Advanced Review

GreenATP: APPortunities to catalyze local to global positive tipping points through collaborative innovation networks
Michael P. Totten
Humanitys unceasing ingenuity is generating vast economic gain for billions of people with goods unavailable to even kings and queens throughout most of history. Unfortunately, this economic growth has triggered unprecedented security challenges of global and historical magnitude: more absolute poor than any time in human history, the sixth largest extinction spasm of life on earth, climate destabilization with mega-catastrophic consequences, and multi-trillion dollar wars over access to energy. These multiple, inextricably interwoven challenges have low probability of being solved if decision makers maintain the strong propensity to think and act as if life is linear, has no carrying capacity limits, uncertainty is controllable, the future free of surprises, planning is predictable and compartmentalized into silos, and Gaussian distributions are taken as the norm while fat-tail futures are ignored. Although the future holds irreducible uncertainties, it is not fated. The emergence of Internet availability to one-third of humanity and access by most of humanity within a decade has spawned the Web analogue of a Cambrian explosion of speciation in knowledge applications. Among the most prodigious have been collaboration innovation networks (COINs) reecting a diversity of genome types, facilitating a myriad of collective intelligence 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 transformational solutions (positive tipping points) to the wicked problems confronting humanity. Web COINs enable acceleration of multiple-benet innovations and solutions to these problems that permeate the nested clusters of linked nonlinear complex adaptive 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 Web initiative, GreenATP, illustrates this opportunity. C 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
How to cite this article:

WIREs Energy Environ 2012, 1: 98113 doi: 10.1002/wene.40

COLLABORATION INNOVATION NETWORKS

ver the past millennium, global population increased 22-fold, world gross domestic product (GDP) rose nearly 300-fold, and per capita income increased 13-fold.13 Life expectation also improved
Correspondence to: mtotten@conservation.org Conservation International, Singapore, Singapore DOI: 10.1002/wene.40

dramatically. The average infant can expect to survive 66 years, compared with 24 years in the year 1000, with one out of three dying in the rst year of life. Per capita growth has also been accelerating exponentially, with declining time intervals that it takes for a doubling of per capita global GDP.4 This phenomenal rise in wealth and well-being has occurred for a number of factors (e.g., the scientic method, advancements in knowledge, improved hygiene and sanitary conditions, and evolving innovations in engineering and technology), with access to

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cheap energy being a primary driver this past century. Cheap energy, in turn, made access to water and resources cheaper, resulting in an eightfold increase in global materials use during the 20th century. This historical growth pattern, coupled with a deterministic view of continuous technology advances, lead most economists to assume global average annual per capita growth rates of 23% in the 21st century. This implies a nearly 10- to 20-fold increase in world GDP. Earth scientists, however, are far less sanguine, given the accumulation of observations, measurements, evidence, and ndings that indicate serious instabilities throughout the biosphere, posing cataclysmic threats to undermine, disrupt, and collapse humanitys vulnerable socioeconomic systems. It is abundantly clear from the multitude of earth systems and socioecological scientic assessments that the traditional wisdom in solving complex problems through orderly, linear modeling is perilously inadequate. We confront a basket of wicked problems, ill-dened problem sets that are too complex to be solved by rational systematic processes.5 The overwhelming scale and complexity of these unparalleled perils is stupefying and paralyze most citizens from taking action, resigned to pessimism, willful blindness, or fatalism. Such attitudes are premature, albeit understandable given well-funded entrenched interests aggressively blocking action by distorting facts. As Body Shop founder Anita Roddick put it, If you think youre too small to make an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room. The past half-century has been witness to an explosion of knowledge generation, technical advances, and accumulated evidence from applied innovations in markets and governance that offer promising prospects for addressing these seemingly intractable perils. Although there does not appear to be any intrinsic technological, economic, or nancial impossibility in transforming humanitys unfolding nightmare into a healthy, sustainable future, harnessing human willpower and overcoming entrenched interests have always been the Achilles heels of such change. There is grossly insufcient leadership in societys major institutions, be it governments, religions, businesses, and academia. This has had a corrosive effect on citizen condence in believing anything positive will occur from sclerotic-like centralized bureaucracies. When sudden crises too large to ignore demand public action (e.g., Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans), all too frequently the actions taken are done without foresight or common sense, let alone designed for achieving multiple-benet outcomes. The result tends to be enormous, lost opportunities. With the rise of

the Web, however, there is amplifying recognition that a powerful communication revolution is emergent. Over the past decade, the exponential growth of Web networks enabling social collaboration has spawned powerful new ways to engage a global citizenry at a heretofore unprecedented level of ongoing breadth, depth, and diversity of arrangements and cooperative initiatives. The Webs many-to-many communication, sharing, producing, and collaborating offer a potent opportunity for harnessing peoples cognitive surplusthe shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles for building a better, more cooperative world.6 GreenATP is used to illustrate the power of self-organizing collaboration innovation networks (COINs) for catalyzing swarms of greeninga activity in localities worldwide.

UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL AND HISTORICAL MAGNITUDE

The accumulating evidence derived from a wide range of transdisciplinary research on the earths physical climate and biogeochemical systems, including extensive interdisciplinary supercomputer modeling, the mathematical study of nested clusters of interacting dynamic nonlinear complex adaptive systems, and paleoscience discoveries in climatology, ecology, and marine geochemistry, starkly show that business-asusual global economic growth is transgressing planetary boundaries in the terrestrial, atmospheric, and oceanic spheres. Humanity is spiraling into a future of more frequent and severe local, regional, and global disasters of increasingly biblical proportions, e.g., 100- and 500-year ood and drought episodes occurring in a period of several years (Figure 1).7

Sixth Largest Species Extinction Spasm

Biologists and ecologists have been sounding alarms over the last quarter century of an unfolding extinction spasm of planetary dimensions, due to humanitys liquidation of intact ecosystems and assemblages of ora and fauna occurring in the wake of converting nation-size landscapes for food, feed, ber, forestry, fuel, and other commodities. Extinction of species inevitably occurs over geological time spans, with some 99.9% of all life having gone extinct since life rst formed 3.85 billion years ago. What is different about the current human-triggered planetary mass extinction is the phenomenal rate, estimated to be three to four orders of magnitude higher than the average natural background rate. As detailed in the multi-volume

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F I G U R E 1 | A safe operating space for humanity. Estimates of how the different control variables for seven planetary boundaries have changed from 1950 to present. The green shaded polygon represents the safe operating space. (Reprinted with permission from Ref 7. Copyright 2009, Macmillan Publishers Limited.) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment8 and the more recent The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity9 and Principles for Responsible Investment10 reports, the wholesale destruction of worldwide ecosystem services, the planets natural capital, is destroying some 5 trillion dollars per year of assets and economic value. This is a conservative estimate, given that just 1% of the planets species have been studied, many holding potentially immense future value generated by the 21st centurys exponentially growing bioinformatics sector and biotechnology industry, and will be irretrievably lost before science discovers them. oil, coal, natural gas, and cement production.17 An additional 1520% (56.6 Gt CO2 e) are estimated from deforestation, nearly 12 Gt CO2 e from nonCO2 GHGs,18 and potentially 1 Gt CO2 e of methane emissions from hydro damsc .19 Scientists recently calculated that the net present value of climate change impacts from business-asusual is $1240 trillion, assuming stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 e below 850 ppm by 2100.20 In reality, society is not only on pace to exceed 850 ppm, but new evidence also indicates far greater climate sensitivity at much lower levels previously thought safe (450 ppm). Three recent global modeling assessments indicate that the planet faces a 57 C increase in global average temperature this centurya drastically large and rapid change unprecedented in the history of Homo sapiens.2123 Implications include desertication of roughly a quarter of global agricultural lands (half in Africa),24 as well as resulting in largely irreversible changes in global ecosystems for 1000 years after emissions stop.25 An estimated two-thirds of the world plant and animals species could be driven to extinction, especially when compounded by humanity annually burning down and clearing tropical forests and ecosystems the size of England. Nor is this the worst of all possibilities. Other recent scientic research indicates that atmospheric CO2 e emissions under business-as-usual carbonintensive economic growth could trigger disastrous tipping points, releasing vast storehouses of the earths carbon stocks into the atmosphere. Nearly a dozen negative tipping points have been identied,d ranging from the melting of the permafrost and release of massive amounts of the potent GHG methane,

Ecosystem Services Irreversible Losses

With the world adding the population size of the United Kingdom every year, the projected 10 billion population by 2050 will require a 70% increase in food production. Along with the increased energy and materials feeding humanitys rising economic metabolism, the continued loss of ecosystem services and natural capital is estimated to cost nearly 20% of annual Gross World Product by 2050.10 Expanding environmental degradation and ecosystem collapses are being recognized as monumental threats to human security,11,12 with evidence of or correlations between loss of ecosystem services and piracy, land conicts and resource wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal crimes (e.g., Rwanda13 and Darfur14 ).15,16

Climate Destabilization and Mega-Catastrophic Consequences

In 2010, global CO2 emissions exceeded the worst case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with 33 Gt carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2 e)b of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted from

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to the dieback of the Amazon rainforest or boreal forest. Each of these could increase the global average temperature by 35 C.26 Recent studies indicate critical aspects of ecosystem functioning beginning to collapse at 2.5 C, with the loss of major ice sheets, the collapse of the Amazon rain forest, extinction of coral reefs, and large-scale release of methane from deep-sea deposits and tundra could occur at temperatures as low as 24 C of warming. The threshold temperature for irreversible dieback of the Amazon rain forest could be as low as 2 C, rather than the more commonly cited 3 4 C.27 A 2005 Amazon drought was estimated to have caused the loss of 1.6 Gt of carbon in that single year.28

F I G U R E 2 | Internet users in the worlddistribution by world

regions, 2011. (Source: Internet World Statswww.internetworldstats .com/stats.htm. Basis: 2,095,00,005 Internet users on March 31, 2011. Copyright 2011, Miniwatts Marketing Group.)

Multi-Trillion Dollar Resource Wars and Genocidal Acts

Climate change, marine acidication, and species extinctions are, in a sense, indirect human-triggered unintended consequences or externalities that, if continued over the long term, will spark collapses in socio-economic systems around the world.36 Currently and for the past century, have also been direct human-triggered devastations from war and conicts over access to oil, minerals, and land; genocidal acts have occurred on average every ve years over the past half century, many triggered over control of natural resources.37 The price tag for the rst oil war of the 21st century instigated by the United States invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is estimated at $6 trillion.38,39 The 2002 US national security strategy mentioned neither oil nor the Gulf, but the 1992 draft of Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 19941999 clearly stated Americas overall objective in the Gulf: to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the regions oil. Large US military bases now cover the region.

Ocean Acidication Threat to Fisheries Collapse

The oceans face multiple extreme risks. Recent marine evidence has found that over the past half-century phytoplankton, the base of the ocean food web has declined 40%, corresponding with a 0.5 C global temperature increase over the past century.29 In addition, humanitys annual 30 + gigaton pulse of CO2 emissions is accelerating the rate of ocean acidication faster than any time during the last 300 million years. Marine scientists warn that the failure to peak global CO2 emissions by 2015 and then steadily reduce these emissions by 5% per annum could, by the end of the century, cause acidication levels that essentially unravel the ocean ecosystem and collapse major sheries and marine species.30 Only 1% of marine shery catch revenues are not inuenced by changes in ocean pH.31,32 Climate change and marine acidication risks are compounding humanitys already massive overshing, depletion, and collapse of major sheries.33 Worldwide, approximately 1 billion people are dependent on sh as the principal source of animal protein and half a billion people depend on sheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods; the vast majority of them live in developing countries. Coral reef-related sheries constitute approximately one-tenth of the worlds total sheries, and in some parts of the IndoPacic region up to 25% of the total sh catch, while also representing the breeding, nursing, and feeding grounds for one-fourth of marine sheries. One-third of all coral species are already at risk of extinction as a result of bleaching and disease caused by ocean warming in recent years.34 In terms of catastrophic risk, acidication interacts with the temperature stress on coral reefs; with 1.7 C warming, all coral reefs will be bleached, and by 2.5 C they will be extinct.35

WEB COINs CATALYZING MULTIPLE-BENEFIT VALUE NETS

Less than 7000 days ago, the World Wide Web was virtually nonexistent, then it exploded, growing nearly 500% between 2000 and 2010, with one out of three people now having Internet access (see Figure 2). The World Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.40 Information technology (IT) experts anticipate it will take less than 5000 days before most of humanity will be connected globally to a ubiquitous semantic Web network. The emergent phenomenon

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F I G U R E 3 | Size of English Wikipedia as of August 2010 (2647 Encyclopedia 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 opportunities occurring through self-organizing web collaboration networks are being examined in countless publications.4145 Although this powerful knowledge-generating and communication network can be and is being used for viral spread of disinformation, propaganda, prejudices, hatred, fallacies, scams, endless advertising for click-and-ship consumerism, gambling, pornography, sexual predation, and a broad range of deviant behaviors, it is also emerging as an especially potent system of social cooperation. Witness the selforganizing open source initiatives, as evidenced by the breathtaking formation of Wikipedia, daily growing and error correcting the worlds largest publicly accessible pool of accumulated knowledge and learning resources. In the decade since it was launched, Wikipedia has swiftly established itself as the worlds largest encyclopedia. Within 60 months and six employees, Wikipedia grew to 10 times the size of the largest encyclopedia. As of August 2010, the size of just the English version of Wikipedia amounted to nearly 2700 volumes the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This phenomenal growth has been accomplished with relatively few paid employees (still less than 100). Daily additions, updates, edits, and error corrections are carried out by several hundred thousand volunteers, with content being translated into several hundred languages. An IBM research team estimated that it took around 100 million hours to self-organize and maintain this open source public knowledge asset. For comparison, Americans watch 100 million hours of television ads every weekend (Figure 3).46

New media Professor Shirky6 makes a compelling case that there are more than 1 trillion hours of television viewed each year, representing a pool of cognitive surplus that could be harnessed to create other open source public collaboration assets. There are now legions of examples underway. For example, in the span of just 48 months, YouTube went from a start-up to experiencing 48 h of video uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day. Over 3 billion videos are viewed a day through YouTube, with users uploading the equivalent of 240,000 full-length lms every week. There is more video uploaded to YouTube in 1 month than the three major US networks created in 60 years. Seventy percent of YouTube trafc comes from outside the United States, and is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages. YouTube mobile gets over 400 million views a day, representing 13% of daily views. One hundred million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc.) every week, and more than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community.47 Flickr, the image and video sharing site, rose from a 2004 start-up to hosting 6 billion images in just 7 years. In 7 years since start-up, Facebook now hosts 800 million active users, including 42% percent of the US public, and 1 billion pieces of content being loaded each day. China has more than half a billion registered microbloggers, and nearly 700 million mobile phone users, with a rapid rise in smart web phones. These examples and scores of other social networks with millions of users provide overwhelming evidence of the growth of citizen engagement in web networks. It was a phenomena the public-at-large hardly envisioned even 15 years ago; or as Bill Gates notoriously said in 1993, The Internet? We are not interested in it. Collaboration innovation and knowledgesharing networks are beginning to permeate global society, speciating throughout business sectors, education systems, science research initiatives, avocations, advocacy issues, media and news services, government and public agencies at all scales, and a long tail of citizen-initiated interest groups. Ongoing research in evolutionary game theory and the dynamics of complex adaptive systems derive some encouraging ndings regarding social cooperation.48 As Professor Nowak, Director of Harvards Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, noted, humanity has the sad capacity to destroy the planets climate, with a number of our current practices and policies eerily geared to meet this outcome as quickly as possible.49 Preserving the earths climate is the biggest public goods game ever, and research indicates the ability of

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people to solve what game theorists call a collective risk social dilemma.50 The key insights are straightforward, even if the tasks are daunting: individuals must be well informed about climate change risk; if misled, then individuals falsely conclude the risk is small and will not cooperate; and if individuals know that the risk is high, then they are likely to cooperate. These dynamics are evident in the United States where the media neglects and distorts reporting on climate risks and costs. The vast realm of science and the environment, of which climate is a tiny subset, barely gets reported in the media; according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, US media coverage on science or the environment is covered just 4 min out of every 10 h of viewing time. By comparison, celebrity coverage gets ve times more attention, crime 15 times more exposure, and advertising captures 45-fold more screening time than all science. Most egregious is the media informational bias as a result of conjuring up two sides of an issue, even when the peer-reviewed science on, e.g., the threat of dangerous and catastrophic consequences of climate-triggered disasters shows virtually unanimous consensus. The deplorable media coverage has been skewed further with a disinformation campaign funded through the largesse of the fossil fuel industry to foster public confusion and false conclusions about climate risks and mitigation costs. In 20092010, the US oil, coal, and utility industries collectively spent $500 million to lobby against climate change legislation and to defeat candidates calling for climate mitigation action.51 Notwithstanding episodes of herd mentality, group think,52 irrational exuberances,53 and misguided certitudes that will be propagated through web sharing networks, web-based cooperation networks relying on empirical, evidence-based, and accumulated experience, shared in as transparent a manner as possible, can hopefully serve as trustworthy checks and balances. Adaptive and interactive network dynamics (i.e., continuous user feedback and further input), using specic mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation48 (i.e., direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial reciprocity, reputation and trust through kin and group selection)54 can be integrated into web collaboration designs and processes. Cooperation increases when combined with networks of social diversity,55 and generally in small-world network phenomenon combining a dense array of local contacts and a good enough number of longrange weak-link contacts, enabling innovation to ourish.56,57

F I G U R E 4 | Trust network visualization. (Reprinted with

permission from Ref 59. Copyright 2004, Springer-Verlag.)

There are approaches to derive assessments about information sources based on individual feedback about the sources. As users add annotations, they can include measures of credibility and reliability about a statement, which are later averaged and presented to the viewer. There is burgeoning activity in the IT research eld, social network space, and commercial applications around the array of recommendation engines, collaborative lters, information condence, and trust metrics provided for and by users, as evidenced, e.g., in commercial sites like eBay, epinions, Amazon.com and, to a certain extent, the PageRank search algorithms used by Google.58 The machine-readable intelligence agents integral to the semantic web are expected to radically improve the trust process, including reputation inference algorithms, Trustbots, semantic reputation networks, etc. (Figure 4).59 So, how does this relate to tackling the multiple wicked problems previously discussed? Essentially by leveraging the power of self-organizing, small-world networks of cooperation and collaboration among willing citizens to apply some of their cognitive surplus toward addressing and solving these wicked problems at the local scale. Not surprisingly, research nds that the higher consumption lifestyle of the worlds urban population, while directly occupying a small fraction of the earths surface, is the primary driver of global deforestation, GHG emissions, ocean acidication, and many of the other major environmental impacts on the planet. Agricultural trade is the other primary driver, most of it driven by urban consumption patterns, as well.60 Urban population increased 10fold in the 20th century to 2.8 billion people. This

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F I G U R E 5 | The emergence of VERGE. (Reprinted with permission from Ref 66. Copyright 2011, GreenBiz.com.) number will nearly double to 5 billion by 2030. In Africa and Asia, the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during their whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation. By 2030, developing world towns and cities will comprise four out of ve global urban dwellers.61 There are three key actions that can be taken for accommodating projected growth while diminishing planetary impacts: (1) Shrinking energy, water, and resource use through continuous, aggressive, ambitious efciency gains; (2) Shifting to green power and fuels having the smallest composite footprint of impacts (e.g., GHG emissions, air and water pollution, toxic wastes, hazardous contaminants, land requirements, water use, displacing valuable ecosystem services, vulnerability to price volatility and supply disruptions, vulnerability to extreme disruption by nature, military or terrorists, fail gracefully, not catastrophically, and offering a least-cost, least-risk, highly resilient way of delivering services at the point of use)62,63 ; and (3) Sourcing standardsbased, multiple-benets carbon mitigation offsets for footprints still remaining, with emphasis on conservation and restoration of threatened ecosystem services as a very cost-effective way. This triple S portfolio of actions is the focus of the GreenATP COIN. currency of the cell. The cells supply of ATP is mostly generated in mitochondria, sometimes described as cellular power plants. To greatly simplify, the emergence of multicellular complex life forms was enabled to a large degree by the symbiogenesis of anaerobic archebacteria and O2 respiring proteobacteria; it was the key evolutionary innovation toward eukaryotic genome and cellular organization.64 In analogous manner, the symbiogenesis of Internet and green Technology (IT and green T) offer the potential emergence of transformational positive tipping points with multiple-benets capable of resolving or dramatically reducing wicked socioecological problems. A paradigmatic example getting intensive analysis and research and development funding from the public and private sectors is the convergence of entirely separate sectors through smart IT connectivity and green T design innovations; or as recently stated in Reinventing Fire, pervading the energy system with distributed intelligence, ubiquitous sensors, and current information, IT-enriched energy will choreograph the convergence between vehicles, buildings, factories, and electricity sources.65 It will, as US Federal Energy Regulatory Chairman Jon Wellinghoff describes, transform every individual energy using device from a standalone single purpose entity into a multipurpose interconnected grid asset that will ultimately optimize the efciency of the entire energy system. It is, he added, a revolution that is coming and it will change everything. (Figure 5).66 Metaphorically, greenATP symbolizes the information currency owing through self-organizing and maintained cooperation and COINs, with a focus

GREENATPAPPORTUNITIES AND POSITIVE TIPPING POINTS

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

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on how urban and rural landscapes can achieve zero emission targets and zero net footprint impact transition goals through continuous application of the triple S portfolio of actions. It is meant as a mnemonic, meme, or iconic brand for positive transformation into healthy, sustainable economies. As an acronym, greenATP stands for green APPportunities and positive tipping points, reecting reliance on the suite of web software tools, applications, resources, and analytics used in small-world networks. Using a diversity of apps, collective intelligence algorithms, web mashups, and eventually semantic meshnetse for undertaking iterative and recursive local knowledge-inaction and adaptable learning-by-doing activities, and particularly focused on accelerating and scaling exceptionally promising options leading to multilocality transformational changes worldwide. Every city or community is unique in numerous respects, embedded in diverse cultures, economies, policies, laws, regulations, and technology development. At the same time, cities exhibit many similar methods of obtaining utility and mobility services and generic logistics of acquiring food and procuring goods. Opportunities abound for taking triple S actions in any and all of these urban areas. The viability of specic ATP will require a recursive and exible process that involves local change agents taking the common knowledge resources and experiences shared and accumulated through the greenATP networks, determining local applicability t and need for modications, discerning the best ways and means of promoting actions locally, and continuing to iterate and adapt this process as outcomes, results, barriers, impasses, etc., unfold and require useful advice from the pool of network collaborators and cooperators.

Mobilizing for the Delivery of Least-Cost and Least-Risk Utility Services

Lovins65 makes the telling insight in his recent gem of a book, Reinventing Fire, The convergence of electricity and information, with rapid innovations in both, makes 21st century technologies and business models collide with 20th and even 19th century cultures and institutions, often encrusted with regulatory structures and rules that no longer t todays evolving needs. This is of monumental importance to address in order to facilitate the convergence of buildings, vehicles, factories, and grids. As CleanTech publisher Joel Makower reminds us, Relative to smartphone technologies, conVERGE technologies are far more

capital intensive. . .The product cyclesthe amount of time it takes to go from concept to market is years longer than most IT products and services. And their lifecycletheir time in productive use can range from a decade (for a car) to a century (for a building). Because they are infrastructural, expensive, and long lasting, their convergence, while slower in coming, will potentially transform how we live, work, shop, travel, and play.67 The pace of convergence innovation can either be further retarded or accelerated, depending on how slowly or quickly encrusted regulations and rules can be superseded by ones aligning with the extraordinary convergence opportunities. In this regard, a long overdue regulatory makeover is ensuring the delivery of least-cost and least-risk (LCR) utility services at the point of use. The regulatory procedures overseeing the traditional utility industry have primarily focused on costs, while ignoring to factor in a number of risks posing economic, security, and nancial costs over the lifespan of conventional power plants. Even regulators emphasis on costs have been articially truncated by exclusively focusing on supply-side expansion options while excluding the vast and still-expanding pool of demand-side, end-use efciency, onsite and locally distributed generation resources.68 For example, three decades of experience in harnessing end-use efciency improvements to deliver utility services in a number of pioneering service territories have been ve to 15 times less costly than the range of supply expansion options.69,70 The global implications of capital misallocation and lost opportunities are massive. Just the construction of power plants and transmission lines over the next 20 years will consume $28 trillion of investment capital to generate approximately 13 trillion kWh per year. However, if an LCR comprehensive integrated resource planning (IRP) methodology is adopted, then end-use efciency emerges as the highest priority,71 as do many onsite and locally distributed resource options. Collectively, they can cost-effectively and competitively deliver half of these kWhs, effectively freeing up $14 trillion (gross, or perhaps $12 trillion net after incentives and operating costs), while potentially reducing annual customer costs by more than half a trillion dollars per year. Industrial electric drive motor systems nicely illustrate these opportunities. Half of all electricity consumed 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 that delivered electricity. As Jiangsu Province discovered

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F I G U R E 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 CO2 e, if benets from negative cost on left-hand side are fully captured. The curve presents an estimate of the maximum potential of all technical GHG abatement measures below 80 per ton CO2 e if each lever was pursued aggressively. It is not a forecast of what role different measures and technologies will play. (Reprinted with permission from Ref 71. Copyright 2010, McKinsey Global Institute.)

Sidebar
McKinsey Globals global carbon abatement cost curve assessments consistently show enormous opportunities for achieving deep GHG emission reductions at zero net costs over the next several decades. Figure 6 shows that the average cost of abatement opportunities up to 38 Gt CO2 e by 2030 equal zero per ton CO2 e, if benets from negative cost on left-hand side are fully captured. The curve presents an estimate of the maximum potential of all technical GHG abatement measures below 80 per ton CO2 e if each lever was pursued aggressively. It is not a forecast of what role different measures and technologies will play. A critically important insight is that delaying action for 10 years would reduce the technical abatement potential in 2030 by half. The other critically important insight is that reducing deforestation, restoring ecosystem degradation, and regenerating agriculture systems represent the largest pool of cost-effective options. It is several fold less costly than carbon capture and storage (CCS) of fossil GHG emissions into geological caverns, and immediately available unlike CCS still a decade away from commercialization.

(in a MOU partnership with California), they could swap out 10,000 MW of inefcient industrial drive

components and replace with high-performance models at a delivered cost of electricity of one cent per kWh. For most of the past decade, all the ofcial energy projections have indicated that coal and natural gas would constitute 3/4ths of this power plant growth. So, displacing a large percentage of these fossil fuels through zero emissions efciency gains would achieve cost-free reductions of several billion tons of CO2 per year, as well as deep reductions in acid rain, smog, mercury, and toxic chemical pollutantsa social benet worth several tens of billions of dollars per year in avoided mitigation expenses and health and ecological damage costs. There are three key scally prudent and nancially responsible criteria which should govern the design and operation of utility delivery systems, whether electricity, natural gas, water, or waste and sanitation. First, adopt a comprehensive IRP that ranks all supply and demand-side (customer-site) resource opportunities according to cost and risk for delivering utility services at the point of use. Costs also include transmission and distribution expenses, plus risk adjustment for exposure to price volatility from long-term dependence on fuel and water requirements, and for externalities such as CO2

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emissions, air pollutants, ground and water contaminants, and a non-zero probability of complete asset loss and large replacement costs (i.e., Fukishima-type disasters).72 Second, remove the regulatory disincentive that undermines utility investment in least-cost customer-site resource options. This requires aligning the nancial interests of the utility provider with those of their customers, which can be achieved by regulatory agencies decoupling utility revenues from gross sales. Allowing utilities to recoup lost earnings from declining revenues as a result of helping customers reduce their bills by taking advantage of cost-effective end-use efciency opportunities.73,74 Third, combine this with performance incentives for the utility to apply its long-term, low-cost capital in nancing the customer-site efciency gains, along with providing technical assistance in identifying what products perform best, as well as removing other transaction costs through partnerships with stakeholder groups and government agencies.75 These regulatory innovations can result in ve to 10 times more customer-site services through efciency gains ranking as LCR options. Without the innovations, utility customers are unlikely to capture more than 1020% of the cost-effective opportunities available because of their much higher discount rates and rate of return requirements than the utilitys, combined with customer inertia induced by a host of transaction costs and multiple market barriers.7680 Accumulated empirical experience over the past several decades in regions with comprehensive IRP utility frameworkse.g., in western, Pacic northwest and northeast US states, in a number of Australian states and cities, and in Chinas Jiangsu provinceprovides compelling evidence for adopting the IRP methodology.81,82 The methodology also proves to be a more open and transparent process combined with broader stakeholder engagement, the reduction of subsidies and negative externalities, and greater consideration of the unique local and regional social and ecological conditions.83 IRP approaches that integrate electricity and water planning, as in California, have identied multiple LCR opportunities, which have saved electricity and natural gas by delivering water services more efciently. California water uses consume 20% of the states total electricity and one-third of the States total natural gas in pumping, distributing, heating and disposing of the states water.84 Over the past three decades, Californias LCR regulatory innovations cut its electric sector CO2 emissions by half while accruing households $1000 on utility savings; if the rest of

the nation had followed Californias regulatory innovations, it would have avoided construction of 180 GW of coal plants and saved several hundred billion dollars per year on utility bills.85 Half of humanity now lives in urban areas and nearly three-fourths of the global population, or more than six billion people, will be urban residents by 2050. Financing the provision of electricity, natural gas, water, sanitation, waste treatment, mobility access, telecommunication, and other urban services pose monumental burdens for local governments. An LCR utility services strategy is imperative in order to wisely apply ratepayer and taxpayer dollars (e.g., fossil fuels annually capture half a trillion dollars in global tax subsidies, excluding several fold more in public costs incurred in cleaning up externalities and suffering health damages). Distributing the utilitys access to low-cost, long-term capital to harness urban (and rural) distributed LCR utility services has a multiplier effect in capturing other highly desired ancillary values: several fold more local jobs generated per dollar of investment than from large coal, nuclear, and hydro dam plants, with the job earnings spent in the local economy (while also saving local governments unemployment insurance and public assistance payments); cleaner, healthier air, water and soil; urban revitalization with greener construction; greater resilience, security and lower vulnerability to price volatilities due to weather-triggered disasters or human-generated disruptions. When LCR rankings indicate expanding new supply, insights and evidence from nancial portfolio theory strongly point to increasing greater reliance on those options with the least composite footprint impacts and risks.86 Solar and wind power rank as the most resilient and least impacting when evaluated from multirisk perspectives (as noted above).56 Commercial progress in solar and wind power is occurring so rapidly that facts a year ago are woefully out of date. Under a strong LCR planning framework, where monetized risks are fully incorporated, wind and solar rank as the most economically attractive and abundant supply options. A global network of land-based 2.5 MW turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity could supply more than 40 times current global power consumption, and ve times total global energy use.87 US wind resources, specically in the Great Plains, could provide as much as 16 times total current power. Both the United States and China, which together emit one-third of global GHG emissions, could steadily

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displace all existing and new coal power plants with their wind resources.88,89 When phased in with utility bill-reducing efciency opportunities, the system cost of delivering electricity should be comparable to or less than continuing dependence on coal plants powering inefcient devices. With the steady cost declines in solar power systems now underway (and expected to reach grid parity by 2015, or sooner under an LCR framework combined with feed-in tariffs), there is a good possibility of powering the world mostly by solar in the latter half of this century. Already, at $3 per gallon of gasoline (equivalent to electricity at 32 cents/kWh), solar electric charging stations are costeffective to power the worlds 150 million existing electric bikes and scooters, with sales increasing 10% per annum. Limited space prevents full discussion of caveats, nuances, other relevant policy, and regulatory needs, which are discussed in a range of recent publications.9092 Although there are strong indications that solar and wind power will be as competitive or less expensive over the long run with fossil or nuclear options, in the larger perspective of unprecedented climate catastrophe costs, multi-trillion oil wars and non-zero probabilities of nuclear reactor disasters, adhering closely to cost-benet analyses is foolish. As Harvard economics professor Martin Weitzman has cogently articulated, the real question we should be answering is how much climate catastrophe insurance humanity needs. Using greenATP COINs to promote the triple S portfolio of actions can perform several key roles in overcoming and superseding existing barriers and myopic thinking. Many regulatory commissioners, for example are political appointees (cronies) with little understanding or interest in authentic LCR practices. GreenATP COINs could generate the knowledge and local advocates to hold these agencies accountable for their failure in performing due diligence on the extra costs and risks by not adopting LCR regulations. Most regulatory commissions and environmental protection agencies operate in silos, failing to recognize the synergistic LCR benets that accrue by productively working together.93 Likewise, greenATP COINs can help forge those connections. All public regulatory agencies are underfunded and understaffed, disproportionately so relative to the industries they are responsible for setting regulations. Citizens can marshal together the pool of LCR facts, documentation, cases, analyses, etc., effectively serving as an ad hoc task force. Most regulatory agencies perform miserably in transparently communicating their decision-making processes. GreenATP COINs

can continually inform the public-at-large, galvanizing and mobilizing public opinion in support of LCR practices and rules. Regulatory agencies are typically laggards, not leaders; they view problems linearly, seldom from fully integrative and systemic perspectives. Yet, the multiple wicked problems of our times call not just for leaders of business-as-usual, but heroic levels of visionary leadership, particularly in addressing nonlinear complex systems. GreenATP COINs can sustain the pressure calling for such transformational and inspirational actions. An exemplary opportunity regards the third component of the triple S portfolio, Sourcing CO2 emission offsets. Hypothetically, if Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) was suddenly available overnight and applied to the 2.4 billion tons of CO2 emissions from US fossil-red electricity generation (at the future projected cost of $45 per tCO2 ), this would amount to nearly $100 billion per year, adding 35 cents per kWh of electricity. In sharp contrast, ecological carbon storage (ECS), or reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) as it is referred to in climate negotiations, is immediately available at an average cost of $7.50 per tCO2 , six times lower cost than future CCS cost projections.94 This would add half a penny per kWh to utility costs, but the end-use efciency gains (from Shrinking) would reduce utility bills well beyond this slight increase. How much would be raised for ECS/REDD + nancing? About $18 billion per year, which is roughly the sum estimated necessary for incentive payments to prevent most tropical deforestation.95

Sourcing Standards-Based, Multiple-Benet Offsets

It is an astonishingly under-reported fact that 15 20% of total global CO2 emissions are due to the burning of 14 million hectares of tropical forests each year. This is an amount greater than the emissions released by the global transport sector, and roughly the same level as the annual CO2 emissions of the United States or China. Nearly a decade ago, the Climate, Community & Biodiversity (CCB) standards were launched as a multiple-benets approach to sourcing emission offsets. The voluntary standards help design and identify land management activities that simultaneously minimize climate change, support sustainable development, and conserve biodiversity. Analogous to green building standards such as LEED, that requires going beyond just making a building energy efcient, CCB standards require going beyond just doing carbon mitigation and encompassing community

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sustainability, improved local livelihoods, and protecting or restoring the health and integrity of ecosystem services and functions. CCB has become the most used land-based standard worldwide, and widely recognized as a high-quality, triple benets standard used for addressing three pressing social and environmental problems. In a world still without global agreement on capping and deeply reducing GHG emissions, such voluntary leadership actions remain essential for sustaining momentum toward phasing out GHG emissions, while demonstrating that it can be achieved simultaneously with development for all and sustaining healthy ecosystem services.

and the web platform and collaboration technologies for sharing and acting on this intelligence are available. Becoming informed by trusted sources has been shown time and again to generate engaged, cooperative behavior. As Mark Twain brilliantly noted, Once you lose your ignorance, its hard to get it back.

NOTES
A diversity of terms and denitions have been proposed for describing the essential or salient properties of planetary well-being, encompassing humanity, biodiversity, and biosphere integrity, now and over future generations. No one denition, let alone a single word, adequately captures this complex process. Sustainability is a primary term of long-time use, but is so pliant that it allows a multitude of, sometimes contradictory, interpretations. Concatenations of terms used by some writers to contextualize the spatiotemporal complexity, e.g., cleaner, greener, safer, smarter, more secure and resilient, and ecologically sustainable is unwieldy and still incomplete. I rely on these various words throughout the paper, recognizing that none of them captures but some aspects or dimensions of a far more complex dynamic continuously evolving through time. b Carbon dioxide equivalents is a metric measure used to compare the global warming potential (GWP) from several dozen radiatively active trace gases, collectively referred to as greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide equivalents are commonly expressed as million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (MMTCDE). The carbon dioxide equivalent for a gas is derived by multiplying the tonnes of the gas by the associated GWP. For example, the GWP for methane is 21 and for nitrous oxide 310. This means that emissions of 1 million metric tonnes of methane and nitrous oxide respectively is equivalent to emissions of 21 and 310 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide. [denition based on IPCC Third Assessment Report, 2001]. c Estimates of hydro dam emissions range widely. The World Commission on Dams 2000 report included a span of 228% of total global GHG emissions based on 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 global emissions. d The term tipping point commonly refers to a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system.
a

CONCLUSION Spurring Reputational Markets and Transparent Governance

The radical evolution of IT, now enabling a powerful symbiosis with smarter, greener ways to produce and deliver utility and mobility services, should be used for accelerating and scaling solutions to the multiple wicked problems confronting humanity. Our hypothesis is that web-based COIN platforms such as greenATP can play invaluable roles in moving society beyond the linear mindset that has led to planetary-scale externalities threatening the long-term well-being of humans and nature. Whether called greenATP or a million other names is unimportant, what is most important is the cooperation, sharing, and local actions initiated through the small world and weak links of collaboration networks. Constellations and clusters of such COINs web-linked worldwide offer powerful new forms of distributed solutions: distributed forms of capital nancing, end-use energy services, and local renewable resource options, and applied intelligence for better sense making of multiple-benet local solutions. Such COINs enable, at the same time, shining sunlight and spotlights on infectious activities such as crony capitalism, legalized graft, embedded corruption, locked-out populations, perverse subsidies, skewed and archaic regulations, lax enforcement, and entrenched moneyed interests shaping media opinions and distortions without transparent disclosure. COINs can manifest the knowledge needed to move humanity beyond the Prisoners Dilemma that is aficting national and international decision makers. Both the positive knowledge for solving wicked problems such as climate change, mass poverty, biodiversity extinction, and oil wars,

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Lenton et al. introduce the term tipping element to describe large-scale components of the earth system that may pass a tipping point. e Mesh, also called meshup, is an Internet information and communication network concept. MeshUp technologies allow using available data, mobiles devices, Web applications, and wireless networks to create innity of new information services. MeshUp technologies merge many forms of data and content loosely adding knowledge in a practical information

service for all. The basic concept behind MeshUp technologies is to create Open-InfoSpace where individuals and organizations gain free and simplied access to an integrated open base of information services, contents, platforms, and infrastructures and are free to integrate and modify them, as the whole resource environment evolves. By satisfying their needs, users and resource providers enhance and upgrade the system. Denition by the European Consen Group, http://meshup.org/node/33.

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