A Sustainable Train of Thought

The state of California recently released its Environmentally Preferable Purchases Best Practices Manual which gives advice and guidelines for purchasing products ranging from plastic trash bags to lumber to antifreeze.

Currently, this sort of database is aimed at professionals and builders, not the ordinary person. In an ideal world, this database would extend to all products and be available to all consumers as a step towards transforming the consumer to customer.

An older article in the Yale Daily News describes how real-time monitoring of energy use enables the city of New Haven, Connecticut, to proactively save money.

The city now uses real-time measuring to electronically monitor the amount of energy being consumed by its buildings. As an example of the city’s use of this information, Altieri said electricity use tends to peak in the summertime during the heat of the day. When the city sees this peak, it can raise the temperature in its buildings by a degree or two without the buildings’ inhabitants noticing. This decrease in electricity consumption then saves the city a significant amount of money, as Honeywell planned.

Another interesting comment from the article:

“The original goal was mainly from a cost perspective,” Smuts said. “It’s only as we achieved such success that we really started to appreciate it from an environmental perspective and a quality of life perspective.”

This sounds so similar to the Location Efficient Mortgages and ShoreBank strategies.

The US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, signed by 205 mayors as of Feb 17, mandate that participating cities meet the Kyoto Protocol goal of 7% below 1990 emission levels by 2012. An ambitious goal, and one of the building blocks for my thesis, but it turns out that California has an even greater ambition.

Citing impacts to “water supply, public health, agriculture, the coastline, and forestry,” Executive Order S-3-05 mandates meeting the following Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction targets for California:

...by 2010, reduce GHG emissions to 2000 levels; by 2020, reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels; by 2050, reduce GHG emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels.

This executive order was signed into law in June 2005, and I suppose it’s no coincidence that the California Climate Change Center and Center for Clean Air Policy reports just came out.

What I find interesting about this executive order is that Governor Schwarzenegger has effectively declared climate change a threat to the state’s economy and future well-being. Which is a roundabout way of saying climate change is a huge opportunity. As I tend to think (and as others have said), as California goes, so goes the nation. Or as Warren Buffet has said: “If California has trouble, the country has troubles. If California prospers, the country prospers.”

As the LA Times says:

California is one of the 10 largest economies in the world and the 12th-largest producer of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are byproducts of industry, agriculture and motor vehicle use.

One benefit of working on this thesis has been my shift in mindset: threats are now opportunities. Silicon Valley tech might be big, but innovation related to climate change action will be even bigger and certainly more diverse.

This San Francisco Chronicle article details how Governor Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency to speed repairs of levees in California. In this post I’m not so concerned with the accusations that this is a way to sidestep environmental requirements during the repair process. Rather, I’m interested in the following quote emphasis mine:

Previously, the corps of engineers in Sacramento has said that it doesn’t declare an emergency to speed deferred maintenance. Emergencies are called to “prevent or reduce imminent risk of life, health, property or severe economic loss.”

The question is when to declare an emergency over infrastructure, or more broadly, long-term concerns. In the short-term-focused world of politics, it’s quite natural to defer and defer and defer decisions, especially ones which carry political heat. Yet at some point these issues must be dealt with. And the above quote reveals quite clearly how the government would deal with most problems.

BBC has been producing some fascinating shows recently. The latest offering is Ethical Man, where reporter Justin Rowlatt will attempt to live an ethical lifestyle for an entire year.

The first episode is available online, and features a conversation at the end of the program weighing the benefits of individual action against collective action (such as legislation). In my opinion, it comes down to short-term versus long-term approaches, with the idea that the two approaches complement one another. As is said in the program, if you want to make a difference, there’s one surefire way of doing so: changing your own behavior.

Another point is that there are no definite answers. We’re dealing with the difficult realm of ethics (as the title of the show indicates) and perhaps what’s difficult about ethics is that there are no good guys and bad guys. Because this is completely counter to what television would so often lead us to believe, I’m curious as to how they will deal with this particular aspect.

Turns out the Center for Climate Change in Berkeley wasn’t the only group studying the effects of action on climate change for California’s economy. The Center for Clean Air Policy (CCAP) also recently published a report (.pdf) outlining some of the benefits California can achieve by taking action on climate change.

...this study finds that carbon reductions sufficient to meet the Governor’s targets can be achieved at no net cost to consumers and likely at a net benefit in both 2010 and 2020. my emphasis

What I find interesting is that while CCAP originally used $30 per metric ton as a cutoff for determining the most attractive measures, they ultimately arrived at figures way below $30: $5.25 per ton and $5.77 per ton in 2010 and 2020, respectively. The reason is even more interesting:

A significant portion of the measures have a negative cost (e.g., the economic benefits of implementing the measure exceed the economic costs.). ... An even larger portion of the measures identified have a cost between zero and $10 per metric ton CO₂e.

While I’m not going to exclaim how wonderful these results are and jump on the bandwagon without thinking twice, I do think these results constitute a significant response to Bush’s excuse for not signing the Kyoto Protocol: “For America, complying with those mandates would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases.”

NRDC estimates the expected savings to consumers from energy efficiency the State of California are expected to result in aggregate savings of nearly $527 million in 2010.

I was curious about what $527 million can get you these days. Turns out that it’ll get you a little less than three days in Iraq at $122,820 per minute.

Why is transportation such a big issue? The Global Toothbrush on Spiegel Online tracks the production of a toothbrush, with a specific (and harsh) focus on the consequences of globalization.

Personally, I was shocked to read that from their production to their final assembly, “the components have traveled a full 27,880 kilometers, two thirds of the Earth’s circumference.”

All that mileage for an electronic toothbrush, which one could argue isn’t even all that necessary: what’s wrong with a manually-powered toothbrush?

Granted, ordinary toothbrushes aren’t that great either (the used-up bristles are thrown out with a perfectly useable handle, which constitutes the majority of the material), but according to the article, each electronic toothbrush has 32 components, produced at 12 locations in five time zones by forty-five hundred employees in ten countries.

Wow.

The California Climate Change Center at the University of California at Berkeley recently released Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in California. The report analyzes the risks to California posed by climate change and the opportunities present within those risks.

I’m going to crib directly from the executive summary because the following points are incredibly relevant for my thesis:

Climate action in California can yield net gains for the state economy, increasing growth and creating jobs. Preliminary modeling indicates that just eight policies that were analyzed in detail can achieve almost half of the Governor’s 2020 targets while increasing Gross State Product by about $60 billion and creating over 20,000 new jobs.

While $60 billion is a lot, the model isn’t complete: “We also know that there are many more low-cost options for the 2020 goals that are not included in the scenarios evaluated here by the BEAR model.” In fact, the model factored in only eight policies—if the economic gains outweigh the costs of the other twenty-two policies which weren’t included in the study, then that $60 billion gain would likely be much higher.

There are numerous additional climate action initiatives beyond those that have been modeled, many of which will also improve California’s economy. The analysis thus far indicates that California can likely reach the Governor’s 2020 targets with a net gain for the state economy.

I’m not as interested in the part about reaching the governor’s targets as I am in the part about “net gain for the state economy.” My feeling is that the more this point is hammered home, the more people will jump on the energy efficiency bandwagon. Positioning the issue of climate change as an issue only environmentalists care about is, in the end, not a very smart strategy. Nobody likes to be called an enemy of the environment.

However, everyone likes to make money—this was something Aram and Alejandro made clear in their service design presentation last year when they said that McDonalds never saw itself as selling burgers forever. It will sell whatever makes money. It’s a business. And in my opinion, smart environmentalists will use this tendency to their advantage by aligning and positioning their goals with those of big business. It’s not about selling out: it’s about communication.

After a server change and the holidays, the new IDII site is up (again). You can check things out at: Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milano

Not much is going on with the site right now because our energies are directed towards thesis work. But you should definitely check out IDII Live, which is a live collection of the latest blog posts by IDII students.

Somewhat tangential to my thesis, but interesting nonetheless, a Salon.com article (Reverse imperialism) describes a phenomena where companies in the developing world are buying companies in the developed world.

The emerging economies of the world are beginning to feature their own internationally aggressive corporate entities, and they are using the capital that’s been poured into them to purchase strategic assets in the developed world.

While this creates a much greater level of international interconnectedness among companies (which can be seen as either good or bad), the relevance to sustainability is the focus on the long-term:

The Journal does offer one ray of hope about the development: “companies from developing nations are tending to focus on deals with a longer-term view to potential profits. Many don’t have the same shareholder pressure to show quarterly profit growth as do publicly held companies in the U.S. and Europe.”

In other words, they are empowered to make sensible decisions for long-term economic health, rather than quick fixes to boost stock prices. One could argue that the U.S. in particular could use a solid dose of that kind of thinking. So bring on the Brazilians and the Indians and the Chinese. If we can’t build up our own economy, maybe they can.

I’m not sure that an additional level of complexity in world markets is necessarily a good thing. Even more to the point, I think there is more to be gained from a conscious shift in values within the US economy than having those values forced on US companies from external parties. Think of it as being along the lines of “you can give a man a fish, or you can teach him how to fish.”

The ultimate question, though, is how long it will take to realize such a shift in values. And I suppose there is some benefit to injecting a new philosophy into the market from external parties, with the hope that other companies within that market will eventually come around. The problem I see is that short-term profits are attractive, and if valuation systems don’t shift to effectively recognize alternate (i.e.: long-term) valuations, those holding long-term views could be unfairly punished in the market.