From the Rocky Mountain Institute
Every day, we haul goods, shuttle our kids to school. Then we jet to meetings and vacations on a foundation of fire. Our mobility is enabled by combustion. All thereby performed using ingenious mechanisms that harness energy stored millions of years of photosynthesis. Consequently burning through 13 million barrels of oil per day.
Imagine the drone of combustion replaced by the whisper of emission-free electric propulsion. Instead of paying an increasingly high cost for oil in money, environmental damage and blood. Now we can capture a $3.8 trillion net prize by 2050.
As the Head of Rocky Mountain Institute Amory Lovins added:
Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year subsidize America’s fossil fuels, and even more flow to the systems that burn those fuels, distorting market choices by making the fuels look far cheaper than they really are. But the biggest hidden costs are economic and military.
America’s seemingly two-billion-dollar-a-day oil habit actually costs upwards of three times that much—six billion dollars a day, or a sixth of GDP. That’s due to three kinds of hidden costs, each about a half-trillion dollars per year: the macroeconomic costs of oil dependence, the microeconomic costs of oil-price volatility, and the military costs of forces whose primary mission is intervention in the Persian Gulf. Those military costs are about ten times what we pay to buy oil from the Persian Gulf, and rival total defense spending at the height of the Cold War.
In their Reinventing Fire series, Rocky Mountain Institute provides a blueprint for transforming transportation and freight services. Yet with uncompromisable convenience, safety and performance. Finally and most importantly using no oil by 2050.
In conclusion and by building better vehicles, we use them more efficiently. Then engineers, managers, financiers, thought leaders and business strategists capture competitive advantage. We will gain an ever more smoothly flowing network of goods. Most noteworthy and people and will fuel growth and investment. All as a result in transformative, home-grown innovation and industrial prowess.
Finally, check out go to the blog post at RMI.
As well Amory Lovins wrote, Reinventing Fire. It is:
November 14, 2011
