Lovins Amory B. - Factor four: doubling wealth, halving resource use: a new report to the Club of Rome

Factor Four made my spine tingle. This is a book which captures the moment, which crystallises a set of seemingly conflicted trends and issues around a simple idea carries you away with its optimism and can-do spirit, its hard facts and concrete examples TOMORROW

The message of a radical, profitable and sustainable change comes through loud and clear perceptive and exciting ideas for trans-forming our entire economic system NATURE

By any criteria a key text for the millenium for anyone involved in business and the environment GREENER MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL

It would be a triumph of humanity over itself if the world were to embrace the practical model of sustainability set out in this book RSA JOURNAL

This excellent book [is for] anyone with a practical bent and a real interest in changing the world for thebetter RESURGENCE

Probably the cleverest book on the business-environment-society relationship superb, and deserves every ounce of the accolades it has received SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTING

An exciting challenge THE ENGINEER

An engaging, challenging work, highly-recommended for the interested, non-specialist reader THE BOOKWATCH

A startlingly simple message that offers a new way of looking at progress, moving the emphasis from labour productivity to resource productivity ECODESIGN

Well-documented, punchy and brilliantly incisive, full of information and original proposals PEOPLE AND THE PLANET

This book is so entertaining that it can absorb the reader in the most distracting situations it wonderfully succeeds in showing what is possible, how important it is to change, and how much fun is to be had from all this. It is the best advertisement for the future I have ever come across BUILDING DESIGN

Seldom can the venerable Club of Rome have received so passion-ate a report, or one so dismissive of the prevailing direction of world leaders and businessmen THE GUARDIAN

Ernst von Weizscker is President of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy in the North Rhine/Westphalian Science Centre, Germany. He was previously a Professor of Biology at Essen University, President of Kassel University, Director at the UN Centre for Science and Technology for Development (New York) and Director of the Institute for European Environmental Politics in Bonn, and in 1996 he was the first recipient ofthe Duke of Edinburgh Gold Medal of WWF International.

Amory B Lovins and L Hunter Lovins are respectively Vice President and Director of Research, and President and Executive Director, of Rocky Mountain Institute which they co-founded in 1982 in Colorado, USA. Amory Lovins is a Mac Arthur Fellow and the recipient of six honorary doctorates, having been perhaps the youngest-ever Oxford don. Hunter Lovins is a sociologist, political scientist and barrister, and was Henry R Luce Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College. The Lovinses have been joint recipients of the Mitchell Prize, the Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Prize), the Onassis Foundations first Delphi Prize and the Nissan Prize. Their pioneering technical, economic and policy work has been enormously influential in the energy, construction and car manufacturing industries.

First published in the UK in 1998 by Earthscan

Reprinted 1999, 2001, 2006

Copyright Ernst von Weizscker, Amory B Lovins, L Hunter Lovins 1997

All rights reserved

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-10: 1-85383-406-8

ISBN-13: 978-1-85383-406-6

Page design and typesetting by MapSet Ltd, Gateshead, UK

Cover design by Andrew Corbett

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Factor Four is the right idea, at the right time, to become a symbol of progress, an outcome the Club of Rome would welcome. Doubling wealth while halving resource use is at the heart of what