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GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Energy Efficiency

Aired August 26, 2006 - 14:30:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ISHA SESAY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: On this GLOBAL CHALLENGES, energized efficiency.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The future is not fate but choice.

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SESAY: Making business sense out of nature's bounty.

Sphere of influence.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Actually, a bunch of ordinary people can do fantastic things and they are not doomed.

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SESAY: An enormous project in England teaches sustainability by example. And mangrove man.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In Thailand alone, about 50 percent of the mangrove forest has gone.

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SESAY: A Thai environmentalist protects the forest he loves.

Hi, I'm Isha Sesay in Snowmass, Colorado. Home of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization devoted to the symbiotic relationship between man and resources. A fitting venue in an area of the United States overflowing with natural abundance.

This edition of GLOBAL CHALLENGES focuses on sustainable living. Simply put, living in harmony with our surroundings. But what does sustainable living really mean to you and me? RMI cofounder Amory Lovins has been focusing his ever renewable energy on that for many years.

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SESAY (voice-over): Snowmass, Colorado, nestled in the Rocky Mountains at an altitude of 2400 meters. It's a place of breathtaking beauty, with pristine mountain vistas and plentiful natural resources.

A short drive from Aspen, it is the chosen home of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Physicist and economist Amory Lovins is a leader in the energy conservation movement. He is the author of numerous books, including "Winning the Oil End Game," which details steps that he says if taken will get the United States completely off oil by the year 2050.

He founded the Rocky Mountain Institute in 1982 with his then wife Hunter Lovins.

AMORY LOVINS, ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE: Our purpose has always been to foster the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, prosperous and life sustaining.

SESAY: RMI headquarters is also home to Lovins with a common kitchen and greenhouse between his personal residence and the offices.

The entire building is a showcase model of efficiency and economics. With visitors from around the world stopping in for tours.

LOVINS: We have two different sets of solar panels.

SESAY: Lovins himself took me around.

LOVINS: You see it tilting a little bit.

SESAY: Yeah.

LOVINS: That's because there's a sensor that always points it toward the sun or the brightest part of the sky.

The electric bill, if we bought from the utility rather than making it solar would be about five dollars a month for 372 square meters, for 1000 square feet.

SESAY: Begun initially as a think tank devoted to research on energy efficiency and economics, RMI has involved into more of a nonprofit consulting firm, lending advice to individuals, companies and organizations. The organization now has a staff of 55 with offices in both Colorado and Hawaii.

LOVINS: I suppose the short version of what we do is create abundance by design. We change how people design things to achieve radical resource efficiency, bringing four, 10, 100 times more work out of energy, water, minerals, topsoil. Whatever we love (ph) from the planet.

SESAY: The demand for such guidance is increasing as businesses see the potential.

LOVINS: Protecting the climate (ph) is not costly, it's profitable. Because saving energy costs less than buying it.

SESAY: Among the RMI clientele, the United States Pentagon. RMI is working with the Defense Department to make their military vehicles more fuel efficient. And Wal-Mart.

LOVINS: As a result of the truck work they have announced that all their new heavy trucks are going to be twice as efficient as the present ones.

SESAY: RMI is also helping Wal-Mart create more energy efficient stores.

LOVINS: A company with that sort of scope and scale is a very good way to bring efficient, clean, new technologies to market fast.

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SESAY (on camera): RMI envisions a more energy efficient world that's less dependent on oil and Lovins thinks key to that future are materials like this.

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SESAY (voice-over): Carbon composite. An incredibly strong, incredibly lightweight material made from carbon fiber and nylon resin that is used in airplanes and some race cars.

RMI spun off a separate for profit company called Fiberforge that is working to make this material practical for every day cars. Lightweight vehicles use less energy.

LOVINS: Doubling the efficiency this way is free and it makes the car safer. It's like finding a Saudi Arabia under Detroit so we're busy drilling.

SESAY: Fiberforge is calling this concept the hypercar. David Cramer is the head engineer.

(on camera): You have a prototype. Is that what you call these? A test model of a hypercar. So let's lift the covers and see what you've got under her.

DAVID CRAMER, FIBERFORGE: This is a show car of the revolution concept car that we developed in 2001 and this is a non-running prototype, it's just to show the style, aerodynamics and many of the design features.

It's also to show that you can make a very fuel efficient car that is also not small.

SESAY (voice-over): Initially Lovins and Fiberforge see the hypercar being run with a hybrid engine but down the road, when the technology is there, the ideal, Lovins says, is hydrogen.

LOVINS: One of the nice things you could do with a car like that is when it's parked, which is about 96 percent of the time, you could plug it in as a power station on wheels to sell power back to the grid.

SESAY: What about the safety of a lightweight car?

LOVINS: You don't need weight for strength. Henry Ford said that very clearly. And if you did, of course, your bicycling helmet would be made out of steel, not carbon fiber.

The simulations say you can run it into a wall at 56 kilometers an hour with no damage to the passenger compartment or you can run it head onto a steel SUV twice its weight, each going 48 kilometers per hour, a total of 96, and still be protected from serious injury.

SESAY: The hypercar is still several years away from being a reality. For the meantime, Fiberforge is hoping sales of their carbon composites in other areas like sporting goods will fund manufacturing of the hypercar and bring it closer to reality.

And Lovins, as always, has his eyes on the road ahead.

LOVINS: The future is not fate but choice. We could in 20 or so years be using, say, twice as much energy as we use now. We could be using a lot less energy than we use now. In that case, we'd have a cleaner, safer environment and a stronger economy and I think a much fairer and safer world.

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SESAY (on camera): Coming up after the break, sewing the seeds of sustainability in grandiose fashion in the U.K.

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SESAY: Welcome back. Former British music producer Tim Smit has big ideas with big results. Becky Anderson travels to Cornwall, England to gaze upon Smit's resplendent example of sustainability.

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BECKY ANDERSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This must be Alice's wonderland.

Housed in Britain's best loved modern building, the Eden project bills itself as a living theater of plants, people and possibilities.

What it delivers is a challenge to each of the 1.2 million visitors a year. Think more about the world around you.

This is now green theme park. No rows of neatly ordered blooms to be glanced at and just as quickly forgotten. Eden is about reflection, sustainability and a global view.

(on camera): The humid tropics biome is the Eden project's showstopper. Where else in the world can you walk from Malaysia to West Africa to tropical South America in just an afternoon.

(voice-over): This self contained world with its eclectic design is the vision of one man. Rock producer turned environmentalist Tim Smit.

(on camera): You talk about Eden project being a living theater. What do you mean y that .

TIM SMIT, EDEN PROJECT: This is a good example at Eden you don't see any signs that say keep off the grass, you mustn't touch anything, whereas at most botanic gardens you do. How the hell are you supposed to feel this is part of you if you're not allowed to do this and go - we have a lot of spares and greenhouses behind so we can bring in anything overtouched, fondled to death.

And a fundamental difference between Eden and a botanic garden is that Eden, wherever you look, the plants are planted in such a way to give a sense of the habitat from which they have come rather than the more traditional there is two of these, what about two of those - there's a collection that multiplies sort of put in a case.

So the living bit alludes both to the way we interact with the public and the schools but also to the way that we have chosen to put our exhibitions together to get a sense of the wildness in certain places and also a sense of the first place where we sort of domesticated the wild and so on.

ANDERSON (voice-over): Just don't call him a visionary.

SMIT: People say to me, Tim, you're such a visionary. What a fantastic thing. And they always are shocked when I say I'm not a bloody visionary. When you were 12 years old, I could go into any classroom anywhere and talked to 12 year old kids and they would have dreamt of building castles on the top of mountains, things in holes all that stuff.

The visionary bit, if you have to use the word, was simply the belief that you could persuade 300 people who have been professionally trained to say no to say yes. That is actually the big battle. And that's been a real gas.

ANDERSON: And it's been a battle worth fighting. Eden has revitalized much of the ground underfoot, but the entire economy in England's southwest corner, the poorest part of the country.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Cornwall has been a very depressed area economically. Traditional industries which were fishing, agriculture, clay mining, have really been hit by the downturn in manufacturing. And Eden has managed to help reverse that trend.

We have had a policy of local sourcing and also of sharing our luck. And the visitors that we've brought to the county will have put into the local economy, just the Cornish economy, over our full six or seven years almost one billion dollars worth of economic activity.

ANDERSON: And that's a lot of money in an area where industry has withered and the harbors are quiet. But beyond the investments Eden's mission is education.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Eden projecti s not just about plants. No, no, no. Eden project is about you. It is about plants and people and how we connect with plants, because plants are very special.

ANDERSON: Teaching environmental sensitivity knows no age limits or geographical borders.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We want to do education without using the word education. So Eden been from three year olds to 93 year olds. Our classrooms haven't got a straight wall in them, they don't look like classrooms. The core doesn't look like an education building but it's an education that's done (ph) right and we want people to realize the whole world they live in is an education and it's about their futures.

ANDERSON: The garden's roof structure follows the natural pattern that occurs in a snail's shell. It features solar panels, spiraling upwards to form the shape of a flower. Panels that should generate enough power to compensate for the release of nine tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The Eden project has been hugely popular with the public and it's a message that is apparently getting through

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It made me think about recycling, the environment more. I'd like to do -if we built another house, I'd like to have solar panels for the electricity and not .

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If we can have plants then we wouldn't be able to have any clothes or anything.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And what would happen if we didn't have any clothes?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Then we wouldn't - we'd be freezing cold standing in the middle of the streets naked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it is absolutely tremendous. It's an education for adults, also children and schools and so on. It really is good.

ANDERSON: Eden presents itself as a stage for change. Everyone who visits becomes part of a giant social experiment. They get knowledge, tools and time to thing. The hope is that when they go home they'll be motivated to make a difference no matter how small.

SMIT: If you want to say what I want people to go away with, I want optimism, the feeling that actually a bunch of ordinary people can do fantastic things and they're not doomed. That'd be the most important thing.

And secondly a sense of excitement that all is not necessarily as it seems and that we can change almost anything if only we had - if we want to do that and I think that's enough for me.

ANDERSON: Becky Anderson, CNN, in Southwest England.

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SESAY: After the break, from grandiose to grassroots, we'll travel to where the ocean meets the rainforest in Thailand to meet a man who's teaching sustainability on fisherman at a time.

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SESAY: Welcome back. Natural resources are essential for our very existence but the actions of man can upset the delicate balance of our ecosystems. An internationally renowned environmentalist is working to change that by creating awareness in the mangrove forest of Thailand.

Aneesh Raman reports.

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ANEESH RAMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Along the coastline of southern Thailand a depleting resource towers over the water. These mangrove forests are the powerful gateway to the villages that lie behind. Their beauty is not easily apparent, their essential role not easily understood and their survival is in doubt. A plight that has defined the life of 62 year old Pisit Contenow (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Once we have discovered land like this, people can decide what species is proper to be planted.

RAMAN: The soft-spoken conservationist spends his days on the front lines of this struggle, keenly aware that what takes minutes to destroy can have generational impact.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The mangrove forest in many countries have decolony (ph) in south Asia. As much damage in the past 30 years in Thailand alone about 50 percent of the mangrove forest is gone.

RAMAN: It was back in 1985 that Pisit and his wife founded the nonprofit Yadfun (ph) association. There goal was to protect mangroves not through government policy but by educating local communities. He has since become a global example of grassroots success, with numerous awards to his name and visitors from around the world making field trips to the area to see his work.

All inconsequential, though, to his real focus.

Walking through the forest with Pisit requires incessant stops. His knowledge of mangroves is as inspiring as it is endless.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The main full sauce (ph) comes from the sea. And the sea without mangrove forests are decoring (ph) in tropical region that is poor because the mangrove forest is breeding ground, it is feeding ground for the small marine animals.

RAMAN: Like the man himself, the trees Pisit embodies are quietly powerful. Not simply lumber but entire ecosystems. Famous for their labyrinth of formidable roots, mangroves protect coastlines from erosion and filter water before it reaches coral reefs and sea grass.

The are also conduits of life. Breeding grounds for small marine animals and feeding area for larger ones. In short, mangrove forests are some of the worlds most productive and diverse wetlands, vital not just for the environment but for anyone living close by.

The 2004 tsunami disaster showed a more urgent implication. Mangroves were identified as an impressive line of defense, their sheer density mitigating the deadly force of the tsunami waves, saving lives and livelihoods.

Indonesia already plans to grow mangrove forest along some 600,000 hectares of vulnerable coastline. But fir Pisit, while the newfound interest is welcome, it must not miss the point, that mangroves are not just for protection.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have to work with the nopon (ph) people to discuss, to encourage them to understand how to utilize, how to restore, how to live in very harmony with the environment.

RAMAN (on camera): Pisit's passion for this cause is infectious and it is a big reason why he has been so successful, whether here teaching children how to plant mangroves or dealing with lifelong fisherman, it is all part of his bottom up philosophy to grass roots organizing.

(voice-over): His efforts are contained to a few dozen villages in southern Thailand but their lesson's global. A majority of each day is spent making locals understand that while they may lose money at first fishing with ecofriendly practices, they will sustain their way of life for generations to come.

Whether teaching children what mangroves provide or teaching their parents how to find the right soil for the right plant, it's a hard sell.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The more I work with the local people about the conservation of the mangrove forest, the more I want to see it (ph).

RAMAN: It is beyond Pisit's reach to ensure that mangroves stand tall worldwide, safeguarding and empowering local communities. The future of what is in his reach, though, is firmly in mind.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I am thinking about the next 10 years. What's happening on this earth. I imagine that there are many victories going. I imagine that there are many crabs, many clams living in this area. I am making it that there are many young people who can come and collect those crabs, fish for them, for their living and for their income.

RAMAN: A vision so vivid and a passion so powerful, there seems little doubt it will happen.

Aneesh Raman, CNN, Chong (ph), southern Thailand.

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SESAY: That's it for this edition of GLOBAL CHALLENGES.

In Snowmass, Colorado, I'm Isha Sesay. Thanks fro joining us.

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