Upstream technology rules and producer incentives

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I glansed in a book by Joseph Huber today and just noted a couple of observations he has made initially. Current approaches to technological innovation inside the environmental area are characteristically end of pipe solutions to solve downstream problems. It is more important to try to focus on the upstream technologies and environmental innovation (TEI), in order to prevent problems. It is also important to find incentives for the designers, producers or manufacturers that helps mobilize them

The book "New Technologies and Environmental Innovation" covers 11 technological clusters. Energy, natural resources, agriculture, chemistry and chemicals, materials processing, building settlement structures, vehicles and transport, utility goods, materials reprocessing (recycling, waste management), emissions control and finally environmental measuring and monitoring. His group has made a TEI database with over 500 TEI's.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Earthquake in Copenhagen: Reflections on CoP-15 and its Aftermath

Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Earthquake in Copenhagen: Reflections on CoP-15 and its Aftermath

Hooray for Holdren!

I saw this first on John Baez site. Its a good thing for the world as a whole that president Obama has appointed John Holden as scientific advisor and it will likely speed up the pace in US environmental initiatives and activities and thus push chances for global collective actions upwards.

Two years ago he held a video-taped one hour speech at the Belfer center on the state the planet and what activities can be done in terms mitigation, adaptation and suffering. The slides are also available  And also costs incurred for doing the neccessary actions to stabilize the the grenhouse gases at reasonable levels which are incurring costs in the range of 1 % of the worlds total global product (GWP), compared to the 2 % of GWP spent on defence today.

He also recommends that the developed countries must lead the way and take action immediately and take the up-front costs and compensate developing countries for eg minimizing deforestation. It is promising that the USA is acting with objective responsability and will certainly up the antes for a successful meeting in Copenhague at the end of the year. 

So who will do the next verification of Blacklight?

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The company Blacklight Power has been around for a while and claims that they have a way to capture the energy from hydrogen as they move between energy levels without burning or nuclear processes. Even though there has been some independent verification it is still very early to draw any conclusions about the feasability of this.

And in the back of my head echoes the promised panacea of cold fusion which turned out to be a conundrum instead. Some years ago there was physicists both supporting and opposing the theory of the hydrino state. But for now I'll give them the benefit of doubt until there are further independent verification or refutation !

Encyclopedia of earth is a tremendous resource

Image by Aaron Escobar via Flickr

If You haven't already discovered the expert-based encyclopedia I urge You to pay a visit! There is an aim to under Creative Commons licensing be a:

"comprehensive resource for timely, objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a means for the global scientific community to come together to produce the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on the role of environmental issues in human affairs."

And also the encylopidia itself with articlas on anything You wanted to know. For example Albedo or Global warming. There are also sections on news, and also forums on a variety of topics. And if You cannot find You can always create You own!

Nano to the rescue for future energy storage?

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ScienceDaily (2008-09-17) -- Engineers and scientists have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called "graphene" as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.

This will certainly have the potential to lower the barrier for renewable energy like wind and solar, but also batteries used in hybrid cars. It stems from research work done in the Nanoscience and Technology Lab at University of Texas in Austin.

Here is the abstract and and an image of chemically modified graphene for the main research report.

Art for combatting global warming

Robert Rohde - a PhD student at UC Berkeley - is running the site Global Warming Art and as he is also a contributing Wikipedian makes the content of his new site available under similar generous terms. Here is one recent interactive piece for exploring sea level rises (in the US).

Here is one interesting static image of oil usage per capita in the twenty largest countries. I really like this site and urge you to spend some time there!

Footprint trading

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Here is another example of trading mechanisms in new companies. It is company with a recent web 2.0 service for reducing and trading carbon footprints (for a fee). The service is called Little carbon feet and is in beta right now. Once you have balanced out your newly added air or car travel footprint you can use that to share with people.

They use the Chicaco climate exchange , mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog, to purchase carbon emission offsets.

Revisiting shared climate prediction

OK I think it is time to get onto climateprediction.net (CP) again. I and the lab I headed at that time were avidly looking for "ET" from the inception of the SETI@HOME project and subsequently I also looked for large Mersenne primes in GIMPS. I personally found neither aliens nor any huge primes, but I have always loved the base idea of sharing reseurces in search of solutions for mankinds large problems. As a whole the GIMPS project holds the record for large Mersenne though

I had some problems with CP when I tried last year, but I'll figure it was mainly "baby stage" glitches. There, its a breeze to install and seems to be less problematic. CPView is a viewer i'll try as well.

Summer reading - World Changing part one

Despite seeing the occasional negative review I decided to take on the book edition of "World Changing - A User's Guide for the 21st Century" and also post brief summaries and followups. When I bought the book the female cashier exclaimed "Oh what a beatiful book". My hope now is that it 's also beautiful on the inside.

The books editor Alex Steffen presents the bad and good news in the Introduction. The bad news starts with the unequal distribution of the ecological footprint (based on Wackernagel's ideas). If you are not familiar with the footprint framework it is good to learn about it because it is a way to actually measure and potentially price non-sustainable footprints. Then he continues with overpopulation "adding one city like Seattle every week" and ecological overshoot is adressed: "we are using the planet with such intensity that it is unable to restore itself". He conludes the bad news with a summary of energy resources, ie the environmental costs of producing non-renewable energy resources and that they are indeed running out and describes the tensions created by the current global economic unequality.

Finally Steffen adresses the good news and that the illusory tradeoff between "doing well and doing right" can be countered by small smart individual and collective steps of innovation. Sharing green innovation and inspire readers to innovate is the overall purpose with the book. He stresses that we should strive for individual actions with global impact. Start with the things you know and address some of the easier stuff and then incrementally and collectively adress the more complex issues. Making the "What will I do?" more maneagable and finding suitable societal networks for knowledge sharing.

I'll return to the questions and overall objective, when posting on each chapter. Stay tuned.

Personal Kyoto and "Real Costs"

R&D for the public domain is what the lab part of Eyebeam does. Some of their projects are listed here. Eyebeam per se seems to have some of the flavour of an open site for art and technology, ie similar to MIT Media Lab. And indeed it turns out that several of the managers have a Media Lab background.



One project is personal Kyoto which is a way of checking and tracking electrical usage (for New York residents for now) and realigning the projected consumption with target levels in the Kyoto protocol. They also co-financed The Real Costs - a Firefox plugin to show CO2 costs when buying airfare tickets.

Cost-efficient sustainability

Utilizing reverse auctions can be a complement to more large-scale market mechanisms like climate exhanges. There is also a host of open source auction implementations that support reverse auctions. TenderSystem, E-Z Auction and iLance are three that can be used for realization of your particular market.

There are many countries that are already using this for energy auctions and there are also emerging private companies in niche areas, like GoGreenSolar, for solar energy projects.

Using open source to track trees in the City

OSGeo is creating many new and old open source tools for geospatial purposes. There are tools for both web-based and desktop mapping. Here is one project - Urban Forest - that has used several OSGeo tools:





"...the project team has created an Urban Forest Map, which digitally pinpoints the location of each tree, maintainstree data in a consistent database, and offers web access to the tree data – key for maintenance and planting efforts. The community can get involved by posting photos and stories about their own trees that they plant and map online. With the launch of this collaborative effort and the support of the Mayor's Office, a critical step has been taken to move San Francisco's urban greening efforts forward...

One of the OSGeo tools from Autodesk is called MapGuide Open Source

Extra, extra! Read all about it.

This is a nifty thing to visualize (RSS and atom feeds). Here I use it on my own feed:



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IT investment getting greener

At least in the US for the moment, where investment agencies are moving more towards clean environment technologies.The IT companies in Silicon Valley have started to employ people and are also leaning more towards juxtapositions of IT and green technology.

Two interiews with Fritjof Capra on Transition Culture

The first part is on Relocalisation and here Capra critizes the the original "sustainability" concept for focusing too much on individual moral persuasion mainly and leaving out the important issue of how to achieve sustainable development. Capras own simplest example is to mimic ecosystems which support life, recycle, uses solar energy and thus are adaptive and sustainable. This is a wonderful approach and it makes the issue more approachable for humans and also is a good incentive for how to go about with human communities. So I really think you should read this short interview in full. Aside on relocalisation theme : There is still an unclear picture on
costs and benefits. See for example the Dec 9 2006 issue of theThe Economist "Why ethical food harms the planet". (premium content). But maybe it is relevant to add an "may" to the title of the Econimist article!

Peak Oil and climate change is the second part of the interview and it recaps some things, but in the context of the opportunities served to mankind with the current climate change. If you need to get understand more on peak oil theory, check wikipedia, but the emphasis here is on "climate change", so don't get lost in debates about peak oil.

Need startup money?

I was not aware of Ceres, until I read the Mindy Lubbers' excellent coverage of Davos on WorldChanging. Here is a quote from their investment part :



"Ceres works with investors worldwide to improve corporate and public policies on climate change and
other environmental, social, and corporate governance issues. As part of this mission, Ceres
launched and coordinates the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), an alliance of leading U.S.
institutional investors that collectively manage over $1.3 trillion in assets"



I will look closer at this and return later. They claim to be global in scope, but from the list of prominent "Ceres companies" there is mainly the large US corporate conglomerates that you'd expect. But there are also coalition members of interest.

See for yourself

This is a extremely user-friendly climate simulation software that is available for download and it also comes with many predefined environmental scenarios:

"The EdGCM Project develops and distributes a research-quality global climate model (GCM) with a user-friendly interface that runs on desktop computers. Anyone can explore the subject of climate change using the same methods and tools that scientists employ. The design of the software allows students to learn and experience the full scientific process including: designing experiments, setting up and running computer simulations, post-processing output, using scientific visualization to display results, and creating scientific reports ready for publishing to the web..."

It has been developed by EdgCM cooperative project at Columbia University.

Zooming out in time to understand climate change

I listened to this talk by the mathematical physicist John Baez last night and I must say his approach impressed me very much. The talk took place at the Long Now Foundation some weeks ago. From a summary of the talk by Stewart Brand (founder of Long Now):

"...The graphs we see these days, John Baez began, all look vertical --- carbon burning shooting up, CO₂ in the air shooting up, global temperature shooting up, and population still shooting up. How can we understand what really going on? "It's like trying to understand geology while you're hanging by your fingernails on a cliff, scared to death. You think all geology is vertical..."

After that John Baez starts to zoom out in time and sheds light on the implications of too speedy temperature change for Earth's species. His talk also has links to relevant material and can be used as a reference for global warming.

It would be great to see a followup of global warming and global dimming and what is known on how they interact. A good source for understanding global dimming is the aerosol postings on the excellent RealClimate blog. See especially this post by the researcher Beate Lipert.

Using semantic web to build environmental application

Explore our planet is a nifty site. It is utilizing the RDF-based Geo-names which anyone can use (creative commons licence). Geo-names is a fabulous semantic web data-set and Explore our planet is one open way of exploring this to put attention on emerging environental issues by layering them on top of Google maps (for now).

It provides REST web access. It is good for developing web applications that require access to GIS data, geocode and similar functionality as ArcGIS.