organic dairy sales grew 23% and organic meat sales grew 55%. Apparently this target will be an easy one to achieve.
Things are once again not quite that simple, because progress can't always happen so uniformly. Legislating switchovers to organic farming is one thing; improving technology in vehicles or electronics to become much more efficient every year is another. Sometimes the physics just hits a brick wall and there's not much more you can do in that direction. However, the history of technology is one long series of surmounting seemingly impossible barriers. The world's industry has already increased its efficiency (in energy use per dollar of revenue) 1 - 4% per year for the last hundred fifty years, as we've mentioned before, and that's without declaring ecological improvements a huge R&D priority, that's simply a side-effect of business as usual. Even if we do find technological barriers that are insurmountable, they can often be circumvented in other ways: a vehicle's efficiency can be doubled by putting a second person in it, with no improvements in technology. And simply making the effort to continually improve can work wonders, as Kaizen's phenomenal success has demonstrated.
Using the Moore's Law approach, or Green Kaizen if you prefer, could be a great policy to push green developments in the right direction. Obviously the rates of required change vary widely, depending on the substance or technology being improved, but as we've seen above you can go from almost nothing to 100% green in just fourteen years if you expand your green activities / technologies / substances by 20% every year. That number is close enough to be a reasonable policy goal for almost all sectors of the economy and environment. And as we've seen, it's a goal that can be surprisingly realistic to achieve, and has in fact been surpassed in several arenas. We just need to keep the momentum going.
