5-Fold Increase in Efficiency - Not Delusional at All
October 28, 2012 2 CommentsSome of my recent articles have circled around an apparent antagonism between different schools of thought in sustainability. I mentioned the two main contemporary concepts for leading business and society through the transformation to sustainable development: efficiency and sufficiency. The former aims at getting the same output with less input, whereas the latter calls for reducing output (mainl...
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“A Balanced Mix of Technologies and Strategies” - The Sustainable ...
October 16, 2012When it comes to discussing ways to limit human influence on global warming, the most popular reaction is to pass the buck: So who's in charge of making the needed substantial changes in the way things run? The Other. Why? Because they pollute more, because they're more powerful, because they have a historical responsibility, because it's easier for them... There seem to be more excuses for not acting than there are carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere. "Technology Will Save Us" Say Efficiency Advocates Even among those who are concerned with the environment and seek a way to increas...
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Better, Different, Less – Green Economy Revisited
September 17, 2012 2 Comments“Post Growth Economy or Resource Efficiency Revolution – How Should We Face the Limits of Our Planet?” This question I asked in a blog post half a year ago. On the green growth vs. post-growth front, an interesting publication caught my attention recently. Barbara Unmüßig and Thomas Fatheuer from the “Heinrich Böll Stiftung”, a foundation associated with Germany's Green Party, and Wolfgang Sachs, member of the club of Rome and former Wuppertal Institut researcher, published a “Critique of the Green Economy” in April with a translation to English that followed in June. In it, they discussed the...
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Exploring the Environmental Effects of Electric Cars
November 8, 2011 1 CommentCan you imagine the weight of 1.8 billion tonnes? I can't. I can only try to put this number in relation to others. 1.8 billion tonnes, that's the weight of all carbon emissions caused by private transport in 2009. 1,8 billion tonnes, that's 6,4% of the total carbon emissions from fuel combustion, emitted by all countries and all sectors in 2009 (see IEA's 2011 "highlights" report on CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion, page 67). Sustainable Strategies: Drive Less, Use the Bus, Get an Electric Car 1,8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, blown in the atmosphere, that's what happens whe...
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Productivity, Efficiency and Quality
October 12, 2011Productivity is probably the main keyword in growth theory. Expressed as a mathematical function it describes the proportion between increases in output per input unit. Obviously there is a close connection to the input output analysis, mainly developed by the economist Wassily Leontief. A growth in productivity, a essential precondition for economic success, can be achieved by more efficient work process flows. Transfering this into target system increasing productivity is the overall target with a growth in efficiency as a measure to achieve this objective. In this context I would like to...
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Transparency and Saving Potentials
September 7, 2011 1 CommentWhen I read about "transparency" in the context of sustainability or sustainability management the term mostly is referring to reporting to and communication with the relevant stakeholders of businesses. That's the case in a study on "Corporate Responsibility and Transparency" (in German: Unternehmerische Verantwortung im Zeitalter der Transparenz) published by pwc in March 2011. The pwc study assesses sustainability reporting of Austrian, Swiss and German companies and shows that 87% of German DAX noted businesses already do sustainability reporting. The energy sector is strongly represented...
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Here's another noteworthy "MDPI Sustainability"-article asse ...
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Thanks Moritz for the interesting blog post. Recently ARTE T ...
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A very nice blog explaining the basic idea as well as the be ...
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[...] valued the universal guidelines for all sorts of envi ...
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[...] 5-Fold Increase in Efficiency – Not Delusional at All ...
April 22, 2013
