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It always begins by asking better questions. Following an invited lecture in 2002, EHRA Founder, John A. “Skip” Laitner, was asked to write about that perspective as a key to providing smart environmental leadership. See his short article in the journal, Corporate Environmental Strategy, “Improving Environmental Leadership: Asking Better Questions about Existing Inefficiencies.”
Asking better questions continued. How might a better understanding of non-energy benefits expand the economic opportunity for energy and resource efficiency? Laitner and his colleague Robert Bruce Lung explored this issue in a 2009 working paper, titled: “Non-Energy Benefits from Energy Productivity Improvements: A Cobb-Douglas Approach to Measuring Impact on GDP.”
Technology trends have always played a prominent role in promoting the more productive use of resources. But sometimes we ask the wrong question. Yes, for example, the scale of information technologies is one of exponential growth, perhaps reaching more than 100 billion networked devices by 2030. That worry drives an understandable and genuine concern about the global footprint of networked devices, about their costs, their energy demands, their climate change impacts and other environmental effects. Working in 2015 with colleagues Matthew McDonnell and Ryan Keller, however, Laitner spearheaded a report suggesting that a systems view might actually reveal a much smaller energy footprint and a greater energy productivity than is generally understood. See, “ICT-Enabled Intelligent Efficiency: Shifting from Device-Specific Approaches to System Optima.”
A number of recent collaborations have pulled these many inquiries, together with other explorations, into what our colleague Jeremy Rifkin calls the Third Industrial Revolution master plans. These initiatives include assessments of infrastructure build-outs and regional energy initiatives as they enable the development of a more robust and sustainable economy. Among these efforts is what our Dutch colleagues in the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and Den Haag (MRDH) call their Roadmap Next Economy. Serving as the chief economist for this initiative, Laitner produced a contributing report entitled, “Exploring the Potential Economic Benefits of the TIR Roadmap Next Economy Innovation Scenarios.”
For understandable reasons there is the inevitable question of how a more energy and resource productive economy will impact job creation. In fact, we’ve been exploring these very issues since the development of what we call the Dynamic Energy Efficiency Policy Evaluation Routine, or the DEEPER Modeling System in 1992. The model, developed by Skip Laitner in early 1992, is a proprietary compact 15-sector dynamic input-output model of a given regional, state, or national economy.
The DEEPER model has a 29-year history of development and application by entities including even earlier versions applied on behalf of the Arizona Energy Office and the Nebraska Energy Office in the mid-1980s. An early version of the key modeling elements can be found in Laitner et al. (1998). It was used, for example, in 2012 to evaluate the benefits of US fuel economy standards, and also in 2017 to assess the potential outcomes and economic benefits of the Third Industrial Revolution in the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and Den Haag, an industrial region 2.3 million people in South Holland.
In our most recent analysis, undertaken for the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) in March 2021, we found that greater energy efficiency and/or cost savings within the electricity sector might support 2.8 million more jobs within the US economy even as greenhouse gas emissions declined.
More critically, we found that transforming and making the American economy significantly more energy productive might drive a net positive gain of 20 million jobs over the next two decades. For more details of this assessment, see our blog asking the question, Can We Imagine 2.8 Million New Jobs? 8.7 or 20 Million New Jobs? And which we then answer: Yes, If we retire fossil fuels, and also our old arguments and thinking! For access to the entire report, including the full descriptions of the scenarios, methodology, data, and validation Click Here.
More details and resources to be added on a rolling basis. Please check back regularly…
There is neither a law of physics nor economics that prevents us from quadrupling the productive use of energy and other resources. Rather, it is much more an issue of imagination and our political will to get it done.
– John A. “Skip” Laitner