Turner, Chris. The leap: how to survive and thrive in the sustainable economy. Random House Canada. Toronto. 2011.
At the Vancouver Public Library
Cited in Hope
The most vital project of the twenty-first century is a shift from our unsustainable way of life to a sustainable one--a great lateral leap from a track headed for economic and ecological disaster to one bound for renewed prosperity. In The Leap, Chris Turner presents a field guide to making that jump, drawing on recent breakthroughs in state-of-the-art renewable energy, cleantech and urban design. From the solar towers of sunny Spain to the bike paths and pedestrianized avenues of the world's most livable city--Copenhagen, Denmark--to the nascent "green-collar" economies rejuvenating the former East Germany and the American Rust Belt, he paints a vivid portrait of a new, sustainable world order already up and running.
In conventional accounting, the replacement cost of oil is effectively zero, in that it is assigned no value until it is extracted; but if the term means what it says, the true replacement cost of a barrel of oil (let alone eighty-six million barrels per day) might be infinity, as a stand-in for not for all the money in the world. And even where the real cost of such externalities can be reasonably calculated, numbers quickly ascent to such staggering scale that to internalize them would price most of our daily lives out of the market overnight. One study factored the cost of deforestation, greenhouse gases, and employee health care into a McDonald's hamburger and estimated its full price at about $200.
A Great Leap Sideways... is not about any given technology but about its application. It begins with a disruptive technique, a change in perspective and priorities that creates a new understanding of value and necessity and leads to new ways of solving problems and organizing systems. The core technologies that propel Leaps are often far from the bleeding edge. Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels are 50 years old, and the first wind-generated electricity came online in Denmark a century ago; the pedestrianized downtown is as old as civilization itself.
... addressing climate change is fundamentally a question of energy; that switching to renewable fuel would precipitate a full-scale structural change of the global energy economy; that making this switch was an opportunity to replace scarce and expensive primary resources with new technology; and that it would not be accomplished by burden-sharing among conventional energy companies and bureaucracies but by replacing them with a whole new energy regime.
Enrique Penalosa, former Bogota Mayor, on civic improvements between 1998 and 2001:
The essence of the conflict today really is cars and people. That is the essence of the discussion. We can have a city that is very friendly to cars or a city that is very friendly to people. We cannot have both.
Core lessons:
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economic development and increased prosperity can emerge with a healthy planet
- long-term economic success depends on a foundation of sustainability and a design philosophy of resilience
Four Laws:
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A chasm can only be crossed in a single Leap
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The sustainable horizon is only visible from the sustainable track
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A quantum leap cannot be measured with a yardstick
- A Leap is powered not by a disruptive technology but by a disruptive technique