3 Videos about Innovating Our Way to a Sustainable Future

Our current business models, energy solutions, and transportation approaches are unsustainable. If we are to become a sustainable society, they must be changed. Change requires doing things differently—creatively inventing innovative ways to do things differently from how we are doing them today. Innovation gives us hope.

Here are three videos that give me hope about possible solutions to the energy and transportation dilemmas. To view these videos in full screen, click on the arrows in the bottom right corner of the video.    Please note that video 2 is only available for viewing by clicking on the title (The Renata Rail Public Transit System) of the video.  If you are receiving this blog post via email, click on the title of the video to view it

1. Reinventing Fire (6:30 minutes)As the YouTube description of this video says: “Energy-related economic, security, and environmental threats are intensifying the national conversation about how to regain energy leadership and competitiveness, restore jobs and prosperity, and build a secure and climate-safe energy system. Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), led by Amory Lovins, has that vision and is now building its detailed roadmap, which they call Reinventing Fire™.

This strategy will bring together RMI’s 28 years of innovation and engage the world in our most ambitious and important work yet—using whole-system thinking and integrative design to move the U.S. off fossil fuels by 2050, led by business for profit.” Amory is one of my top-5 sustainability heroes. If anyone can pull this off, he can. A longer, 57:30 minute version with more supporting detail is also available.

2.The Renata Rail Public Transit System (3 min)The video illustrates an interesting rail-based public transportation design with profound implications for holistic community development. The video was made for a Fort McMurray situation, so it talks about getting people to work at the oil sands project. It could work anywhere. It illustrates a “satellite city” community design approach that is explained in more detail in the Renata Project Sustainable Transportation paper. Its innovative idea is to design communities around their public transit systems, instead of vice versa.  Smart.

This video is viewable by clicking on the title to the left

3. Solar Roadways (4:38 min)This is a mind-blowing possibility. As the introduction at the Solar Roadways website says, “The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses. Our ultimate goal is to be able to store excess energy in or alongside the Solar Roadways.

If there was ever any doubt that sustainability-related challenges are a catalyst to innovation, these videos dispel that concern. So do some of the TED Talks videos and clean-tech breakthroughs assessed in Tyler Hamilton’s Clean Break blog. If you know of other similar videos, please suggest them in the Comments section below.

Bob