Michael P Totten GreenATP: APPortunities to catalyze local to global positive tipping points through collaborative innovation networks

Advanced Review

GreenATP: APPortunities tocatalyze local to global positivetipping points throughcollaborative innovation networksMichael P. Totten∗

Humanity’s unceasing ingenuity is generating vast economic gain for billionsof people with goods unavailable to even kings and queens throughout most ofhistory. Unfortunately, this economic growth has triggered unprecedented se-curity challenges of global and historical magnitude: more absolute poor thanany time in human history, the sixth largest extinction spasm of life on earth,climate destabilization with mega-catastrophic consequences, and multi-trilliondollar wars over access to energy. These multiple, inextricably interwoven chal-lenges have low probability of being solved if decision makers maintain the strongpropensity to think and act as if life is linear, has no carrying capacity limits,uncertainty is controllable, the future free of surprises, planning is predictableand compartmentalized into silos, and Gaussian distributions are taken as thenorm while fat-tail futures are ignored. Although the future holds irreducibleuncertainties, it is not fated. The emergence of Internet availability to one-thirdof humanity and access by most of humanity within a decade has spawned theWeb analogue of a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of speciation in knowledge applica-tions. Among the most prodigious have been collaboration innovation networks(COINs) reflecting a diversity of ‘genome’ types, facilitating a myriad of collectiveintelligence crowd-swarming phenomena (Malone T, Laubacher R, Dellarocas C.The Collective Intelligence Genome. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring; 2010,Vol. 51). COINs are essential tools for accelerating and scaling transformationalsolutions (positive tipping points) to the wicked problems confronting humanity.Web COINs enable acceleration of multiple-benefit innovations and solutions tothese problems that permeate the nested clusters of linked nonlinear complexadaptive systems comprising the global biosphere and socioeconomy [Raford N.How to build a collective intelligence platform to crowdsource almost anything.Available at: http:news.noahraford.com. (Accessed November 30, 2011)]. The Webinitiative, GreenATP, illustrates this opportunity. C© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How to cite this article:WIREs Energy Environ 2012, 1: 98–113 doi: 10.1002/wene.40

COLLABORATION INNOVATIONNETWORKS

O ver the past millennium, global population in-creased 22-fold, world gross domestic product

(GDP) rose nearly 300-fold, and per capita incomeincreased 13-fold.1–3 Life expectation also improved

∗Correspondence to: [email protected]

Conservation International, Singapore, Singapore

DOI: 10.1002/wene.40

dramatically. The average infant can expect to sur-vive 66 years, compared with 24 years in the year1000, with one out of three dying in the first year oflife. Per capita growth has also been accelerating ex-ponentially, with declining time intervals that it takesfor a doubling of per capita global GDP.4

This phenomenal rise in wealth and well-beinghas occurred for a number of factors (e.g., the scien-tific method, advancements in knowledge, improvedhygiene and sanitary conditions, and evolving inno-vations in engineering and technology), with access to

98 Volume 1, Ju ly /August 2012c© 2012 John Wi ley & Sons , L td .

WIREs Energy and Environment APPortunities to catalyze tipping points through COINs

cheap energy being a primary driver this past century.Cheap energy, in turn, made access to water and re-sources cheaper, resulting in an eightfold increase inglobal materials use during the 20th century. Thishistorical growth pattern, coupled with a determin-istic view of continuous technology advances, leadmost economists to assume global average annual percapita growth rates of 2–3% in the 21st century. Thisimplies a nearly 10- to 20-fold increase in world GDP.Earth scientists, however, are far less sanguine, giventhe accumulation of observations, measurements, ev-idence, and findings that indicate serious instabilitiesthroughout the biosphere, posing cataclysmic threatsto undermine, disrupt, and collapse humanity’s vul-nerable socioeconomic systems. It is abundantly clearfrom the multitude of earth systems and socioecologi-cal scientific assessments that the traditional ‘wisdom’in solving complex problems through orderly, linearmodeling is perilously inadequate. We confront a bas-ket of wicked problems, ill-defined problem sets thatare too complex to be solved by rational systematicprocesses.5

The overwhelming scale and complexity of theseunparalleled perils is stupefying and paralyze mostcitizens from taking action, resigned to pessimism,willful blindness, or fatalism. Such attitudes are pre-mature, albeit understandable given well-funded en-trenched interests aggressively blocking action bydistorting facts. As Body Shop founder Anita Rod-dick put it, ‘If you think you’re too small to makean impact, try going to bed with a mosquito inthe room.’ The past half-century has been witnessto an explosion of knowledge generation, technicaladvances, and accumulated evidence from appliedinnovations in markets and governance that offerpromising prospects for addressing these seeminglyintractable perils.

Although there does not appear to be any intrin-sic technological, economic, or financial impossibil-ity in transforming humanity’s unfolding nightmareinto a healthy, sustainable future, harnessing humanwillpower and overcoming entrenched interests havealways been the Achilles’ heels of such change. Thereis grossly insufficient leadership in society’s major in-stitutions, be it governments, religions, businesses,and academia. This has had a corrosive effect oncitizen confidence in believing anything positive willoccur from sclerotic-like centralized bureaucracies.When sudden crises too large to ignore demand publicaction (e.g., Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans),all too frequently the actions taken are done with-out foresight or common sense, let alone designed forachieving multiple-benefit outcomes. The result tendsto be enormous, lost opportunities. With the rise of

the Web, however, there is amplifying recognitionthat a powerful communication revolution is emer-gent. Over the past decade, the exponential growthof Web networks enabling social collaboration hasspawned powerful new ways to engage a global cit-izenry at a heretofore unprecedented level of ongo-ing breadth, depth, and diversity of arrangementsand cooperative initiatives. The Web’s many-to-manycommunication, sharing, producing, and collaborat-ing offer a potent opportunity for harnessing peo-ple’s ‘cognitive surplus’—‘the shared, online work wedo with our spare brain cycles for building a bet-ter, more cooperative world.’6 GreenATP is used toillustrate the power of self-organizing collaborationinnovation networks (COINs) for catalyzing swarmsof ‘greening’a activity in localities worldwide.

UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGES OFGLOBAL AND HISTORICALMAGNITUDE

The accumulating evidence derived from a wide rangeof transdisciplinary research on the earth’s physicalclimate and biogeochemical systems, including ex-tensive interdisciplinary supercomputer modeling, themathematical study of nested clusters of interactingdynamic nonlinear complex adaptive systems, andpaleoscience discoveries in climatology, ecology, andmarine geochemistry, starkly show that business-as-usual global economic growth is transgressing plan-etary boundaries in the terrestrial, atmospheric, andoceanic spheres. Humanity is spiraling into a future ofmore frequent and severe local, regional, and globaldisasters of increasingly ‘biblical’ proportions, e.g.,100- and 500-year flood and drought episodes occur-ring in a period of several years (Figure 1).7

Sixth Largest Species Extinction SpasmBiologists and ecologists have been sounding alarmsover the last quarter century of an unfolding extinc-tion spasm of planetary dimensions, due to human-ity’s liquidation of intact ecosystems and assemblagesof flora and fauna occurring in the wake of convertingnation-size landscapes for food, feed, fiber, forestry,fuel, and other commodities. Extinction of species in-evitably occurs over geological time spans, with some99.9% of all life having gone extinct since life firstformed 3.85 billion years ago. What is different aboutthe current human-triggered planetary mass extinc-tion is the phenomenal rate, estimated to be three tofour orders of magnitude higher than the average nat-ural background rate. As detailed in the multi-volume

Volume 1, Ju ly /August 2012 99c© 2012 John Wi ley & Sons , L td .

Advanced Review wires.wiley.com/wene

FIGURE 1 | A safe operating space forhumanity. Estimates of how the differentcontrol variables for seven planetaryboundaries have changed from 1950 topresent. The green shaded polygon representsthe safe operating space. (Reprinted withpermission from Ref 7. Copyright 2009,Macmillan Publishers Limited.)

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment8 and the more re-cent The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity9

and Principles for Responsible Investment10 reports,the wholesale destruction of worldwide ecosystemservices, the planet’s natural capital, is destroyingsome 5 trillion dollars per year of assets and economicvalue. This is a conservative estimate, given that just1% of the planet’s species have been studied, manyholding potentially immense future value generatedby the 21st century’s exponentially growing bioinfor-matics sector and biotechnology industry, and will beirretrievably lost before science discovers them.

Ecosystem Services Irreversible LossesWith the world adding the population size of theUnited Kingdom every year, the projected 10 billionpopulation by 2050 will require a 70% increase infood production. Along with the increased energyand materials feeding humanity’s rising economic‘metabolism’, the continued loss of ecosystem servicesand natural capital is estimated to cost nearly 20% ofannual Gross World Product by 2050.10 Expandingenvironmental degradation and ecosystem collapsesare being recognized as monumental threats to humansecurity,11,12 with evidence of or correlations betweenloss of ecosystem services and piracy, land conflictsand resource wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocidalcrimes (e.g., Rwanda13 and Darfur14).15,16

Climate Destabilization andMega-Catastrophic ConsequencesIn 2010, global CO2 emissions exceeded the worstcase scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-mate Change, with 33 Gt carbon dioxide equivalent(CO2e)b of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted from

oil, coal, natural gas, and cement production.17 Anadditional 15–20% (5–6.6 Gt CO2e) are estimatedfrom deforestation, nearly 12 Gt CO2e from non-CO2 GHGs,18 and potentially 1 Gt CO2e of methaneemissions from hydro damsc.19

Scientists recently calculated that the net presentvalue of climate change impacts from business-as-usual is $1240 trillion, assuming stabilization of at-mospheric concentrations of CO2e below 850 ppmby 2100.20 In reality, society is not only on pace toexceed 850 ppm, but new evidence also indicates fargreater climate sensitivity at much lower levels previ-ously thought ‘safe’ (∼450 ppm).

Three recent global modeling assessments in-dicate that the planet faces a 5–7◦C increase inglobal average temperature this century—a drasti-cally large and rapid change unprecedented in thehistory of Homo sapiens.21–23 Implications includedesertification of roughly a quarter of global agri-cultural lands (half in Africa),24 as well as resultingin largely irreversible changes in global ecosystemsfor 1000 years after emissions stop.25 An estimatedtwo-thirds of the world plant and animals speciescould be driven to extinction, especially when com-pounded by humanity annually burning down andclearing tropical forests and ecosystems the size ofEngland.

Nor is this the worst of all possibilities. Otherrecent scientific research indicates that atmosphericCO2e emissions under business-as-usual carbon-intensive economic growth could trigger disastrous‘tipping points’, releasing vast storehouses of theearth’s carbon stocks into the atmosphere. Nearly adozen negative tipping points have been identified,d

ranging from the melting of the permafrost and re-lease of massive amounts of the potent GHG methane,



to the dieback of the Amazon rainforest or boreal for-est. Each of these could increase the global averagetemperature by 3–5◦C.26

Recent studies indicate critical aspects of ecosys-tem functioning beginning to collapse at 2.5◦C, withthe loss of major ice sheets, the collapse of the Amazonrain forest, extinction of coral reefs, and large-scalerelease of methane from deep-sea deposits and tun-dra could occur at temperatures as low as 2–4◦C ofwarming. The threshold temperature for irreversibledieback of the Amazon rain forest could be as lowas 2◦C, rather than the more commonly cited 3–4◦C.27 A 2005 Amazon drought was estimated tohave caused the loss of 1.6 Gt of carbon in that singleyear.28

Ocean Acidification Threat to FisheriesCollapseThe oceans face multiple extreme risks. Recent ma-rine evidence has found that over the past half-centuryphytoplankton, the base of the ocean food web has de-clined 40%, corresponding with a 0.5◦C global tem-perature increase over the past century.29 In addition,humanity’s annual 30 + gigaton pulse of CO2 emis-sions is accelerating the rate of ocean acidificationfaster than any time during the last 300 million years.Marine scientists warn that the failure to peak globalCO2 emissions by 2015 and then steadily reduce theseemissions by 5% per annum could, by the end ofthe century, cause acidification levels that essentiallyunravel the ocean ecosystem and collapse major fish-eries and marine species.30 Only 1% of marine fisherycatch revenues are not influenced by changes in oceanpH.31,32

Climate change and marine acidification risksare compounding humanity’s already massive over-fishing, depletion, and collapse of major fisheries.33

Worldwide, approximately 1 billion people are de-pendent on fish as the principal source of animal pro-tein and half a billion people depend on fisheries andaquaculture for their livelihoods; the vast majority ofthem live in developing countries. Coral reef-relatedfisheries constitute approximately one-tenth of theworld’s total fisheries, and in some parts of the Indo-Pacific region up to 25% of the total fish catch, whilealso representing the breeding, nursing, and feedinggrounds for one-fourth of marine fisheries. One-thirdof all coral species are already at risk of extinctionas a result of bleaching and disease caused by oceanwarming in recent years.34 In terms of catastrophicrisk, acidification interacts with the temperature stresson coral reefs; with 1.7◦C warming, all coral reefs willbe bleached, and by 2.5◦C they will be extinct.35

FIGURE 2 | Internet users in the world—distribution by worldregions, 2011. (Source: Internet World Stats—www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Basis: 2,095,00,005 Internet users on March 31, 2011.Copyright 2011, Miniwatts Marketing Group.)

Multi-Trillion Dollar Resource Warsand Genocidal ActsClimate change, marine acidification, and species ex-tinctions are, in a sense, indirect human-triggered un-intended consequences or externalities that, if con-tinued over the long term, will spark collapses insocio-economic systems around the world.36 Cur-rently and for the past century, have also been directhuman-triggered devastations from war and conflictsover access to oil, minerals, and land; genocidal actshave occurred on average every five years over thepast half century, many triggered over control of nat-ural resources.37 The price tag for the first oil warof the 21st century instigated by the United Statesinvasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is estimated at $6trillion.38,39 The 2002 US national security strategymentioned neither oil nor the Gulf, but the 1992 draftof Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years1994–1999 clearly stated America’s ‘overall objec-tive’ in the Gulf: ‘to remain the predominant outsidepower in the region and preserve US and Western ac-cess to the region’s oil.’ Large US military bases nowcover the region.

WEB COINs CATALYZINGMULTIPLE-BENEFIT VALUE NETS

Less than 7000 days ago, the World Wide Webwas virtually nonexistent, then it exploded, growingnearly 500% between 2000 and 2010, with one out ofthree people now having Internet access (see Figure 2).‘The World Wide Web was developed to be a pool ofhuman knowledge, and human culture, which wouldallow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideasand all aspects of a common project.’40

Information technology (IT) experts anticipateit will take less than 5000 days before most of hu-manity will be connected globally to a ubiquitoussemantic Web network. The emergent phenomenon



FIGURE 3 | Size of English Wikipedia as of August 2010 (2647Encyclopedia Britannica volumes). (Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_in_August_2010.svg.)

of new value creation and social engagement oppor-tunities occurring through self-organizing web col-laboration networks are being examined in countlesspublications.41–45

Although this powerful knowledge-generatingand communication network can be and is being usedfor viral spread of disinformation, propaganda, prej-udices, hatred, fallacies, scams, endless advertisingfor click-and-ship consumerism, gambling, pornog-raphy, sexual predation, and a broad range of de-viant behaviors, it is also emerging as an especiallypotent system of social cooperation. Witness the self-organizing open source initiatives, as evidenced by thebreathtaking formation of Wikipedia, daily growingand error correcting the world’s largest publicly ac-cessible pool of accumulated knowledge and learningresources.

In the decade since it was launched, Wikipediahas swiftly established itself as the world’s largestencyclopedia. Within 60 months and six employees,Wikipedia grew to 10 times the size of the largest en-cyclopedia. As of August 2010, the size of just the En-glish version of Wikipedia amounted to nearly 2700volumes the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thisphenomenal growth has been accomplished with rel-atively few paid employees (still less than 100). Dailyadditions, updates, edits, and error corrections arecarried out by several hundred thousand volunteers,with content being translated into several hundredlanguages. An IBM research team estimated that ittook around 100 million hours to self-organize andmaintain this open source public knowledge asset. Forcomparison, Americans watch 100 million hours oftelevision ads every weekend (Figure 3).46

New media Professor Shirky6 makes a com-pelling case that there are more than 1 trillion hoursof television viewed each year, representing a pool of‘cognitive surplus’ that could be harnessed to createother open source public collaboration assets. Thereare now legions of examples underway. For example,in the span of just 48 months, YouTube went froma start-up to experiencing 48 h of video uploaded ev-ery minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content up-loaded every day. Over 3 billion videos are vieweda day through YouTube, with users uploading theequivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week.There is more video uploaded to YouTube in 1 monththan the three major US networks created in 60 years.Seventy percent of YouTube traffic comes from out-side the United States, and is localized in 25 countriesacross 43 languages. YouTube mobile gets over 400million views a day, representing 13% of daily views.One hundred million people take a social action onYouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc.) every week,and more than 50% of videos on YouTube have beenrated or include comments from the community.47

Flickr, the image and video sharing site, rosefrom a 2004 start-up to hosting 6 billion images in just7 years. In 7 years since start-up, Facebook now hosts800 million active users, including 42% percent of theUS public, and 1 billion pieces of content being loadedeach day. China has more than half a billion registeredmicrobloggers, and nearly 700 million mobile phoneusers, with a rapid rise in smart web phones. Theseexamples and scores of other social networks withmillions of users provide overwhelming evidence ofthe growth of citizen engagement in web networks.It was a phenomena the public-at-large hardly envi-sioned even 15 years ago; or as Bill Gates notoriouslysaid in 1993, ‘The Internet? We are not interestedin it.’

Collaboration innovation and knowledge-sharing networks are beginning to permeate globalsociety, speciating throughout business sectors, ed-ucation systems, science research initiatives, avoca-tions, advocacy issues, media and news services, gov-ernment and public agencies at all scales, and along tail of citizen-initiated interest groups. Ongo-ing research in evolutionary game theory and thedynamics of complex adaptive systems derive someencouraging findings regarding social cooperation.48

As Professor Nowak, Director of Harvard’s Programfor Evolutionary Dynamics, noted, humanity has thesad capacity to destroy the planet’s climate, with anumber of our current practices and policies eerilygeared to meet this outcome as quickly as possible.49

Preserving the earth’s climate is the biggest publicgoods game ever, and research indicates the ability of



people to solve what game theorists call a ‘collectiverisk social dilemma.’50 The key insights are straight-forward, even if the tasks are daunting: individualsmust be well informed about climate change risk;if misled, then individuals falsely conclude the riskis small and will not cooperate; and if individualsknow that the risk is high, then they are likely tocooperate.

These dynamics are evident in the United Stateswhere the media neglects and distorts reporting onclimate risks and costs. The vast realm of science andthe environment, of which climate is a tiny subset,barely gets reported in the media; according to thePew Research Center for People and the Press, USmedia coverage on science or the environment is cov-ered just 4 min out of every 10 h of viewing time. Bycomparison, celebrity coverage gets five times moreattention, crime 15 times more exposure, and adver-tising captures 45-fold more screening time than allscience. Most egregious is the media informationalbias as a result of conjuring up two sides of an is-sue, even when the peer-reviewed science on, e.g., thethreat of dangerous and catastrophic consequencesof climate-triggered disasters shows virtually unani-mous consensus. The deplorable media coverage hasbeen skewed further with a disinformation campaignfunded through the largesse of the fossil fuel industryto foster public confusion and false conclusions aboutclimate risks and mitigation costs. In 2009–2010, theUS oil, coal, and utility industries collectively spent$500 million to lobby against climate change legisla-tion and to defeat candidates calling for climate miti-gation action.51

Notwithstanding episodes of herd mentality,group think,52 irrational exuberances,53 and mis-guided certitudes that will be propagated throughweb sharing networks, web-based cooperation net-works relying on empirical, evidence-based, and accu-mulated experience, shared in as transparent a man-ner as possible, can hopefully serve as trustworthychecks and balances. Adaptive and interactive net-work dynamics (i.e., continuous user feedback andfurther input), using specific mechanisms for the evo-lution of cooperation48 (i.e., direct reciprocity, indi-rect reciprocity, spatial reciprocity, reputation andtrust through kin and group selection)54 can be inte-grated into web collaboration designs and processes.Cooperation increases when combined with networksof social diversity,55 and generally in small-world net-work phenomenon combining a dense array of lo-cal contacts and a good enough number of long-range ‘weak-link’ contacts, enabling innovation toflourish.56,57

FIGURE 4 | Trust network visualization. (Reprinted withpermission from Ref 59. Copyright 2004, Springer-Verlag.)

There are approaches to derive assessmentsabout information sources based on individual feed-back about the sources. As users add annotations,they can include measures of credibility and relia-bility about a statement, which are later averagedand presented to the viewer. There is burgeoning ac-tivity in the IT research field, social network space,and commercial applications around the array of rec-ommendation engines, collaborative filters, informa-tion confidence, and trust metrics provided for andby users, as evidenced, e.g., in commercial sites likeeBay, epinions, Amazon.com and, to a certain extent,the PageRank search algorithms used by Google.58

The machine-readable intelligence agents integral tothe semantic web are expected to radically improvethe trust process, including reputation inference algo-rithms, Trustbots, semantic reputation networks, etc.(Figure 4).59

So, how does this relate to tackling the multiplewicked problems previously discussed? Essentially byleveraging the power of self-organizing, small-worldnetworks of cooperation and collaboration amongwilling citizens to apply some of their ‘cognitive sur-plus’ toward addressing and solving these wickedproblems at the local scale.

Not surprisingly, research finds that the higherconsumption lifestyle of the world’s urban popula-tion, while directly occupying a small fraction ofthe earth’s surface, is the primary driver of globaldeforestation, GHG emissions, ocean acidification,and many of the other major environmental impactson the planet. Agricultural trade is the other pri-mary driver, most of it driven by urban consumptionpatterns, as well.60 Urban population increased 10-fold in the 20th century to 2.8 billion people. This



FIGURE 5 | The emergence of VERGE. (Reprintedwith permission from Ref 66. Copyright 2011,GreenBiz.com.)

number will nearly double to 5 billion by 2030. InAfrica and Asia, the accumulated urban growth ofthese two regions during their whole span of historywill be duplicated in a single generation. By 2030,developing world towns and cities will comprise fourout of five global urban dwellers.61

There are three key actions that can be takenfor accommodating projected growth while dimin-ishing planetary impacts: (1) Shrinking energy, wa-ter, and resource use through continuous, aggres-sive, ambitious efficiency gains; (2) Shifting to greenpower and fuels having the smallest composite foot-print of impacts (e.g., GHG emissions, air andwater pollution, toxic wastes, hazardous contami-nants, land requirements, water use, displacing valu-able ecosystem services, vulnerability to price volatil-ity and supply disruptions, vulnerability to extremedisruption by nature, military or terrorists, fail grace-fully, not catastrophically, and offering a least-cost,least-risk, highly resilient way of delivering servicesat the point of use)62,63; and (3) Sourcing standards-based, multiple-benefits carbon mitigation offsets forfootprints still remaining, with emphasis on con-servation and restoration of threatened ecosystemservices as a very cost-effective way. This triple Sportfolio of actions is the focus of the GreenATPCOIN.

GREENATP—APPORTUNITIES ANDPOSITIVE TIPPING POINTS

Biochemically, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is acomplex nanomachine serving as the primary energy

currency of the cell. The cell’s supply of ATP is mostlygenerated in mitochondria, sometimes described as‘cellular power plants.’ To greatly simplify, the emer-gence of multicellular complex life forms was enabledto a large degree by the symbiogenesis of anaerobicarchebacteria and O2 respiring proteobacteria; it wasthe key evolutionary innovation toward eukaryoticgenome and cellular organization.64

In analogous manner, the symbiogenesis ofInternet and green Technology (IT and green T)offer the potential emergence of transformationalpositive tipping points with multiple-benefits capableof resolving or dramatically reducing wicked socio-ecological problems. A paradigmatic example gettingintensive analysis and research and developmentfunding from the public and private sectors is the con-vergence of entirely separate sectors through ‘smart’IT connectivity and green T design innovations; or asrecently stated in Reinventing Fire, ‘pervading the en-ergy system with distributed intelligence, ubiquitoussensors, and current information, IT-enriched en-ergy will choreograph the convergence betweenvehicles, buildings, factories, and electricitysources.’65 It will, as US Federal Energy RegulatoryChairman Jon Wellinghoff describes, ‘transformevery individual energy using device from a stand-alone single purpose entity into a multipurpose in-terconnected grid asset that will ultimately optimizethe efficiency of the entire energy system.’ ‘It is,’ headded, ‘a revolution that is coming and it will changeeverything.’ (Figure 5).66

Metaphorically, greenATP symbolizes the infor-mation currency flowing through self-organizing andmaintained cooperation and COINs, with a focus



on how urban and rural landscapes can achievezero emission targets and zero net footprint impacttransition goals through continuous application of thetriple S portfolio of actions. It is meant as a mnemonic,meme, or iconic brand for positive transformationinto healthy, sustainable economies. As an acronym,greenATP stands for ’green APPportunities and posi-tive tipping points,’ reflecting reliance on the suite ofweb software tools, applications, resources, and an-alytics used in small-world networks. Using a diver-sity of apps, collective intelligence algorithms, webmashups, and eventually semantic ‘meshnets’e for un-dertaking iterative and recursive local knowledge-in-action and adaptable learning-by-doing activities, andparticularly focused on accelerating and scaling ex-ceptionally promising options leading to multilocalitytransformational changes worldwide.

Every city or community is unique in numerousrespects, embedded in diverse cultures, economies,policies, laws, regulations, and technology develop-ment. At the same time, cities exhibit many similarmethods of obtaining utility and mobility servicesand generic logistics of acquiring food and procur-ing goods. Opportunities abound for taking triple Sactions in any and all of these urban areas. The vi-ability of specific ATP will require a recursive andflexible process that involves local change agents tak-ing the common knowledge resources and experiencesshared and accumulated through the greenATP net-works, determining local applicability fit and need formodifications, discerning the best ways and meansof promoting actions locally, and continuing to it-erate and adapt this process as outcomes, results,barriers, impasses, etc., unfold and require usefuladvice from the pool of network collaborators andcooperators.

Mobilizing for the Delivery of Least-Costand Least-Risk Utility ServicesLovins65 makes the telling insight in his recent gemof a book, Reinventing Fire, ‘The convergence ofelectricity and information, with rapid innovationsin both, makes 21st century technologies and busi-ness models collide with 20th and even 19th centurycultures and institutions, often encrusted with regu-latory structures and rules that no longer fit today’sevolving needs.’

This is of monumental importance to address inorder to facilitate the convergence of buildings, ve-hicles, factories, and grids. As CleanTech publisherJoel Makower reminds us, ‘Relative to smartphonetechnologies, conVERGE technologies are far more

capital intensive. . .The product cycles—the amountof time it takes to go from concept to market—is years longer than most IT products and services.And their lifecycle—their time in productive use—can range from a decade (for a car) to a century (fora building). Because they are infrastructural, expen-sive, and long lasting, their convergence, while slowerin coming, will potentially transform how we live,work, shop, travel, and play.’67 The pace of con-vergence innovation can either be further retardedor accelerated, depending on how slowly or quicklyencrusted regulations and rules can be supersededby ones aligning with the extraordinary convergenceopportunities.

In this regard, a long overdue regulatorymakeover is ensuring the delivery of least-cost andleast-risk (LCR) utility services at the point of use.The regulatory procedures overseeing the traditionalutility industry have primarily focused on costs, whileignoring to factor in a number of risks posing eco-nomic, security, and financial costs over the lifespanof conventional power plants. Even regulators’ em-phasis on costs have been artificially truncated by ex-clusively focusing on supply-side expansion optionswhile excluding the vast and still-expanding pool ofdemand-side, end-use efficiency, onsite and locallydistributed generation resources.68 For example, threedecades of experience in harnessing end-use efficiencyimprovements to deliver utility services in a numberof pioneering service territories have been five to 15times less costly than the range of supply expansionoptions.69,70

The global implications of capital misallocationand lost opportunities are massive. Just the construc-tion of power plants and transmission lines over thenext 20 years will consume $28 trillion of investmentcapital to generate approximately 13 trillion kWh peryear. However, if an LCR comprehensive integratedresource planning (IRP) methodology is adopted, thenend-use efficiency emerges as the highest priority,71

as do many onsite and locally distributed resourceoptions. Collectively, they can cost-effectively andcompetitively ‘deliver’ half of these kWhs, effectivelyfreeing up $14 trillion (gross, or perhaps $12 trillionnet after incentives and operating costs), while poten-tially reducing annual customer costs by more thanhalf a trillion dollars per year.

Industrial electric drive motor systems nicely il-lustrate these opportunities. Half of all electricity con-sumed worldwide goes just to power electric motors,pumps, compressors, and fans. In China, it is 60%,and industry is paying 10 cents per kWh for thatdelivered electricity. As Jiangsu Province discovered



FIGURE 6 | McKinsey Version 2.1 global GHG abatement curve beyond BAU, 2030. Average cost of abatement opportunities up to 38 Gt CO2

equal zero € per ton CO2e, if benefits from negative cost on left-hand side are fully captured. The curve presents an estimate of the maximumpotential of all technical GHG abatement measures below €80 per ton CO2e if each lever was pursued aggressively. It is not a forecast of what roledifferent measures and technologies will play. (Reprinted with permission from Ref 71. Copyright 2010, McKinsey Global Institute.)

Sidebar

McKinsey Global’s global carbon abatement cost curve as-sessments consistently show enormous opportunities forachieving deep GHG emission reductions at zero net costsover the next several decades. Figure 6 shows that the av-erage cost of abatement opportunities up to 38 Gt CO2e by2030 equal zero € per ton CO2e, if benefits from negativecost on left-hand side are fully captured. The curve presentsan estimate of the maximum potential of all technical GHGabatement measures below €80 per ton CO2e if each leverwas pursued aggressively. It is not a forecast of what roledifferent measures and technologies will play. A criticallyimportant insight is that delaying action for 10 years wouldreduce the technical abatement potential in 2030 by half.The other critically important insight is that reducing de-forestation, restoring ecosystem degradation, and regen-erating agriculture systems represent the largest pool ofcost-effective options. It is several fold less costly than car-bon capture and storage (CCS) of fossil GHG emissions intogeological caverns, and immediately available unlike CCSstill a decade away from commercialization.

(in a MOU partnership with California), they couldswap out 10,000 MW of inefficient industrial drive

components and replace with high-performance mod-els at a delivered cost of electricity of one cent perkWh.

For most of the past decade, all the official en-ergy projections have indicated that coal and natu-ral gas would constitute 3/4ths of this power plantgrowth. So, displacing a large percentage of these fos-sil fuels through zero emissions efficiency gains wouldachieve cost-free reductions of several billion tons ofCO2 per year, as well as deep reductions in acid rain,smog, mercury, and toxic chemical pollutants—asocial benefit worth several tens of billions of dollarsper year in avoided mitigation expenses and healthand ecological damage costs.

There are three key fiscally prudent and finan-cially responsible criteria which should govern thedesign and operation of utility delivery systems,whether electricity, natural gas, water, or waste andsanitation.

First, adopt a comprehensive IRP that ranksall supply and demand-side (customer-site) resourceopportunities according to cost and risk for de-livering utility services at the point of use. Costsalso include transmission and distribution expenses,plus risk adjustment for exposure to price volatil-ity from long-term dependence on fuel and wa-ter requirements, and for externalities such as CO2



emissions, air pollutants, ground and water contam-inants, and a non-zero probability of complete assetloss and large replacement costs (i.e., Fukishima-typedisasters).72

Second, remove the regulatory disincentivethat undermines utility investment in least-costcustomer-site resource options. This requires aligningthe financial interests of the utility provider with thoseof their customers, which can be achieved by regula-tory agencies decoupling utility revenues from grosssales. Allowing utilities to recoup lost earnings fromdeclining revenues as a result of helping customers re-duce their bills by taking advantage of cost-effectiveend-use efficiency opportunities.73,74

Third, combine this with performance incen-tives for the utility to apply its long-term, low-costcapital in financing the customer-site efficiency gains,along with providing technical assistance in identify-ing what products perform best, as well as remov-ing other transaction costs through partnerships withstakeholder groups and government agencies.75

These regulatory innovations can result in fiveto 10 times more customer-site services through effi-ciency gains ranking as LCR options. Without theinnovations, utility customers are unlikely to cap-ture more than 10–20% of the cost-effective op-portunities available because of their much higherdiscount rates and rate of return requirements thanthe utility’s, combined with customer inertia inducedby a host of transaction costs and multiple marketbarriers.76–80

Accumulated empirical experience over the pastseveral decades in regions with comprehensive IRPutility frameworks—e.g., in western, Pacific north-west and northeast US states, in a number of Aus-tralian states and cities, and in China’s Jiangsuprovince—provides compelling evidence for adopt-ing the IRP methodology.81,82 The methodology alsoproves to be a more open and transparent processcombined with broader stakeholder engagement, thereduction of subsidies and negative externalities, andgreater consideration of the unique local and regionalsocial and ecological conditions.83

IRP approaches that integrate electricity andwater planning, as in California, have identified mul-tiple LCR opportunities, which have saved electricityand natural gas by delivering water services more ef-ficiently. California water uses consume 20% of thestate’s total electricity and one-third of the State’s to-tal natural gas in pumping, distributing, heating anddisposing of the state’s water.84 Over the past threedecades, California’s LCR regulatory innovations cutits electric sector CO2 emissions by half while accru-ing households $1000 on utility savings; if the rest of

the nation had followed California’s regulatory inno-vations, it would have avoided construction of 180GW of coal plants and saved several hundred billiondollars per year on utility bills.85

Half of humanity now lives in urban areas andnearly three-fourths of the global population, or morethan six billion people, will be urban residents by2050. Financing the provision of electricity, natu-ral gas, water, sanitation, waste treatment, mobilityaccess, telecommunication, and other urban servicespose monumental burdens for local governments. AnLCR utility services strategy is imperative in orderto wisely apply ratepayer and taxpayer dollars (e.g.,fossil fuels annually capture half a trillion dollars inglobal tax subsidies, excluding several fold more inpublic costs incurred in cleaning up externalities andsuffering health damages).

Distributing the utility’s access to low-cost,long-term capital to harness urban (and rural) dis-tributed LCR utility services has a multiplier effect incapturing other highly desired ancillary values: sev-eral fold more local jobs generated per dollar of in-vestment than from large coal, nuclear, and hydrodam plants, with the job earnings spent in the localeconomy (while also saving local governments’ unem-ployment insurance and public assistance payments);cleaner, healthier air, water and soil; urban revitaliza-tion with greener construction; greater resilience, se-curity and lower vulnerability to price volatilities dueto weather-triggered disasters or human-generateddisruptions.

When LCR rankings indicate expanding newsupply, insights and evidence from financial port-folio theory strongly point to increasing greaterreliance on those options with the least compos-ite footprint impacts and risks.86 Solar and windpower rank as the most resilient and least impactingwhen evaluated from multirisk perspectives (as notedabove).56

Commercial progress in solar and wind poweris occurring so rapidly that facts a year ago are woe-fully out of date. Under a strong LCR planning frame-work, where monetized risks are fully incorporated,wind and solar rank as the most economically at-tractive and abundant supply options. A global net-work of land-based 2.5 MW turbines restricted tononforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at aslittle as 20% of their rated capacity could supplymore than 40 times current global power consump-tion, and five times total global energy use.87 US windresources, specifically in the Great Plains, could pro-vide as much as 16 times total current power. Boththe United States and China, which together emitone-third of global GHG emissions, could steadily



displace all existing and new coal power plants withtheir wind resources.88,89 When phased in with utilitybill-reducing efficiency opportunities, the system costof delivering electricity should be comparable to orless than continuing dependence on coal plants pow-ering inefficient devices.

With the steady cost declines in solar powersystems now underway (and expected to reach gridparity by 2015, or sooner under an LCR frameworkcombined with feed-in tariffs), there is a good pos-sibility of powering the world mostly by solar inthe latter half of this century. Already, at $3 pergallon of gasoline (equivalent to electricity at 32cents/kWh), solar electric charging stations are cost-effective to power the world’s 150 million existingelectric bikes and scooters, with sales increasing 10%per annum. Limited space prevents full discussion ofcaveats, nuances, other relevant policy, and regula-tory needs, which are discussed in a range of recentpublications.90–92

Although there are strong indications that so-lar and wind power will be as competitive or lessexpensive over the long run with fossil or nuclearoptions, in the larger perspective of unprecedentedclimate catastrophe costs, multi-trillion oil wars andnon-zero probabilities of nuclear reactor disasters, ad-hering closely to cost-benefit analyses is foolish. AsHarvard economics professor Martin Weitzman hascogently articulated, the real question we should beanswering is how much climate catastrophe insurancehumanity needs.

Using greenATP COINs to promote the triple Sportfolio of actions can perform several key roles inovercoming and superseding existing barriers and my-opic thinking. Many regulatory commissioners, forexample are political appointees (cronies) with lit-tle understanding or interest in authentic LCR prac-tices. GreenATP COINs could generate the knowl-edge and local advocates to hold these agencies ac-countable for their failure in performing due dili-gence on the extra costs and risks by not adoptingLCR regulations. Most regulatory commissions andenvironmental protection agencies operate in silos,failing to recognize the synergistic LCR benefits thataccrue by productively working together.93 Likewise,greenATP COINs can help forge those connections.All public regulatory agencies are underfunded andunderstaffed, disproportionately so relative to the in-dustries they are responsible for setting regulations.Citizens can marshal together the pool of LCR facts,documentation, cases, analyses, etc., effectively serv-ing as an ad hoc task force. Most regulatory agenciesperform miserably in transparently communicatingtheir decision-making processes. GreenATP COINs

can continually inform the public-at-large, galvaniz-ing and mobilizing public opinion in support of LCRpractices and rules.

Regulatory agencies are typically laggards, notleaders; they view problems linearly, seldom fromfully integrative and systemic perspectives. Yet, themultiple wicked problems of our times call not justfor leaders of business-as-usual, but heroic levels ofvisionary leadership, particularly in addressing non-linear complex systems. GreenATP COINs can sus-tain the pressure calling for such transformationaland inspirational actions. An exemplary opportunityregards the third component of the triple S portfo-lio, Sourcing CO2 emission offsets. Hypothetically,if Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) was suddenlyavailable overnight and applied to the 2.4 billion tonsof CO2 emissions from US fossil-fired electricity gen-eration (at the future projected cost of $45 per tCO2),this would amount to nearly $100 billion per year,adding 3–5 cents per kWh of electricity.

In sharp contrast, ecological carbon storage(ECS), or reducing emissions from deforestation anddegradation (REDD) as it is referred to in climate ne-gotiations, is immediately available at an average costof $7.50 per tCO2, six times lower cost than futureCCS cost projections.94 This would add half a pennyper kWh to utility costs, but the end-use efficiencygains (from Shrinking) would reduce utility bills wellbeyond this slight increase. How much would beraised for ECS/REDD + financing? About $18 billionper year, which is roughly the sum estimated neces-sary for incentive payments to prevent most tropicaldeforestation.95

Sourcing Standards-Based, Multiple-BenefitOffsetsIt is an astonishingly under-reported fact that 15–20% of total global CO2 emissions are due to theburning of 14 million hectares of tropical forests eachyear. This is an amount greater than the emissionsreleased by the global transport sector, and roughlythe same level as the annual CO2 emissions of theUnited States or China.

Nearly a decade ago, the Climate, Commu-nity & Biodiversity (CCB) standards were launchedas a multiple-benefits approach to sourcing emis-sion offsets. The voluntary standards help design andidentify land management activities that simultane-ously minimize climate change, support sustainabledevelopment, and conserve biodiversity. Analogousto green building standards such as LEED, that re-quires going beyond just making a building energyefficient, CCB standards require going beyond just do-ing carbon mitigation and encompassing community



sustainability, improved local livelihoods, and pro-tecting or restoring the health and integrity of ecosys-tem services and functions.

CCB has become the most used land-basedstandard worldwide, and widely recognized as ahigh-quality, triple benefits standard used for address-ing three pressing social and environmental prob-lems. In a world still without global agreement oncapping and deeply reducing GHG emissions, suchvoluntary leadership actions remain essential forsustaining momentum toward phasing out GHGemissions, while demonstrating that it can be achievedsimultaneously with development for all and sustain-ing healthy ecosystem services.

CONCLUSION

Spurring Reputational Markets andTransparent GovernanceThe radical evolution of IT, now enabling a pow-erful symbiosis with smarter, greener ways to pro-duce and deliver utility and mobility services, shouldbe used for accelerating and scaling solutions tothe multiple wicked problems confronting human-ity. Our hypothesis is that web-based COIN plat-forms such as greenATP can play invaluable rolesin moving society beyond the linear mindset thathas led to planetary-scale externalities threatening thelong-term well-being of humans and nature. Whethercalled greenATP or a million other names is unim-portant, what is most important is the coopera-tion, sharing, and local actions initiated through thesmall world and weak links of collaboration net-works. Constellations and clusters of such COINsweb-linked worldwide offer powerful new formsof distributed solutions: distributed forms of capi-tal financing, end-use energy services, and local re-newable resource options, and applied intelligencefor better sense making of multiple-benefit localsolutions.

Such COINs enable, at the same time, shin-ing sunlight and spotlights on infectious activitiessuch as crony capitalism, legalized graft, embeddedcorruption, locked-out populations, perverse subsi-dies, skewed and archaic regulations, lax enforce-ment, and entrenched moneyed interests shapingmedia opinions and distortions without transpar-ent disclosure. COINs can manifest the knowledgeneeded to move humanity beyond the Prisoner’sDilemma that is afflicting national and internationaldecision makers. Both the positive knowledge forsolving wicked problems such as climate change,mass poverty, biodiversity extinction, and oil wars,

and the web platform and collaboration technologiesfor sharing and acting on this intelligence are avail-able. Becoming informed by trusted sources has beenshown time and again to generate engaged, coop-erative behavior. As Mark Twain brilliantly noted,‘Once you lose your ignorance, it’s hard to get itback.’

NOTESaA diversity of terms and definitions have been pro-posed for describing the essential or salient propertiesof planetary well-being, encompassing humanity, bio-diversity, and biosphere integrity, now and over fu-ture generations. No one definition, let alone a singleword, adequately captures this complex process. Sus-tainability is a primary term of long-time use, but is sopliant that it allows a multitude of, sometimes contra-dictory, interpretations. Concatenations of terms usedby some writers to contextualize the spatiotempo-ral complexity, e.g., ‘cleaner, greener, safer, smarter,more secure and resilient, and ecologically sustain-able’ is unwieldy and still incomplete. I rely on thesevarious words throughout the paper, recognizing thatnone of them captures but some aspects or dimensionsof a far more complex dynamic continuously evolvingthrough time.bCarbon dioxide equivalents is a metric measure usedto compare the global warming potential (GWP) fromseveral dozen radiatively active trace gases, collec-tively referred to as greenhouse gas emissions. Car-bon dioxide equivalents are commonly expressed as‘million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents(MMTCDE)’. The carbon dioxide equivalent for agas is derived by multiplying the tonnes of the gasby the associated GWP. For example, the GWP formethane is 21 and for nitrous oxide 310. This meansthat emissions of 1 million metric tonnes of methaneand nitrous oxide respectively is equivalent toemissions of 21 and 310 million metric tonnes of car-bon dioxide. [definition based on IPCC Third Assess-ment Report, 2001].cEstimates of hydro dam emissions range widely. TheWorld Commission on Dams 2000 report included aspan of 2–28% of total global GHG emissions basedon a literature review, St. Louis et al.18 estimated 7%extrapolated from 30 catchment basin measurements,and a 2011 Nature Geoscience article by Barros et al.estimate emissions at less than 1% of total globalemissions.dThe term ‘tipping point’ commonly refers to a crit-ical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qual-itatively alter the state or development of a system.



Lenton et al. introduce the term ‘tipping element’ todescribe large-scale components of the earth systemthat may pass a tipping point.eMesh, also called ‘meshup’, is an Internet informa-tion and communication network concept. ‘MeshUptechnologies allow using available data, mobiles de-vices, Web applications, and wireless networks tocreate infinity of new information services. MeshUptechnologies merge many forms of data and contentloosely adding knowledge in a practical information

service for all. The basic concept behind MeshUptechnologies is to create Open-InfoSpace where in-dividuals and organizations gain free and simplifiedaccess to an integrated open base of information ser-vices, contents, platforms, and infrastructures and arefree to integrate and modify them, as the whole re-source environment evolves. By satisfying their needs,users and resource providers enhance and upgrade thesystem.’ Definition by the European Consen Group,http://meshup.org/node/33.

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