Getting to Green

Engineering behavior

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:29:34 GMT

For years now, I've used Microsoft Office, running on Microsoft Windows. And for years, every time I've wanted to do something out of the ordinary -- something I don't do often, something I have to think about how to do -- I've spat and fumed about how Microsoft manages to hide simple functions deep inside complex menu structures. I have heard more than once that MS designs its Office menus not to make actual use easy and intuitive, but to make software demonstrations a bit more impressive. If that's true, it's not quite as bad as the story behind the QWERTY keyboard design -- intentionally created so that usage speed wouldn't overwhelm 19th-century mechanical capabilities, but it's at least somewhat close.

I got a pleasant surprise (if a small one) when I started using my new computer at work. I've used pretty much every version of MS Windows from 3.0 on, and while they sometimes got better they never got good. One of the things I disliked about Vista -- the almost-newest Windows flavor -- was that it was easy to put the computer to sleep, and harder (took more attention) to turn it off. Since one of the things I preach to employees at Greenback U is to turn their computers actually off if they're going to be away from their desks for more than about an hour, I found the sleep-mode-encouraging interface design unhelpful.

Thus, one of the first things I noticed about Windows 7 (the most recent flavor) was that the easy choice is now to turn the thing off, and it's putting it to sleep that requires extra attention. My tech people tell me that Windows 7's sleep mode is far more energy-efficient than Vista's sleep mode was (although I haven't seen numbers on that yet), but "off" is still better than "asleep", and they say that the new "off" mode also uses less electricity than the old "off" mode did. (Modern PCs, even when they're supposedly entirely off, still draw a little bit of current. The only way to stop that entirely is to cut off power upstream of the PC itself. A common way to do that is to pull the plug or switch off the power strip.)

So, specific numbers aside, the important principle here is that the software is designed to make the more sustainable behavior the easier one to do. That's a lesson a lot of product designers could take to heart. Engineer for human laziness and you'll usually get the behavior you expect.

Self-winding cellphones

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:00:19 GMT

It's not in production yet, but Nokia was recently awarded a patent for a cellphone that recharges its own battery, with no electrical connection required.

The thing is built with most of its innards able to move slightly within its case. Between aforementioned innards and the case itself are piezocrystals which, when compressed, put out a small electrical charge. It's not a lot on any single compression, but if you keep the thing in your pocket(book) or in a holster, so that it moves when you do, it's intended to be enough to keep the battery charged.

What this reminds me of is the original self-winding wristwatches. Before the dawn of recorded history, people had to actually remember to wind their watches on a regular basis (imagine!). Then came the self-winding watch which, if you wore it on your wrist and were normally active, used the impetus from your arm motions to incrementally recompress its own mainspring. The Nokia technology is entirely different, but the principal is the same -- capture energy which is being expended anyway in the normal course of events, and apply it to powering an existing application.

That's an important principal in terms of optimizing energy efficiency. Many devices waste a lot of energy (often exhausted as heat, but not always). If we can think outside our traditional parsimonious design models, we can surely find many more ways to utilize energy (often in forms we're not used to thinking about) that's currently going to waste. Cogeneration is a classic example, perhaps even micro-cogeneration powered by exhaust heat from industrial equipment or motor vehicles.

Staying within the consumer electronics sector, Nokia has set an example that lots of firms should be able to follow. Consumer electronics are responsible for a large portion of the increase in electrical use in North America over the past couple of decades. For stationary devices, a good portion of this can be eliminated by use of smart surge suppressors/power strips. But more and more electronic devices are becoming "personal" in the sense of mobile. And for that set of applications, something akin to the Nokia approach seems very attractive.

You can't beat city hall

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:26:35 GMT

In order to address a number of Greenback U's sustainability issues, it's necessary that the campus work hand-in-hand with local governments. This was, I'm sure, part of the intent of focusing on higher education through vehicles like the ACUPCC.

For instance, we can't do a whole lot about Greenback's accessibility via public transit unless we get the city, many of the surrounding towns, the county and the local transit district on board.

Similarly, to restrict campus vehicular traffic or facilitate bicycle access, we need to get the highway and traffic control departments from all local municipalities to reach at least a working consensus.

Want to do something about sewer (storm or sanitary)? Gotta talk to the sewer district, and probably the water department.

About waste management? The county refuse and recycling authority and (if it's going on public roads) the highway department.

Want to compost on campus? Refuse and recycling, plus public health.

On and on it goes.

Part of being located in the Northeast is that local government is never something that occurs in the singular. Each municipality is about the size of a bed sheet, and then gets overlapped with some combination of specialized service (water, sewer, fire, transit, etc.) districts. Just figuring out what you've got to figure out is a full-time job. But, at least, it's an aspect of the job which I had anticipated.

What I hadn't anticipated -- although I probably should have -- is that for local municipal governments, "long range planning" refers to anything that happens after lunch. The specialized service districts, while each one jealously guards its own prerogatives and independence, are able to make and implement long-term plans and, indeed, often exist primarily for that purpose. Local municipal governments, on the other hand, can't commit to anything farther in the future than the next election cycle. (Or, if they do commit, it seems the agreement generally isn't worth very much.)

So I'm beginning to understand one of the advantages I have, working at Greenback (or, truth be told, probably any university). Getting all the players on side is a challenge, and establishing actual momentum takes a lot of time and effort, but at least the planning horizons are useful. Talk about setting a goal four or five decades into the future, and people don't find that inconceivable. Work back from that long-term goal to some shorter-term objectives and milestones, and people see (and believe) how it all fits together. Get all the pieces (funding, logistics, governance) in place, and things can actually start to happen. Not quickly, and not easily, but for the long term.

So if you can't beat city hall, maybe you can beat Old Main. And Old Main, with support from the appropriate unelected government agencies, might just be able to outflank city hall in the long run.

Treehugger meets treestabbers

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:01:32 GMT

A local crew of treestabbers has been around my place fairly regularly for the past week. And that's OK with me.

The stabbers in question are children of a neighbor of mine. They"stab" my sugar maples with steel taps connected to plastic tubes which run into covered buckets, collecting sap to make maple syrup. When sugaring season is over, we put a dab of tree paint on each puncture wound. The trees don't seem to mind at all.

These kids are growing up on the farm across the road from mine, and down a bit.Their family has been farming for generations; none of them has any expectation of ever having to "work off" (as in "off the farm"). They expect their descendants to farm for generations hence. And to sugar -- sugaring is one of the traditional ways farm families augment their incomes in this part of the country.

But the truth is, maple sugaring in the northeastern United States is a dying trade. Seasons are shortening. Yields are down. And it's only going to get worse. As our winters get milder (in temperature if not in wind and snowfall) and our springs get warmer faster, the sap just doesn't flow the way it used to. I've heard foresters predict that, within a generation or two, the sugaring trade will have moved entirely north of the border into Canada.

I've had Canadian maple syrup. I can't tell it from the local product. It's almost like the trees don't care what flag flies above the sugarhouse or even what language the sap-boilers speak. To me, it doesn't really matter so long as I don't have to cover my waffles in that evil corn syrup stuff (not that I'm opinionated on the subject, or anything!).

But it matters to those kids. Or it will, when they learn about it. It won't much affect them this year or next, and they're too young to worry their heads about what comes after that. So I didn't tell them.

Does that make me a tree-stabber-hugger?

Environmental Avatar?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:36:04 GMT

Life is pretty busy right now, both personally and professionally. It's not that I don't have time to write a post, it's more like I don't have time/attention to sort out in my own head what I want to write. Then along comes something that needs little or no sorting, at least in its interrogative incarnation.

According to Grist (one of the myriad newsletters to hit my in-box every day), James Cameron addressed a Hollywood fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. During his remarks, he claimed (with characteristic humility) to be the greatest environmental film director of all time.

Now I'll be the first to acknowledge that Avatar was about the environment, but only on the same level that The Thirty-Nine Steps was about aircraft engine design. More emotional impact, perhaps, but as I was walking out of the movie theater, I don't remember anyone chattering about how they needed to run right out and save the environment.

So the question is: will the environmental McGuffen in Avatar have any effect on people's perceptions in the long term? The short term? Even the instant?

And more seriously -- since popular fiction has a significant impact on popular perception, can any commercially successful movie/television show/novel (graphic or otherwise) really help firm up people's positive perceptions of sustainability, or is the very concept of huge commercial success just to antithetical for that to work? If it could work, what would it have to include? Look like? Feel like?

'Tis a puzzlement.

Can comedy save us?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:26:36 GMT

Intelligence is overrated (see Al Capp's extensive work on the subject of "hoomin stoopidity").

Outrage has been co-opted and merged with ignorance and arrogance.

Irony is dead.

Comedy may be our last hope.

Watch this, then frame your answer.

I have seen the face of evil . . .

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:02:36 GMT

. . . and it is, in truth, apparently banal.

Oh, it's kind of new-tech, in a 21st century social-networking-becomes-social-engineering sort of way. And I suspect that college students and relatively recent grads are at the center of its target demographic.

The spawn of the Devil, in all its Hellboy-meets-Hello-Kitty cuteness, can be yours at blippy.com.

Funded, in large part, by Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures (think "Twitter") and Ron Conway, and headed by Philip Kaplan (known, randomly I'm sure, as "pud"), Blippy intends to take what Twitter did with the question "what are you doing right now?" and apply it to the question "what are you buying right now?" It works by capturing and sharing credit card transaction data, so users don't even have to remember to tweet (blip? bleep?) to participate. They just register their credit cards and, from that point on, everything happens automagically.

The banality of the Blippy business plan is that, in a society where participation equals consumption, the social streaming of purchase transactions is a logical next step. We are no longer known by the company we keep, nor by what we do, but by what we buy (albeit increasingly useless and short-lived stuff from an ever-decreasing number of suppliers). With Blippy, I don't have to worry about achieving my 15 minutes of fame -- my purchase from Overstock.com can achieve 15 milliseconds of that fame for me!

That characterization of why a consumer might participate is probably a tad cynical, but also probably not far off the mark. Why a retailer would participate is rather more obvious. Retailers hope to stimulate copy-cat or "me, too!" purchases. Like unto (but an order of magnitude advanced from) the candies and weight-loss booklets located in the check-out lane, retailers hope Blippy will trigger impulse buying. And the wonder of it is, it doesn't even have to be your impulse!

In a society whose model of economic growth is dependent on over-leveraged consumerism (the fact that consumer debt is once again expanding was trumpeted as a sign of economic recovery), the potential for Blippy to generate "shareholder value" seems considerable. Whether it truly benefits society (much less ecology) to sprinkle this accelerant on the embers of our recently-overheated economic firebox is another question. After all, a recent (albeit unpublished) UN report estimated that one-third of all major corporate profits come as a result of inflicting environmental damage with impunity.

Who knows? If someone can just come up with an effective way to shift purchasing more toward low-value short-lived vicarious impulse items (truly the crack cocaine of the consumer culture), maybe we can get the proportion up to one-half. And Blippy might just be that way!

Green business travel (?)

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:24:47 GMT

Before I came to work at Greenback, I used to travel on business quite a lot. Never much cared for it, and was happy to give it up.

Or, at least, to give it up as much as I could. Working for a University, it's pretty much a requirement to go to the occasional conference. Sometimes you present, sometimes you just sit and listen, but pretty much every time you meet people you wouldn't otherwise get to know. And, in a field which evolves as rapidly as "sustainable practices" does, those folks almost always know something you haven't yet had the opportunity (or the need) to figure out for yourself, yet.

My wife. is also in a field where occasional conference attendance is a necessity. Unlike me, she has little opportunity to pick and choose. Sometimes, a conference is the only one of its kind in a particular year. And on occasion, she'll get told flat out by her granting agency that attendance is mandatory.

Mrs. R. was recently required to attend a conference in mid-town Manhattan. It was a 2-day affair, so the best she could do was to stay over only one night in a hotel. She reports that the (major chain) hotel room was too big (although not as big as in some other cities) and over-heated. She also reports spending $30.00 to get a burger and fries for dinner.

Now, I'm not adverse to spending $30.00 on dinner when I travel, but I do try to get something healthier than a burger and fries for my money. And I recognize that mid-town Manhattan isn't Backboro. (Around here, you typically get a very nice three-course meal for that price.) But I was struck by the fact that, given her meeting location, she really didn't seem to have a lot of better options. A consumption level higher than necessary or even desired was (as far as she could determine) the only game in town.

So casting my mind back to my days on the road, I got to wondering -- is there a market niche for travelers who want to be as green as possible? (That's a different question from whether there's a niche serving travelers who want to be told they're behaving sustainably and are willing to spend luxury prices for the privilege.) And since modest rooms at modest prices are fairly available at the metropolitan perimeter, this question pretty much refers to center-city sorts of locations.

In many cities, if I have sufficient time to plan, I can find a small -- usually, older -- hotel in a slightly less fashionable part of town where the room is smaller, the HVAC more modest, and the surrounding restaurants frequented by locals not on expense accounts. But what if my planning time is short? What if I need to be in (or to be able quickly and reliably and efficiently to get to) a high-rent location? What if it's a city with which I'm unfamiliar?

It would just seem to me that a chain of something along the lines of the commercial hotels of a half-century ago -- less posh than today's major chains, but operating on maybe two-thirds the energy per overnight stay, still conveniently located, and providing access to healthy meals realistically priced -- could do a land-office business. Corporate/government bean-counters would certainly approve, small entrepreneurs might go for it in a big way, sustainability offices would try to get it written into travel policies. And "sleep green" might even turn out to be a successful marketing approach.

"It's not just cheap, it's more sustainable." Has a nice sort of ring to it (or am I nuts?).

PS to anyone who has done a lot of business travel recently -- does such an option already exist?

Managing to change

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:41:03 GMT

According to the web newsletter Environmental Leader, the British consulting firm Verdantix has just published a report describing four strategies to achieve world-class carbon management. (Carbon management, while not synonymous with sustainability by any means, does address a large portion of the environmental sustainability problem.)

Three of the four are predictable, in terms of "best strategic practices" lists put out by consulting firms -- strong governance, clear strategy, integrated technology. But the fourth strategy, while still somewhat obvious, might have some interesting implications for colleges and universities:

"Design cross-functional process changes across energy, operations and finance."

Personally, I would have preferred the action verb "implement" rather than "design", but the rest of the statement looks pretty good.

Process changes. Change your processes. Don't do the same things the same way because, if you do, you'll continue to get the same results. Don't just be willing to consider change, expect to change. Demand change. Don't take "no" for an answer.

Cross-functional process changes. Meaning, changes that affect multiple operating departments. Academic affairs and student affairs and business affairs, all affected by the same change.

Changes across energy, operations and finance. It's not just an energy question. Changing the lighting, or buying more renewably-generated electricity won't do it. Operations -- what we do, where we do it, when we do it, for whom we do it -- can't stay the same. Neither can how we charge for what we do -- how we charge our students, how we allocate internal charges.

And if there's a single biggest implication of this report as advertised (and I have only the advertisements -- I can't swing the 300 pounds sterling to purchase the actual report (all donations gratefully accepted)) -- it's in the area of internal measurement, internal allocation, internal finance. If universities expect their administrative departments to operate the campus on significantly less energy, they're going to have to incent the academic departments to accept changes in schedule, and in resource utilization. The only proven method for achieving that incentive is to charge the academic departments for space used on an actual (not pro-rated) basis. When they pay the bills (and internal pricing can be adjusted to achieve results desired), the academic departments at Greenback become willing to consider doing expensive things differently. When the savings accrue to their departmental budgets, the unthinkable (like Friday afternoon classes) sometimes becomes a little less so.

Charging for campus facilities on an actual utilization basis requires a level of metering and measurement beyond what most campuses have in place. New meters need to be installed for electricity, steam, natural gas, water, whatever. The meters need to be able to determine not just how much of a resource was consumed, but where it was consumed and -- sometimes -- when it was consumed. "Good enough to pay the bills" is a higher standard when there are more bills to pay, and they have to be calculated with more precision. You can't manage what you can't measure, so we need to be serious about how well we can measure energy utilization.

Many of the meters can be "virtual", and most of them should report their readings regularly and automatically to a central data repository (remember the bit about integrated technology). On our campus, the metering enhancements won't be cheap, but they won't be prohibitively expensive, either. And they're a key enabling technology. Strategically, tactically, and operationally.

NPR lies artfully

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:27:10 GMT

Mark Twain, I believe, once wrote that there are two ways of lying artfully -- telling the truth but not the whole truth, and telling the whole truth but telling it in such a manner that your audience believes you're lying. A story on NPR this morning pretty well accomplished the latter.

Using the recent snowstorms in Washington, DC as a hook, the item was titled "Get This: Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow." (Of course, titles aren't broadcast on the radio. To get the title, you have to go to the website.) Taken absolutely straight, the story refuted current silliness about how winter storms contradict scientific evidence of climate change. But it was hard to take the story absolutely straight, because it wasn't presented anywhere near straight. The overall flavor reminded me of nothing so much as the technique my mother refers to as "damning with faint praise."

The opening line was, "With snow blanketing much of the country, the topic of global warming has become the butt of jokes." But the story wasn't really about the jokes, and it never came right out and said that the jokes were based on ignorance. In fact, the strongest statement it contained was that "For scientists who study the climate, it's all a bit much. They're trying to dig out. Most don't see a contradiction between a warming world and lots of snow."

Ummm . . . let me get this right -- the scientists have been snowed under but most of them don't see a contradiction in that? No contradiction? How about simply reporting that climate scientists have, in fact, been for years predicting increased snowfall in coastal areas? Not only does this winter not contradict climate science, it positively corroborates it! And "most"? Can anyone name three scientists who actually study the climate and who do see such a contradiction??

And that opening to the story was no aberation. After soft-pedaling through the substance, the reporter ended with the following:

"In [a warming] climate, you will have more frequent extreme events, heat waves and so on, but again, none of those individual events is proof itself that climate is changing," [a weather blogger] says.

Climate scientists say they can't prove any single weather event is due to climate change. Thus, they say, Hurricane Katrina or the heat wave in Vancouver that's dogging the Winter Olympics isn't proof that climate change is happening. Nor can southern and eastern snowstorms prove that it's not.

So there's the bottom line -- the memory the audience will be left with. Southern and eastern snowstorms can't prove that climate change isn't happening. Implication: it might not be, but we'll need more than a few snowstorms to seal the verdict. The whole thing reminds me of an Eddie Izzard routine where he wryly demonstrates the power of visual imagery trumping verbiage -- he makes a statement which might or might not be true, then alternates between shaking and nodding his head . . . no, I don't mean it . . . yes, I do . . no, I really don't . . .

Wry comedy is hardly one of the qualities I look for in a morning "news" program.

For a far more informative take on the same subject, I was glad to see Bill McKibben's piece in The Washington Post. Quoting the same blogger and citing the same events, McKibben managed to leave his audience less confused, not more. Who knows, maybe someone at NPR reads the Post. And, if so, maybe they'll learn something.

Dissing equilibrium

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:18:50 GMT

I was talking to an economist this week. (She's not an environmental economist -- I don't know whether that would have made a difference or not.) The topic was the dependency of economic activity on a supply of natural resources. I was able to negotiate an expansion of the definition of "resources" to include sinks as well as sources, but the discussion still didn't get very far.

Whether it was the root cause of our communication problem or merely a symptom, I noticed that she kept coming back to the concept (or at least the term), "equilibrium".

Now I've studied enough economics to place the point of equilibrium at the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve, but I don't see how the concept is relevant to a discussion of resource utilization when the resource in question is treated as cost-free and infinitely available. For natural resources like iron ore, I can imaging an equilibrium price (at least temporarily). For natural resources like the atmosphere, I simply can't.

More to the point, I don't see the use.

I could be wrong here, but I got the impression that my interlocutor was considering the economy (national, global, or otherwise) as a simple closed system which could be equilibrated by proper management of its internal pieces. If so, maybe that's the root of our disconnect, because I've never considered it such.

To my mind, an economy is a subsystem of a society. And a society is a participant in -- and therefore a subsystem of -- an ecosphere. The higher level systems set the conditions in which the subsystems must operate. Subsystems can affect the status of their supersystems, but not with impunity. Higher level systems tend -- over time -- to be more stable than their components. Indeed, one of the ways higher level systems achieve that stability and survival is by sacrificing components to save the whole. Thus, the question for an economy (and a society) is not whether equilibrium can be attained (or even identified), it's how to live and operate within constraints imposed at a higher level.

That's one of the reasons why I can't begin to understand arguments along the lines of "we can't afford to mitigate (much less reverse) climate change -- it would put too great a burden on our economy." It's also probably one of the reasons why I don't put knowledge of which urban neighborhood to stay out of after dark on the same level as understanding the forces of nature. (Neighborhoods are temporary. Nature, in some form, is forever.)

The economist in question is tenured, so I suspect she's very good at her specialty. But, like so many faculty members, I can't help thinking that she's missing the bigger picture. And I can't help hoping she doesn't pass that myopia on to too many students. ("Too many", like the term "more", sometimes means "any".)

Watch more commercials

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:57:57 GMT

OK, you got me. If pretty much the only TV I watch is an occasional movie on HBO, then once again "more" translates into "any". Don't send the language police after me, send the Green Police, instead.

In fact, I wouldn't even have known about Audi's "Green Police" SuperBowl ad, were it not for this post on Grist, an environmental newsletter. The post includes both an embedded YouTube link and an analytic deconstruction of the ad's message and presumptions. In a nutshell, it suggests that Audi is intending to sell cars that get their drivers environmental "get out of jail free" cards. And for that to work, the target audience must already have internalized the legitimacy -- on some level -- of environmental regulation.

Far be it from me to try to outwit Madison Avenue (or wherever it is the creative types hang out these days), but I wonder whether the marketing geniuses are right on this one. Or, if they're right, are they only right about a narrow target demographic (30-50 year old upper-middle and lower-upper class white males with a tendency toward European cars (read "Euro-culture") but without the money to buy Porsches)?

Other thoughts? Reactions? Questions?

Watch more TV

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:49:48 GMT

OK, I admit it. For me, watching pretty much any TV is watching "more".

But from time to time, there comes along a show -- in this case, a made-for-TV movie -- that truly justifies the existence of the idiot box. "Temple Grandin" is a tour de force. In the movie, which premiered on HBO this past Saturday but will doubtless be re-aired, Claire Danes turns in an Oscar-worthy performance if ever I've seen one. And director Mick Jackson both recreates the America of the 1960's (which has been done before) and creates an impression of how it must be to see the world entirely differently (which, to my knowledge, really hasn't).

Grandin, a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State, is autistic. Her renown comes both from overcoming this challenge and from becoming the world's leading designer of livestock containment and handling systems. The film traces her life from her high school years (with flashbacks to early childhood) through her early breakthroughs and acceptance into the doctoral program at Illinois. More importantly, it shows (not just tells) the viewer how her different way of perceiving the world led to her ability to solve problems other trained professionals didn't even notice existed.

And this is the lesson for all of us. The fact that things have been done a certain way for hundreds of years -- the fact that all the professionals just know that the traditional way is the best way, indeed the only way -- the fact that no one involved perceives any significant downside in the way things are done -- none of these means that significant improvements aren't possible, aren't economically efficient, aren't at some level easy and obvious. People have been handling animals for thousands of years, and one autistic woman showed us how to do it an order of magnitude better. Perhaps, just perhaps, some things we've been doing for far less time can also be improved markedly, if we just ask the right questions.

Sequestration reality check

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:52:21 GMT

The last time I did algebra in these pages, I crashed and burned. But the compulsion, triggered by President Obama's latest proposal that your dollars and mine be invested in making "clean coal" a reality, is just too strong. Plus, I'm a slow learner.

So let's start with some basic facts:

In the USA, coal is burned almost exclusively for the purpose of generating electricity; it puts about 1950 million metric tons of CO2 (or 520 mmt of carbon) into the atmosphere every year.

A metric ton of CO2, at sea level and at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, takes up about 18000 cubic feet. Do the multiplication, and the CO2 that would need to be sequestered (captured and stored) every year to make burning coal a clean process would fill about 35 trillion cubic feet. That's a layer of CO2 which would cover the entire surface of the country (including Alaska, remember) to a depth of about 4 inches. In 9 years, that adds up to three feet. In a century, it's the height of a 3-story building. Across the entire USA. Where and how are we going to store that much stuff? How are we going to be sure that it won't ever escape into the atmosphere? What are we smoking, to be even thinking about this?

Of course, most of the weight and volume of the CO2 comes not from carbon (the coal), but from oxygen (the air). If we could somehow separate the two (strip out the carbon), the oxygen could go back into the atmosphere without creating a problem. Plants do that (transform CO2 into O2 plus hydrocarbons) all the time. An acre of forest converts (depending on a number of variables) enough CO2 to create between one and two metric tons of carbon per year. So, what we'd need to create would be a processing capacity equivalent to about 350 million acres of forest. That's about twice the size of Texas, and it would require an amount of energy equivalent to all the sunlight those trees would absorb. And we'd still have to find a way to store the carbon extracted, which would be about equal in volume to all the coal burned to create it.

None of which is to say that the infrastructure and the logistical processes to burn coal and not contribute to global warming can't happen. But it does demonstrate that to make it happen, we'd have to more than trade away the advantage -- low cost -- that's causing our electrical companies to want to burn coal in the first place. "Clean coal" may be technologically feasible (I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying I can't prove a negative), but it's clearly not economically feasible. And it's even more clearly not economically attractive when compared to renewable technologies which are considered "too expensive" today.

I used to do consulting work to a manufacturing company which was known for its engineering culture. In that organization, it was common practice for engineers to low-ball initial cost estimates by an order of magnitude or more, on the basis that "if we told management what it's really going to cost, they'd never let us go forward with the project."

Compared to the proponents of "clean coal", those engineers were entirely scrupulous in their honesty.

In praise of Gordon Gekko

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:02:23 GMT

Today, I got lucky.

It's usually better to be lucky than good (a poker player told me that one). It's always better to be lucky than smart (pure intelligence, if there is such a thing, doesn't correlate particularly well with good outcomes -- luck, if there is such a thing, does). So today must be one of my better days.

I've been pondering the implications of "Global Warming's Six Americas 2009", a report from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. As I mentioned last week, this is an audience segmentation analysis which breaks the American public down into six segments based on their attitudes about climate change -- segments ranging from the Alarmed to the Dismissive.

One of the most obvious conclusions in the report is that the largest category -- those who are Concerned -- contains one in three Americans all by itself. Combine it with those who are Alarmed, and you account for 51 percent of the American public. In a pure democracy, 51% of the population would be enough to decide the issue but, as recent US Senate experience has proven, this isn't a pure democracy and a majority requires more than 60% to be effective. Thus, my focus since my first reading of the report has been on the two categories of individuals who are less than Concerned but still more than Doubtful or Dismissive. The Cautious constitute 19% of the populace, and the Disengaged another 12%. Add that 31% (or even a good portion of it) to the 51% already on board, and you might have enough of a consensus to actually act upon.

The question that's been occupying my mind for the last week, then, has been how to construct a message which would appeal to the Cautious ("Yeah, the climate is probably changing, but let's not rush into this") and the Disengaged ("Climate change? Well yeah, probably. Haven't thought much about it") without alienating the Alarmed or the Concerned. My thoughts had been focusing mainly on the cautionary principle and everyone's hopes and wishes for their grandkids (born or otherwise). I was trying to be good, or at least smart. Then, I got lucky.

This morning, on public radio segment The Environment Report (out of the U of Michigan), I heard the second half of an interview with James Hansen. The mist cleared. Precaution and grandkids aren't bad, but those arguments lack force. The reason the Cautious and the Disengaged are so -- well -- cautious and/or disengaged is that they don't see what's in it for them.

The challenge to those of us concerned with ecological sustainability and minimizing climate change (no one I know is talking about avoiding it any more) is to communicate clearly and simply the reason Americans want their government to take action. The reason can be simple. Gordon Gekko was right. Greed is good.

Hansen was making the point that cap-and-trade is a market-based solution to a societal problem, but it clearly isn't appealling to the very people who preach that market-based solutions cure all ills. There's a disconnect here. And we can't address the disconnect on an intellectual level, because that's not where it exists.

The disconnect exists on an economic level. Established interests are making lots of money the way things are. Those same interests are less likely to make lots of money in a sustainable energy economy. Thus, those interests (with clearly subsidized assistance from Citizens United and presumably unsubsidized assistance from SCOTUS) will continue to spend lots of money to make sure people remain cautious and/or disengaged, so that nothing much changes.

Money is what's keeping this country from addressing climate change. Money is what can cause us to deal with the problem.

One of the issues I've had with most cap-and-trade GHG reduction schemes is that they, in effect, reward the very people and organizations who created the problem in the first place. I can see the political pragmatism that presents, but also the economic pragmatism which says that if you're going to bribe profitable malefactors to change their behavior, you better bring a lot of money.

What Hansen pointed out this morning is that a fossil carbon fee -- imposed at the mine, at the wellhead, and at the port of entry -- could easily generate a whole lot of money. He presumed that it would be implemented gradually, to allow people to modify their behavior and mitigate the impacts. But he estimated that by the time the carbon fee effectively raised the price of a gallon of gasoline by a dollar, it would generate enough money to pay every adult in the US $3000 per year, and every child (up to two children per family) another $1500.

A family of four, then, might spend an additional $1000 a year on gasoline and proportionally more for electricity, heating oil, natural gas, whatever. But they'd be pulling down an additional $9000 per year, some of which should be left over after all the additional costs are paid. And that's without any sort of behavioral change at all.

In fact, a lot of families -- given the opportunity -- will find ways to modify their behaviors, reduce their usage (directly or otherwise) of fossil fuels, and hold on to more of the $9000 annual payout. Corporations would, similarly, adapt. Those which adapted efficiently would make lots of money. Those which didn't, well . . .

But each American family (except, perhaps, the truly richest and most profligate) could come out ahead. Certainly, most of them would expect to. And, in even an impure democracy, financial expectations present powerful political arguments.

Say the prospect of an extra couple thousand a year is enough to sway the Cautious. And it's enough to split the Disengaged right down the middle. That's 25% of the American public, in addition to the 51% who are already on board. Three out of four Americans who would be in favor of doing something about climate change, and who would feel cheated by any government not willing to make that happen.

Now that's a political argument that's so easy to sell you don't have to be lucky. Or good. Or even smart.

Watching trees grow

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:34:39 GMT

One of the questions that Greenback students often pose about carbon dioxide emissions runs along the lines of, "well, if there's more CO2, isn't that good for plants? And aren't plants good for the environment?"

Sometimes the student is merely curious, sometimes (s)he is being intentionally challenging. But the response I like to give is the same, either way. Yes, more CO2 generally tends to stimulate more plant growth among other effects. But not all plant growth is good for the environment. Not all plants are good, not all plants are good in all places, and more growth isn't necessarily better growth.

That we're getting more growth is the subject of a report just issued by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Ecologist Geoffrey Parker led a team of scientists who measured the growth of 55 different plots of mixed hardwoods for 22 years, and their data corroborates increases in CO2 levels, increases in soil and air temperatures, and a longer annual growing season.

That faster growth isn't always a good thing is borne out by differences in maple trees over distance and time. I've always been fond of red maples and sugar maples -- as trees, as syrup sources, and as dimensional lumber. But when I was living in the southern USA, the maples that grew nearby were junk trees -- the wood grew too fast and was, as a result, insufficiently dense. OK to burn, perhaps, but no good as lumber.

Near Greenback, maple sugaring is a traditional pursuit as winter gives way to spring. It's not a major industry, but a lot of farmers supplement their incomes by boiling a lot of sap. It's been that way for generations. It breaks my heart to know that it's on its way out.

A couple of years ago, I saw some signs along the back roads: "Stop global warming. Save our syrup". I haven't seen them recently. Maybe the supply ran out. Or maybe the people who set them out have noticed -- as I have -- that their yields are trending down already. Look -- maple syrup yields vary according to the kind of spring it is; some years the sap seems to run for almost a month, sometimes it's pretty much done in a week. But regardless of season length, yields have been decreasing for probably a decade or more.

Saving our syrup is, in all likelihood, no longer possible. Some day in the future, oil imports may be down but maple syrup imports will be up. That may be a victory for corn syrup producers, perhaps (shudder!), but it might just be enough to get me to stop making pancakes on Sunday mornings. Or to start bringing back gallons of duty-free syrup from Canada on a regular basis. Maybe I'll just cut Sunday breakfasts short, take my coffee out to the shop, and work on that trestle table I'm building. At my age I may see the end of maple sugaring, but at least the lumber will still be dense and strong with a nice open grain.

Yesterday's news

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:17:42 GMT

No, I'm not concerned with what will be (by the time you read this) last night's State of the Union address. I've seen and heard too many of those over the years to have any doubt that the state of our union will be declared to be strong. Realities notwithstanding.

What I'm intrigued by, and sad I didn't know about earlier, is a report out of George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication -- an outfit with which I'll definitely have to become more familiar. Catchily titled "Global Warming's Six Americas 2009" (even though we all know there are only three Americas -- North, South and Central), it breaks US public opinion regarding climate change down according to a six point scale (alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful and dismissive) and provides an analysis of the thoughts and beliefs of each segment.

I'm still working my way through the report's 140 pages (this being the beginning of a semester, I obviously have nothing else to do with my time), but a couple of points have already caught my attention.

First, the two categories at the most convinced/most concerned/most motivated end of the scale account for 51% of the result set (18% alarmed, 33% concerned). This is a truth that too often gets lost in the "one from this side, one from that side" style of what passes for journalism.

Second, the fact that folks in the "dismissive" category both consider themselves very knowledgeable on the subject and admit that they haven't thought much about it. I suspect that this combination is more common than most of us expect, but the quality of the debate might improve if this syndrome were pointed out a bit more often.

Based on reading the introduction and the table of contents, and on reviewing the 55 pages of tables which present the data, I'm looking forward to reading the category analyses. They should prove informative, and knowledge of the patterns described should prove useful.

I just wish I'd discovered the report when it first came out. Demographic analyses don't change as rapidly as the weather, but they do change. And stories about the economy and health care finance have shown a tendency to drown out other concerns. And alarms.

The real mother of invention

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:39:24 GMT

No, not Frank Zappa. Well, maybe Zappa, too, but that's not what I meant.

What I meant was perceived necessity. Not necessity proper, but the perception of it.

If a need is real but no one recognizes it, no invention is stimulated. If a need is imaginary but perceived, invention is likely to occur. It's not the necessity, it's the perception.

Why does that matter? Well, in a recent report from the National Science Board, it was noted that the dominance of US science and engineering is slipping. Not so much that we've gotten worse, but that the rest of the world is catching up.

Part of the reason, I'm sure, is just the maturation of post-secondary science and technology education in the rest of the world. The Indian Institute of Technology, to take a familiar example, is world-class -- it provides better technical education than was available anywhere outside of North America and western Europe only a decade ago. Several Chinese universities aren't far behind. As economic power shifts to Asia, higher education naturally follows. No surprise there, and nothing much to be done about it.

But part of the reason is also that governments and markets outside the USA perceive a number of necessities to which the US government and market accord only grudging acknowledgment. In a nutshell, they take climate change seriously. We don't. We're too wrapped up in life-and-death struggles about the nature of health care finance and other weighty matters. Climate change is, in practical terms, off our national radar screens.

So the other nations of the world perceive a necessity we don't. And they're addressing it, even as we speak. China, for instance, is outstripping the USA as a producer of renewable energy technology. They'll likely outstrip us as a market for renewable energy technology. And they'll make a lot of money (even more than currently) as a result. Worse, China is only one example.

I've long suspected that the US plan for addressing the climate change issue was to wait until it became an immediate crisis, because there's more profit in solving a crisis than in averting one. The flaw in that plan, of course, is that if someone else starts building the solution first, and in larger quantities, then the large profit margins you were hoping for either never eventuate or end up in someone else's bank account.

Or, to paraphrase my inventive mother, be careful what you wish against because someone else might get it.

States and schools and sustainability

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:03:02 GMT

As I drove to campus this morning, my local NPR station was talking about only three subjects -- Haiti, the senatorial election in Massachusetts, and state governments. Some of the coverage of state governments was local, some was from the opposite coast (California). But all of it was related to fiscal crises, and efforts to relieve fiscal crises, and political problems standing in the way of efforts to relieve fiscal crises.

Now the good news about working to achieve sustainability on an institutional, local or societal level means that pretty much everything you hear, everything you learn reminds you -- in some way -- of your job. (Actually, I could be wrong. Maybe that's the bad news.) What reminded me most of sustainability efforts in the state government coverage was the way the supposed leaders were doing everything they could to avoid addressing the real issues facing them. It reminded me of my job because of how hard some (not all) of Greenback's decision-makers do everything they can to avoid addressing the real issues of sustainability on campus and in society. (They're glad to have Backboro become more sustainable. Most of our students, most of our alumni, and most of our donors don't live in Backboro. So making the local community sustainable doesn't require anything from the constituencies most important in Greenback's decision-making.)

The most typical state government response to fiscal crisis these days is a flat percentage spending cut across the board. The advantage of this is that it doesn't require explanation and it doesn't require thought. You're 15% short on cash, you cut expenditures at all agencies by 15%, everything's back in balance, right?

Of course, the balance achieved is only financial, and only on paper. If you cut expenditures on programs which are saving you money in other areas (like arbitration which reduces court costs or prenatal services which reduces health costs), the savings are more illusory than real. And if you cut social welfare expenditures, crime rates may go up, policing costs may go up, incarceration costs may go up, up, up. The politically simple tends to be the pragmatically stupid.

The next most typical state approach seems to be to target education and healthcare. The "reasoning" here is based on the fact that these costs have escalated significantly in recent years. Since this is where the cost increase disproportionately is coming from, this is where the cuts must happen. Note the implicit assumption that expenditures which have remained relatively flat for a while are not the problem, regardless of the nature of those expenditures. If you've been pouring the same amount of state money into the statewide inter-county machine screw thread coordinating corporation (a public entity) for the past hundred years, that can't be where the financial problem is. And -- just to emphasize the importance of that expenditure -- it can readily be pointed out that (due, I'm sure, to the efforts of this glorious corporation) bolts purchased in County A and nuts purchased in County B fit together just perfectly! What could be better? Indeed, in a society increasingly aware of the need to create jobs, what could be more fundamentally important?

Look, this approach (which the media seem to swallow whole, by the way), makes as much sense as saying that food, clothing and shelter prices are rising fast but the cost of dollar lottery tickets has been stable for years, so in the current downturn it only makes sense to buy less food. Or clothing. Or shelter.

What resonated with me was the fact that "leaders" of so many state governments were spending so much time, so much effort, so much political capital and never once asking the question of how the existing structure and operation of their organizations was resulting in problematic expenditure levels. They never managed to get to the question of what existing expenditures were unnecessary, or of low priority. They never asked what sorts of efforts more than paid their own way on a net-net basis, or which ones were basically pouring money down a hole.

That's the same sort of assumptions which are implicit in many administrative decisions that get made at Greenback -- we're willing to become sustainable, so long as it means that we don't really have to change anything. We don't really want to be affected. We don't want to think too hard or too long about the predictable results of what we're doing and what we continue to do.

If universities, which ostensibly specialize in thinking, aren't willing to ask the hard questions and figure out how what we've been doing has gotten us to where we are, how can social and political leaders be expected to? (I was told by a national political figure, once, that he was running for President, not genius. On campus, I like to think that there are at least a few folks running for genius. But I could be overly optimistic.)

Greenback, like any other organization, won't become sustainable without a thorough-going analysis of what it wants to do, what it's currently doing, how it's currently structured, why it's structured that way, how it could operate and structure itself more sustainably. Incremental changes -- increasing energy efficiency a bit here, switching to a cleaner-burning fuel there -- will get the ball rolling, but they won't get us where we say we want to go.

I've heard the saying attributed both to Thomas Edison and to G.K. Chesterton. There is almost no length to which a [wo]man won't go, to avoid the real work of thinking. But not thinking -- or at least, not thinking enough about the right things -- is what got us into this mess. Continuing to not think seems highly unlikely to lead us out of it.

Thanks be to Sam

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:13:55 GMT

As the new semester gets underway, there are a million things on my plate. Working with profs on curriculum revisions, with students on new projects, with student reporters new to the sustainability beat, etc., etc., etc.

So it seems odd that the announcement that stuck in my mind was the one about Walmart installing a 1MW solar array on some warehouse rooftop. California, I think. Certainly, nowhere near Backboro.

The announcement rubbed me the wrong way. First, one megawatt is significant but hardly record-breaking. The announcement trumpeted it as Walmart's biggest array ever, which only means that it's bigger than Walmart's other arrays. A personal best, if you believe in corporate personhood. It's the kind of triumphant announcement which PR people can always arrange any time anybody does anything about anything. Hardly the stuff of legend.

And, of course, there's the fact that it's Walmart. The big box retailer to end big box retailing. (Or, more truthfully, to end local small-box retailing in another town every day or two.) Today's great facilitator of suburban sprawl and rampant consumerism. The answer to a question no one should ever have been allowed to ask. Sure, they're making their distribution chain more efficient. That's hardly news. That's the way they've been doing business since Sam Walton first got a twinkle in his eye. Last year, they sold that as a virtue based on lowering consumer prices. This year they're selling it as a virtue based on reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Next year they'll be selling as a virtue based on some premise I can't even imagine at present. Same business strategy, new PR campaign. The more things change . . .

But then I got to thinking about a guy I worked for over 20 years ago. A good manager, a decent leader, a nice person, and the father of a son with a learning disability. He had a good income (a very good income, in fact), and he did a lot of volunteer work for a charity helping financially strapped families with learning disabled kids because, he said, he was so grateful for their work. See, he was sophisticated enough to know that the market for the services his son needed was increased tremendously by the financial help this outfit gave to families, and that the facilities to provide those services in our area probably wouldn't even exist if they had to depend only on clientele who could pay their own way. He knew that he benefited from the work of the charity, even though he didn't receive any funding from them. He got something more important, so he helped out any way he could.

Maybe it's rationalization. Maybe I have to find a way to justify Walmart's continued existence. After all, they've taken over pretty much all retail where I live, too. If I can't get it at Walmart, I probably have to drive 25+ miles. But my rationalization de jour is that maybe, by supporting and expanding the market for solar arrays, Walmart is in some way supporting the costs of technological and facilities development, making solar power more available in the market for all of us.

I'm not sure I really believe it. But if I try hard enough . . . maybe . . .