February 23, 2009
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In the wee hours of the morning Tuesday, NASA attempted to launch an experimental mission to save the earth with the smallest rocket it currently has in use. The initial launch failed when the module did not separate from the rocket. But eventually, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will use a spectrometer to take the most precise measurements ever made of carbon dioxide concentrations and "sinks" in the Earth's atmosphere, and answer some lingering questions about exactly how much carbon is absorbed by our fields, forests and oceans. About 30% of human contributions to the CO2 load are unaccounted for by current models.
NASA is working closely with Japan, which launched its own carbon observatory last month. The OCO will yield 8-million carbon dioxide measurements every 16 days, far improving over current measurements.
[Via BBC News ; see also this NASA podcast.]
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February 23, 2009
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Transit ridership is soaring amid concerns about gas prices, an aging population, and greater preference for city living. But public investments just haven't kept pace, and with state and local budgets hurting from the recession, cutbacks are on the table across the country, from New York and DC to Reno, Nevada and Kings County, Washington. Since 1982, federal transportation funding has broken down 80% for roads, 20% for mass transit.
But as In These Times reports, the T4 coalition for transit reform has gained surprising new allies in the business world, like the National Association of Realtors, which likes the positive effects on property values around a transit hub, and the national Truck Safety Coalition, which wants to keep the highways clear for truckers.
The stimulus package includes $17 billion for new projects, including $8 billion for high-speed rail, which is a great start, but trains will keep getting overcrowded without a long-term commitment at all levels of government, shifting incentives and subsidies from cars to rails.
[via In These Times]
Image: Amtrak
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February 23, 2009
01:23 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
If you missed the Compostmodern sustainable design conference in San Francisco last week, you can get an excellent taste here of one of the top presentations. Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts. His full presentation, with the tongue-in-cheek title "Becoming a Sustainable Designer in 47 Easy Steps", can be downloaded at his website.
The presentation clearly visualizes and relates a spectrum of conceptual frameworks for talking about sustainable design--what we at <em>Fast Company</em> call "ethonomics" and what Shedroff says should be called "blue" not "green." Whether "life cycle analysis", "natural capitalism," "biomimicry" or "social return on investment," these frameworks all take place within the three spheres: Human capital, natural resources and financial capital; Society, the Environment, and the Market; or People, Money, and the Planet. Through the applications of concepts like "dematerialization" (putting less stuff in your stuff, like an ultralightweight keyboard) or product-as-service (Zipcar, a shared car rental service that eliminates the need for car ownership), human ingenuity can replace natural resources, close waste loops and make the world a better plac for the future.
The presentation itself is an example of exactly the kind of design it's talking about: elegant, human-centered, sustainable.
via Greenbiz.com
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February 23, 2009
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In Britain, small mom-and-pop shops are thriving by selling filtered used cooking oil as biodiesel for cars. They can sell the fuel at a discount to regular diesel because they get the grease free from fish-and-chips shops and other establishments. Besides cutting CO2 emissions, the business performs an important recycling service. Restaurant owners are legally banned from discarding their used oil in landfills; it also causes terrible clogging problems in drains, and is no longer allowed to be used in animal feed because of concerns about mad cow disease.
Although large-scale biodiesel refinery operations begun on both sides of the pond have flopped with the price of petroleum, smaller operations seem to have hit a sweet spot. (A US example is TriState Biodiesel in the New York City area.) Sometimes finding the right sustainable business model is a question of scale.
Via The New York Times; image courtesy Jem Stone via Flickr
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February 20, 2009
10:55 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
The IT sector sucks up about as much energy as the aviation industry. This is largely due to the ugly guts of the Internet--the data centers with their racks of servers that must be constantly hooked up to power and cooled with air conditioning. Data centers are expected to hit a resource crisis, doubling their energy needs by 2012. But this is the most intelligence-intensive industry of all--can't they use smarts to cut their energy needs?
Well, yes. And three basic approaches were suggested recently:
1. More efficient chips. Samsung recently came out a with the "world's most efficient," ultra-small, ultra-low-power DRAM chip, which uses 20% less energy than similar chips.
2. Smarter cooling. HP sells a "Dynamic Smart Cooling" system that reduces cooling costs by 25-40%.
3. The simplest solution of all: ventilate with outside air, and allow the centers to run hotter. Yesterday, reps from Microsoft, Oracle and Intel all claimed at a conference that they want their procurers to run with outside air as hot as 90-95 degrees Fahrenheit, even if that means a few more failures. Will the data center operators listen?
via Greentech Media; image via Samsung
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February 20, 2009
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Charities are now falling into bankruptcy as times get tougher. The trend of the '00s has been for nonprofits to act more like for-profits--social entrepreneurs, social venture funders, social capitalists, triple bottom liners, pro-social for-profit hybrids. (Whatever you want to call them, Fast Company has been all over them.) They've hired marketing firms and consultants, and been evaluated by new rating agencies.
However, now that the for-profit economy has fallen into such dire straits, and just when more and more needy people are turning to organizations like food pantries, nonprofits are going down by the same means that they once used to try to grow. Buffeted by downturns in donations and government cutbacks, an increasing number are having to file bankruptcy, rather than simply close their doors, because they have creditors to deal with. They borrowed money in attempts to grow faster than their current donor base permitted--in other words, they were overleveraged just like for-profits.
Charities made bad investment decisions as well. The Jewish Funders Network has started a $5 million "Crisis Loan Fund" to make up budget shortfalls for the large number of organizations that lost money to the Madoff ponzi scheme.
There are two possible outcomes of these unfortunate setbacks. One is that nonprofit management will return to an earlier, more cautious and patient model. The other is that new government programs will step in to take over some of the functions currently provided by private charities, which is more or less what happened during the New Deal.
via New York Times; Image Fast Company
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February 19, 2009
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Commenters like Tom Friedman and James Fallows have suggested that China's command-and-control government and history of dramatic social change (Great Leap Forward, anyone?) actually offers a better approach, compared to the vagaries of democratic governance, to tackling a challenge as huge as sustainability--when and if the government makes it a priority.
That theory is being tested right now. The top story on Digg this week was about China's plans to reduce water consumption 60% per unit of GDP by 2020. Currently, China faces its worst drought in 50 years, affecting 4.37 million people and 2.1 million head of livestock. The country is tackling the drought with irrigation and subsidies to farmers, although the long-term plan involves cleaning up urban water supplies and improving efficiency of irrigation in China's northern breadbasket.
On Thursday of this week, the government took even more drastic steps to end the drought in Beijing. It fired iodide sticks into clouds to produce an artificial and rare snowfall, which even fell over the Great Wall.
Clearly China's environmental measures are prompted by necessity, not idealism. But that may make them no less effective.
[via BBC; Image via People's China Daily ]
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February 19, 2009
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Finish your vegetables, and there won’t be so many children starving in China. That’s the gist of a remarkable new report by the United Nations Environment Programme. It just issued a seven-point plan that targets reducing massive food waste as a major strategy to counter malnutrition without taxing the world’s resources further. (Recently I wrote about new global-warming related anxieties about farm outputs.)
Shockingly, the report found that over half of the world’s food is wasted, from bycatch (less desirable fish thrown back into the ocean from fishing boats), to corn fed to cattle that could be munching grass, to unsold vegetables rotting in fields in countries with poor infrastructure, to edible food discarded from restaurants and grocery stores in affluent countries.
To address the issue, one of the seven recommendations put forth to improve food security is to increase food energy efficiency by "capture and recycling of post-harvest losses and waste." In the U.S., this may mean changing laws to make it easier for restaurants, for example, to donate food, or to get post-consumer food waste back into the energy stream as animal feed or compost.
It's striking how efficiency--achieved through greater use of information and technology--is becoming such an environmental watchword from energy, to water, to food. An expert I spoke with at IBM for the Fast 50 had a lot to say about the importance of tracking food from the farm to the fork.
And in mostly overfed countries like ours, individual behavior does have a role to play in increasing awareness, whether that means freeganism and dumpster diving, or just eating your leftovers.
The full report can be downloaded here; Via Grist
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February 19, 2009
12:17 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
Next week, 10,000 students and youth will converge on the Capitol for a massive lobby day to demand action on climate change and green jobs.
On March 2, thousands of people have pledged to commit nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol Power Plant, a heavy bit of symbolic machinery that burns dirty coal to provide electricity to Congress.
Dr. James Hansen, the most prominent scientific voice on global warming, and Al Gore have both endorsed direct action on climate change.
And this week, 96% of MoveOn.org members have voted "Build a green economy, stop climate change," as one of their top causes for 2009, with a $3 million campaign and triple the current number of community organizers coast to coast.
President Obama made clear in his inaugural address that he sees global warming as a top priority. Unfortunately, most Americans don't agree with the president or the activists: Global warming has slipped to the bottom of a long list of policy priorities in recent polling, as the economy dominates people's worries; and the percentage who believe that the damage is caused by human activity has actually slipped compared to a couple of years ago.
As Obama's first month in office draws to a close, there has already been progress, but it's been mixed. The stimulus package contained $30 billion in direct spending, and $20 billion in tax incentives for renewables, batteries, efficiency and smart grids. The EPA plans to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant, reversing a Bush Administration decision, but this is widely seen as a stopgap until further Congressional action can be taken. As for the Congress, Senator Barbara Boxer has issued a set of principles for a new climate change bill, clearly favoring cap-and-trade over other approaches like a carbon tax, and leaving out any hard targets. The Washington Post said in an op-ed: "Senator Boxer is open to everything--except what might work best."
This makes it a perfect time to ask a potentially deflating question: Will all of this principled citizen action actually be effective in shaping climate change policy for the Obama administration in 2009, 2010, and beyond? You have to go back to the 1960s and 70s to find a time when marches on Washington had an unambiguous effect on policymaking. And global warming is a different kind of issue from civil rights or the Vietnam war. We can all agree on the principle of preserving the earth's majesty for future generations, but good climate-change policy requires a mastery of both Nobel-level diplomatic skills and Nobel-level science. The movements have worked hard to make "80 by 20" (80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020) and 350 (parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere) into rallying cries, but they don't have exactly the same ring as "We Shall Overcome" and "Make Love Not War."
I don't mean to suggest that mass protests are always ineffective or that they're the wrong thing to do in this case. The most important effect of these protests--and particularly targeted letter-writing and phone call campaigns--will be to provide political cover to lawmakers who are facing pressure from business groups to water down or vote down climate legislation.
To avoid alienating the skeptics, or just those who feel the US has other priorities right now, these campaigns would be smart to remain focused on the link between green energy and green jobs. It's the young people who really get this connection. It was at the Power Shift conference in 2007 when I first heard Van Jones hailed as a hero, with his Green Collar Economy call for environmental, social, and economic justice, and the student activists I met were seeking their own economic opportunity as well; the conference included a job fair with reps from nonprofits and green businesses.
On the other hand, respectfully dissenting from Al Gore, I'm not sure getting arrested is the most effective environmentalist technique at the moment. If activists can actually shut down coal plants as they have in Britain, that has a real, if incremental, effect on CO2 emissions; but is it really worth getting painted as extremists and carted off to jail just when the movement has supporters in the highest places? Sometimes you have to shout down the door, and other times you want to be inside with a seat at the negotiating table.
[via It's Getting Hot In Here blog]
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February 19, 2009
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Pankaj Shah is a 36-year-old four-time entrepreneur whose latest project, Tonic, is like Angelina Jolie in website form: glitz and sex appeal combined with do-gooding and a dose of unreasonable optimism. The for-profit site sells exclusively celebrity-linked products (Donna Karan T-shirts, a Gwen Stefani-signed iPod) with a percentage of proceeds going to various charities, and also runs original news stories, focused on "random acts of kindness."
"So many people tell me I don't even read the news anymore or watch it, I don't want to hear about this crap! Give me some good news!" Shah, who's in town for Fashion Week, told me. His mix of relentless positivity and cheerful profanity is apparently beloved by his legions of famous friends. He makes no secret of the fact that "a lot of our success comes from calling in personal favors. And it gets easier every time you ask."
[photo: Luella Bartley tee from Tonic.]
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