The City as a Green action focal point

Bruno Giussiani, reporting on a new initiative by the Clinton Foundation to tackle climate change with action around energy efficiency of buildings in cities, summarises "the possible role of big cities in tackling global problems such as climate change":

The basic idea: If cities start acting as global actors towards sustainability, new mobility solutions and traffic strategies, clean energy, water resources management, etc, when you add it all up there could be significant progress even without national policies and international treaties.

I guess we can easily relate to cities both as obvious causes of the climate change problem, with their massive energy use per capita, but also as the creative and entrepreneurial centres that can produce solutions for that problem. It is always easier to galvanise people to action when they can identify clearly with a simple set of concepts and a clearly-defined associated community. It seems that the City is becoming a key focal point in this regard for climate change action.

UPDATE—Jerry Fishenden of Microsoft (who are the technology partner for the Clinton Foundation project) has some intelligent words to say about this issue.

The Green Web?

Katie Fehrenbacher writes:

[O]rganizations and companies are gravitating towards using the web to organize and communicate about climate change. Media, content distribution, collaboration tools and communications are all migrating to the web, so why not put them to use for a crucial issue.

The topic of climate change is also uniquely suited to the web. The information is often localized and action-oriented — what’s the best public transportation route in my city, or where do I recycle my e-waste. The topic also has a feeling of urgency (if not at times alarmist) which helps to quicky disseminate it around the web.

I'm sure Katie is right that the web can become an incredible tool for concerted and focused positive Green action. On the other hand, the production, use and disposal of technology itself creates a very significant negative environmental impact. Let's just hope that the Green benefits of the web begin to outweigh its costs. As both an ardent technologist and commited inhabitant of Planet Earth, I sincerely hope they will, and massively so.

Your network increases your effective intelligence

Jamais Cascio, pondering trends in outsourcing, writes:

Ironically, it's entirely possible that the carbon footprint of shipping may add so much cost to outsourced manufacturing that those jobs get re-localized, whereas the knowledge jobs (needing only an Internet connection) end up being globalized.

So are we headed to a world where the only stable jobs are those that absolutely require hands-on contact—health maintenance, grooming, and the like? Or to one where wages even out across the world of skilled workers? Neither strikes me as terribly appealing or stable.

I think Jamais' observation about the likely re-localisation of manufacturing is quite persuasive. However, I have a feeling he's a bit off target with the second paragraph. While stable jobs for all but the most worker location-dependent tasks may come under threat, my guess is that the economic well-being of the successful knowledge workers will actually only continue to follow a power-law curve, with the richest continuing to get richer.

Knowledge workers don't get hired only for what they know or what they can do, but also for who they know—and, as Clay Shirky long since pointed out, winners take all in social networking. Why do people with great networks get hired? Partly through plain old nepotism, of course, but also because who you know effectively increases both what you know and what you can do by enabling you to outsource task fulfillment across your uniquely-valuable network.

Yahoo and Google try to out-Green one another

This kind of tussle for the technology behemoth Green brand identity high ground can only be a Good Thing. : )

The Encyclopedia of Life

Well, this is a grand identity project indeed: The Encyclopedia of Life!



The species information tree-navigation interface (shown in the video) looks pretty cool too.

[Via BBC News]

Not-so-not-so-green Apple?

This news is a few days old now, but I wanted to update readers further to my "not-so-green Apple" post: Steve Jobs has blogged positively about Apple's environmental footprint, current and future, and Greenpeace have given him a qualified thumbs up. There is some intelligent commentary from Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm.

Carbon footprint labels scheme

BBC News reports:

A labelling scheme that will show customers the size of a product's "carbon footprint" has been unveiled.

The initiative, operated by the Carbon Trust, will show shoppers how much carbon was emitted in the manufacture and transportation of the goods.

Participating companies also have to agree to cut the product's carbon footprint over a two-year period or face being thrown out of the scheme.

It will be interesting to see how detailed the label information is—and whether it breaks down shipping carbon costs into its inter- and (much larger) intra-national elements. (There's no indication that it will do so on the relevant Carbon Trust page here.)

On a related note, Jamais Cascio points out the need for carbon labels to not only show the carbon cost of the product but also a guideline "recommended" figure:

[N]ow the Carbon Trust, a UK non-profit that works with businesses to reduce their greenhouse impacts, has embarked on an effort to build a labeling standard for adoption across industries. (It should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favor of this sort of labeling!)

So let's say this works out, and soon every bag of crisps you buy has a little label on it showing how many grams of carbon resulted from that bag's production. Now you can compare it to other snacks, and try to eat only the goodies with smaller numbers in the label. But while that level of comparison is helpful, it doesn't offer the larger context necessary to make the comparison meaningful. You still don't know whether both the (e.g.) 100g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of crisps and the (e.g.) 50g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of carrots are outrageously high, ridiculously low, or vanishingly irrelevant.

Giving purchasers a more contextual sense of product carbon cost may actually be an area that is ripe for disintermediation of the retailers by social web services—if I could scan a product's barcode with my phone camera and then view it's carbon cost in relation to other equivalent products (via a web service), I could readily get a sense of its carbon cost in its relevant context.

Global warming, hypotheses and truth

George Monbiot, leading proponent of action for sustainability, has written a damning critique of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (that Channel 4 programme I blogged about the other day). George cites many scientific studies and the programme maker's murky history as evidence against the programme, and his piece* reads rather persuasively.

George oversteps the mark in talking about "truth" rather than hypotheses, though, I feel. In my experience, we all yearn for simple truths, but all we ever can actually grasp are relatively strong hypotheses about the nature of our world. And we ultimately tend to act from our gut, not our intellect. My gut feeling is that George is probably right. But it's not necessarily the truth.

*For another good analysis of "Gore v. Four", see this piece from the Independent on Sunday.

Man-made climate change: a relatively benign religion?

Charla and I watched a Channel 4 programme entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle" two nights ago.

The gist of the programme's message was that man-made climate change has become a scientific religion—and to question that religion, as a researcher or journalist, is now to jeopardize your career, or worse.

It seems quite plausible that this should be the case. The sustainability movement is rapidly tipping over into the mainstream, and the mainstream demands a simple message (in this case, "we are causing global warming, but if we change our behaviours we might be able to stop it").

Have Nots in the developing world are being pressured by us carbon-profligate Haves to forego industrial development on the basis of a provisional hypothesis of man-made global warming. Meanwhile alternative and complementary, perfectly valid, climate change hypotheses are being sidelined. Sadly, religions have always led to these kind of iniquitous behaviours and outcomes.

However, as religions go, I would argue that "man-made climate change" is a benign one, if taken as a whole. For it turns us, as a species, back onto ourselves: it leads each of us tiny individuals to identify with—and to take collective responsibility for—the continued survival and well-being of one another and the planet.

And this religion reaches far beyond its headline doctrine of action on climate change—the agendas of human rights, stewardship of natural resources, global peace and the democratisation of political power and economic opportunity all fall out of it as naturally as ripe fruit from a tree.

Which tree?

The tree of life.

Not-so-green Apple

Greenpeace would like to have a greener Apple:

12 January 2007, San Francisco, United States —

It was holy week in Apple land, when all us loyal Mac fans turn to face the Macworld conference in San Francisco to hear where Apple is going to lead the consumer electronics industry next. But while we waited hopefully for Steve Jobs to announce better environmental practices, less toxic contents, and the greener Apple we've all been dreaming of, all we got was a phone.

OK, it's a totally cool phone, but still, it's a phone. We wanted an industrial revolution. One that would address the problem of all the e-waste piling up in China and India.

Thousands of participants in the Green my Apple campaign have been dropping some pretty big hints to Apple about what they wanted announced at Macworld.

They've been writing to Steve, blogging, creating graphics and ads, t-shirts and buttons, photographing themselves hugging their macs.

For our part, we bathed the Apple store in San Francisco in green light and put our cardboard Mac Guy (star of our alternative Mac Ad) on tour at the conference, and helped a small squad of Green Apple volunteers with the task of handing out leaflets about the Green my Apple campaign. It was popular stuff. They ran out of leaflets.

They were spreading the word about how much more Apple could do than the little that US law requires, which has earned them a pat on the head from the Bush Administration's Environmental Protection Agency.

We even presented Steve with a suggested speech, which was among the
top YouTube videos viewed on the day of Steve's keynote.



But when it came time for the real speech, we didn't even get a measly Keynote slide about Apple's continued use of brominated fire retardants, PVC, and stuff that other computer manufactures have already agreed to phase out. Like Dell.

While Steve Jobs was studiously ignoring everyone's pleas to make Apple eco-friendly, Michael Dell of Dell computers was doing what Steve should be doing: leading. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, (a poor cousin to the grandeur which is Macworld) Dell said:

"I challenge every PC maker to join us in providing free recycling for every customer in every country... all the time — no exceptions."

Now that's the kind of different thinking we're asking for with the Green my Apple campaign. Steve, he's stealing your moves!

So if you love Apple and you want to buy iPods and iPhones and Macs that aren't going to poison kids in Asia and Africa when they reach the end of their lives, join the campaign to get Steve to do the right thing.

Hum, I had no idea Apple were such environmental reprobates in comparison to their competition. I haven't been active as a Greenpeace campaigner for a while, but I shall certainly follow this campaign with interest.

UPDATE: Green My Apple has a rather cool Apple.com-like campaign site. The "download a screensaver then photograph yourself hugging your Mac then upload it to Flickr and locate yourself on the map" thing seems a bit like hard work, though—I'll stick to blogging about the campaign, I think!

Transparent footprints

Just how accurate are the much-trumpeted new supermarket "carbon footprint" product labels? Not very, according to Seamus McCauley. Seamus makes a cogent argument that supermarkets are still deliberately fudging the "carbon transparency" issue.

Supermarkets are making noises at the moment about labelling food that's been flown in as such (Times), so people can make informed choices about the environmental impact of their purchases. The theory goes that food that's been flown in from abroad has a far greater carbon footprint than food produced in the UK.

The theory doesn't hold up. The time food spends on a plane contributes an absurdly tiny proportion of its carbon footprint - far less than 1%, says Tim Harford in the FT. Effectively all of the pollution occurs at the stage when it's carted around the UK on lorries or, more importantly, driven out of the supermarket in shoppers' cars. See if you're interested the original DEFRA report into the matter from 2005.

...

So how might we persuade supermarkets to become truly transparent to the identity, carbon costs and all, of their products? This sounds like a good topic for the Identity Society to ponder... : )