A Sustainable Train of Thought

That would be billions of dollars. One amount is how much the United States of America has annually spent on programs or initiatives which address global warming (to be fair, they qualify the amount with “almost”). One amount is this year’s annual budget request from the Pentagon. Or maybe it does. Not that a couple of misplaced billions here or there makes that much of a difference I suppose¹.

Guess which story was on Page A1 of the New York Times today? Guess which story was on Page A11 of the New York Times today?

Pithy Bush Administration apologist quote:

Administration officials asserted Friday that the United States had played a leading role in studying and combating climate change, in part by an investment of an average of almost $5 billion a year for the past six years in research and tax incentives for new technologies.

At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of unilateral limits on emissions. “We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution,” he said.

The United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other country.

I’m not even going to touch the Pentagon budget requests, which apparently include funding for such dubious projects as the so-called Missile Shield. I’d like to know how a missile shield is going to protect us from a 23-inch rise in sea levels, which, by the way, is considered a conservative estimate. Some estimates now put rising sea-levels at anywhere from 12 to 20 FEET.

Al Gore showed the effects of a 20 foot rise in sea levels in An Inconvenient Truth which, if you remember, depicted quite a bit of New York City underwater.

Thanks Missile Shield!

Ironically (if one can even use such a term when discussing these matters), the science upon which this latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is based may already be out of date:

Dr. Shindell, who emphasized that he was speaking as an individual, said, “The melting of Greenland has been accelerating so incredibly rapidly that the I.P.C.C. report will already be out of date in predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much worse than is predicted in the I.P.C.C. report.”

The big question now is whether we can afford to wait another two years until the Bush regime is over before taking action.

“Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high scientific confidence in this work — this is real, this is real, this is real,” said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a professor at Pennsylvania State University. “So now act, the ball’s back in your court.”

¹ (For the record, the Bush Administration is requesting $93 billion on top of the Pentagon request to support the war in Iraq.)

It was only a matter of time…

“In a case echoing the landmark litigation against tobacco and fast food companies, California is suing the car giants for damages flowing from climate change.” — The Age

The lawsuit claims “damages related to such issues as melting snow, rising sea levels, increased ozone depletion and bushfires.” Interestingly, there is no compensation amount listed, which in itself will be a difficult task to assess: how do you calculate the cost of melting snow, rising sea levels, increased ozone depletion, and bushfires?

I’m very curious to see how this plays out.

I’ve spent plenty of time in my youth mowing lawns, and I always found electric lawnmowers rather odd. Partly because of the potential to mow over your extension cord, which didn’t seem too safe to me, and partly because I always had trouble taking them seriously.

To mow a lawn you need a motor, and motors on lawnmowers should be loud and smelly. Electric lawnmowers sounded at most like a swarm of angry bees buzzing about. Lawnmowers should also be heavy and made of metal—I’ve seen what the professionals use (those riding lawnmowers) and they’re never electric or plastic. As far as I could tell, electric lawnmowers were always made of plastic and thus just came across as more toy than tool.

I suppose you could apply similar logic to the perception of electric cars versus gasoline-powered cars. But that’s another story, and I’m writing this post because of an email I received from Amazon.com today, touting “Eco-Friendly Cordless Lawn Care Tools”. Naturally, I was intrigued, if not a little skeptical. The one part which jumped out at me:

As a valued Amazon.com customer interested in the environment, you might be interested in zero-emission electric trimmers and edgers. Best of all, you never have to hassle with oil and gas again.

If that’s not an abuse of the word “zero emissions” then I don’t know what is. Perhaps if you apply the term to the specific point of use, then yes, physically the object isn’t emitting anything. But that electricity powering the tool is coming from somewhere, and emissions were certainly involved in creating the plastics and components of the tools, their assembly, and their transportation and delivery.

Now, I know that small engines like lawnmowers and snowmobiles and so forth are actually pretty bad in terms of emissions, mainly because they’re not as regulated as vehicle engines. So in that sense I can see how it would be better to use electric lawn-care equipment. But something bothers me about the claim of “zero emissions” and I think it’s the cavalier omission of time in that statement.

Maybe I’m just more tuned into this kind of analysis because of my thesis work and general frame of mind, but then again language usage is really important and we really need to be clear on what exactly we’re talking about when we use terms like “zero emissions”.

A silly, simple solution would be to plant trees to cover the amount of lifetime emissions associated with the creation and use of the lawnmower. Better still would be a redesign which systemically eliminates emissions from the production, delivery, use, and disposal phases.

Quick post as I’m in the midst of preparing stuff for our exhibition at Salone del Mobile.

As I’ve mentioned before, I presented a concept during the review before Christmas which involved composting. The idea was to close the loop between consumers and farmers (consumers and producers), with supermarkets as intermediaries. (I cover this concept in greater detail in my thesis report.)

Sydney just sent me an article from Treehugger which describes a service currently running in San Francisco which takes food waste (primarily from restaurants) and turns it into compost which is resold to farmers.

My concept looked more at the individual’s contribution, and at the time I wasn’t looking at regulation or involving other parties…my focus was perhaps too narrowly aimed at supermarkets and only supermarkets. I’ve since opened things up in terms of stakeholders—while it may be hard to justify a supermarket’s incentives for collecting compost, a city can certainly benefit from such practices, and private companies would definitely be willing participants.

Another difference is that the actual composting in San Francisco occurs in Vacaville, whereas in my concept each individual was composting in their home. I think there would need to be an intense look at whether centralized methods of composting are better than individual composting, both in terms of convenience and in terms of material usage, and such things as transportation costs and emissions.

I think in the end, however, I wasn’t really interested in composting per se as I was the motivations for the individual to participate within such a system. It’s one thing if you have a recycling container which you dump things into: that’s easy enough to accommodate in your life. What’s harder is to get a sense of contribution and the role you play within the larger system and community. For those of us who get personal satisfaction from doing good, it’s enough to know you’re doing the right thing. But for others, a little more incentive and visibility is perhaps warranted.

I was surprised to find this article by The Independent on Google News, but it looks like a plan to incorporate a standardized, easy-to-read labeling system on foods in the UK has hit some snags. Called the “traffic light” food labeling system, the national scheme aims to present shoppers with clear nutritional information.

[The Food Standards Agency] confirmed that it was recommending the food industry to put red, amber and green warning signs on processed foods to indicate high, medium or low levels of fat, saturated fat, salt and sugar on ready meals, pizzas, breakfast cereals and sandwiches.

Tesco, one of the major supermarkets in England, has refused to implement the system, as have several other food manufacturers. (As an aside, doesn’t the phrase “food manufacturer” sound odd? Does a baker manufacture bread?)

What I find interesting is that the reason for their refusal lies in something simple, as the Telegraph article points out:

The industry hit back, claiming it had “listened to customers” and that traffic light labels were “confusing”. They “demonised” food because consumers would read a red light as “don’t eat this”.

The food industry has a point. First, complex problems generally can’t be summarized within a simplistic model. As Fabio Sergio was telling us in this last Applied Dreams: “Simplicity, not simplistic” Second, I’d agree with their assessment of the warning label, although I think the information the labels impart is important from the perspective of the shopper. I for one would like to know if I should eat one sandwich instead of another, but of course the companies which manufacture these foods don’t want you to buy something else…

It would seem that the food industry would do well to look at the car industry for examples of how innovation leadership can reap rewards. Of course like many things that’s easy for me to say and much harder to do. But unless we start thinking about making some serious changes to our infrastructure (energy, transport, food, etc.), we’re going to have some problems in the future.

Energy efficiency has proven to be a concern for Google. A new report from Morgan Stanley points to Google purchasing AMD chips for near-term replacement needs when servicing its estimated 200,000 or more servers.

The rationale behind the switch from Intel:

There he discussed the importance of power-efficiency in servers, stating that in some cases simply switching on server hardware and running it for its three-year lifetime can cost a company half as much as it paid for the hardware in electricity fees…

It’s a bit of a convoluted way of saying what’s been said before, namely, that over the lifetime of the computer hardware, the cost of power to run the hardware may someday be much higher than the cost of the hardware.

The question ultimately comes down to “work per watt” and is something I’ve touched on before.

Again, going through some older posts I never got around to posting…

An older Treehugger post talks about IKEA and its foray into vermiculture. While the idea of mobile “worm-mobiles” is intriguing, I tend to think the worm-farms have been set up in trucks because they can easily be removed from the premises if the trial doesn’t work out. At any rate, it’s interesting to see how large corporations can be proactive too.

It is, of course, no surprise that IKEA is interested in environmentally-friendly practices. They are proponents of The Natural Step and are a big reason so many people use compact fluorescent light-bulbs.

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.

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.

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.