BLOGS

Global warming can be changed, says Rob Watson, CEO of EcoTech International and the founding father of the LEED standard for buildings but only if we change how we think. For one thing, we need to focus on the real danger of “irreversible damage” to humankind if we don’t do something about CO2 concentration. “The planet is fine and can take care of itself,” he comments. “It’s humanity that’s in danger.” What danger? 150 years of Katrina on a global scale.

As part of this, we need to move beyond what Watson calls egonomics – politics and the habit of thinking we’re the center of the universe. Egonomics assumes that the impact of economics transactions can be separate from the transactions themselves. In this view, efficiency and renewable energy require some sort of payback. Watson calls this an 18th century prescription that is no longer a useful framework for the 21st century.

When what’s green is new, it can be more expensive, but that’s because it’s new, not because it’s green. Once green is mandatory, the price will come down over time. The biggest cost of green is inexperience. You can’t do LEED except before you do the drawing.

Carbon caps, trade and taxation also represent egonomics in Watson’s view. His prescription? “We have to do the right thing every day. Energy demand is choice, not fate.” We know what to do. We have the technical and design knowledge. We have the solutions. Can we get them into place? Maybe not.

What we can do specifically:
 

• Stop designing buildings, industries and cars to be inefficient. Use technologies we already have effectively. Buildings represent the largest single source of environmental problems – almost 50 percent of all CO2 emissions – twice as many as all cars and trucks combined.
• Integrate market and mandatory mechanisms as California is doing, rewarding early adopters.
• Establish regulatory certainty. Incentives need to be ongoing, not just for a year or two.
• Build the case for nonbelievers by creating value around the product. Set your goal and budget and stick to them; adopt new thinking. . “Your competitors are doing it. They’ll kick your ass! WalMart started doing it as a defensive posture. Then they found it made more money! The leaders are out ahead of you and will eat your lunch!”
• Move from a centralized energy grid to one that’s distributed to cut the high cost of moving energy around in order to make it available.

My thanks to the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York for this opportunity to hear and talk with Rob Watson face to face. Much more can be found at www.greenerbuildings.com.

Shai Agassi of Better Place gives us meaningful action that can be implemented within the next 15 years to significantly reduce automotive emissions and, incidentally, reduce the cost of operating a car. His company has started to build prototype battery-change stations for all-electric cars. The first stations are scheduled to open in 2012 – just three years from now.

Not surprisingly, the initial Better Place stations are not intended for Detroit’s vehicles. Renault-Nissan will be the pioneer auto-builder. Israel, Denmark, Japan, Australiaand Canada were the first countries whose governments signed agreements with Better Place to build switching stations. The good news is that the US will not be completely left out. Hawaii and a nine-city alliance in the San Francisco area have signed agreements as well.

Will President Obama’s victory at the polls trigger a revolution – literally a complete turn around? Are we ready, willing and able to change how we live, how we do business and how we think by adopting socially and environmentally responsible values? That’s my vision. And I keep finding more and more people with similar thoughts If revolution is but thought carried into action – Emma Goldman’s words – we just need enough people to envision who we might be if we but accept the golden rule.

It was a new expression for me when a friend mentioned it over lunch. “Energy harvesting.” Recovering and using energy that is typically lost or dissipated in the environment to create a virtually inexhaustible source of energy. What a cool idea. Images of people waving giant devices like butterfly nets to capture energy ran through my head. Oh that it were so simple!

It’s far from simple. As described in an article in EE Times by Erick O. Torres and Gabriel A Ricon-Mora (August 2005), energy could be extracted from vibrations, thermal gradients and light – all of them self-renewing sources – and stored in chip-compatible, rechargeable batteries. The process would require a special charger to accommodate the irregular, random, low-energy bursts of harvested energy. The batteries, in turn, could be used to power electronic devices.

But challenges abound with regard to energy capture, storage and delivery.
 
 
Fortunately, Professor Ricon-Mora, of George Institute of Technology, and others continue their research to this day. Ricon-Mora's goal: totally integrated power solutions for portable battery-operated applications – integrated circuits for portable applications, integrated batteries and integrated power components. The systems would be small and compact enough for portability, lightweight, long-lasting, self-powered and self-sustaining They could power consumer electronic devices, implantable biomedical devices and remote space and field meter monitors for military reconnaissance.
 
 
President-elect Obama, are you listening?

It sounds increasingly as if some current efforts to mitigate climate change may do more harm than good – and do harm to even more than the environment.

Corn ethanol fuel, a highly touted biofuel alternative to gasoline, is easy to manufacture, easy to process and can be made from common materials – including corn and sugar cane. It’s already widely used to power automobiles in Brazil. It’s already a gasoline additive for some U.S.vehicles and has the potential to replace gasoline entirely.

The promise has been reduced dependence on foreign oil, fewer greenhouse gases and a way to support the farm economy.

Now, after about a year of riding high, ethanol has come under serious attack. By increasing demand for corn, it’s pushing up prices for corn, which is a problem for livestock farmers who use it for feed and food companies that produce grain products. As was to have been expected, oil companies don’t like it either. Worse yet, environmentalists are unhappy about the way ethanol demand increases the use of water and fertilizer to grow corn, and the American Lung Association has raised a red flag about air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline.

Foreign opposition has also emerged – from Mexico, where it’s believed to help cause corn-based tortilla prices to rise; Quebec, where the government concluded the environmental costs were too high, and from China, Malaysia, Cuba and Venezuela.

The U.S.ethanol industry, which plays a key role in President’s Bush’s program to reduce dependence on foreign oil, has some powerful U.S.government protection: Oil refiners get an excise tax credit for every gallon of ethanol they blend into gasoline, and imported ethanol is taxed at 54 cents per gallon. It’s also supported by investors, who’ve enabled construction of more and more new and larger ethanol plants.

Pending legislation would increase the amount of renewable fuels to be blended with gasoline by 2022, about 15 of 36 gallons to be corn ethanol, with the balance other fuels, including celluosic ethanol, still an embryonic industry.

Sounds like it’s time to stop the music. Benefits of ethanol have been challenged, and damaging side effects appear likely. How do we call a time-out with so many vested interests in entrenched positions? How can we get better public understanding of the complex technical issues at stake here? Better yet, how can we get informed discussion of superior alternatives?

“Eco-friendly” comes first in Intel’s description of its new 45 nanometer processors – “eco-friendly, faster and `cooler’” is the phrase. That’s good news for environmentally conscious customers and good business for Intel.

On technical achievement alone, the new processors are impressive enough for Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore to call this the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years. Breakthroughs in manufacturing and materials boost performance, lower power consumption and open the door to future products that are even smaller and more cost-effective.

What makes the new chips faster is Intel’s new manufacturing process, which makes it easier to squeeze increasing numbers of electronic brains on a chip by shrinking circuitry dimensions to 45 manometers from 65 manometers – a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The new processors are said to have nearly twice the transistor density of previous chips built on the company’s 65 nm technology. This brings the number of transistors up to 820 million for quad-core processors that use the new formula.

Increasing energy efficiency has become key to IT product design not only because of the environmental benefits but because of cost savings for users. In addition, environmental friendliness has been mandated by regulatory bodies around the world.

Whatever the motivation, it’s good to see environmental considerations the No. 1 selling point.

“The oblivious capitalist's days are numbered” is the subhead of “Business 3.0,” a recent article in Fast Company by futurist Andrew Zoli. Mr. Zoli describes both some of the disastrous effects our civilization has unleashed on the global environment as well as some of the bold new approaches business leaders are initiating to convert this situation into an economic opportunity. He calls for an “Eco-Innovation Revolution” supported by a new practice of “ecologically conscious capitalism.” (To read the article, see www.fastcompany.com/magazine/113/open_fast50-essay_Printer_Friendly.html)

“Ecologically conscious capitalism” is an emerging growth strategy for businesses in many industries. Major IT companies are among the early adopters. Why? Because they can do well by doing good. They can do something tangible about stressed out natural resources and, at the same time, they can grow their businesses. They see growth opportunities in terms of costs savings, customer satisfaction, and new revenue streams as well as corporate image perceptions worth millions.
 

Three Examples
 

1. IBM Reinvents the Data CenterIBM will invest $1 billion per year to develop products and services that reduce corporate data center energy consumption – and related data center operating costs. The company’s new BladeCenter "S," previewed on June 13th, can help reduce the 25 to 45 servers used by an average mid-size company by up to 80 percent and is also designed to minimize IT administration. (Read the full announcement at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/21704.wss)

 

2. Apple Removes Toxic Chemicals from Electronic Product‘Apple is already a leader in innovation and engineering, and we are applying these same talents to become an environmental leader,” says Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer, in his “Greener Apple” statement, a response to criticisms by environmental groups that could hurt the Apple brand. The focus of the statement is what is already being done to remove toxic chemicals from the company’s products and recycle products to reduce e-waste, and it concludes with a commitment to address other environmental issues as well, such as the energy efficiency and carbon “footprint” of the company’s products. (For the full “Greener Apple” statement, see www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple)

 

3. Intel Reduces Energy Costs and Greenhouse Gas EmissionsIntel, the world leader in silicon innovation, and Google Inc., the search technology innovator, joined with Dell, EDS, HP, IBM, Microsoft and others earlier this month to launch the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. By setting aggressive targets for energy-efficient computers and components, these companies hope to save $5.5 billion in energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons per year. (Read the news release at www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070612corp.htm?iid=pr1_releasepri_20070612r

The radical idea: Use geo-engineering to reduce the effects of pollutants. The concept is to send sulphate particles into the stratosphere to produce a cooling effect in specific geographic areas. Professor David Keith, of the University of Calgary, talked at the TED Salon about focusing on the North and South Poles. It’s very cheap and could act as a form of risk control that takes the edge off environmental heat while we work to reduce emissions and concentrations of pollutants.

The scientist: David Keith (www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/) - Earth Sciences, University of Calgary - Director, ISEEE Energy and Environmental Systems Group.- Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment., Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Department of Economics.- Adjunct Professor Department of EPP at Carnegie Mellon.

BUT how will this affect the ozone layer? If we do serious research and make this technique a reality, will that weaken motivation to reduce emissions? How can we best avoid this “moral challenge”? What about nations’ ownership of their air rights. Will we need treaties?

We heard David Keith speak at the first TED Salon, where he was one of five eminent scientists who spoke. TED, best known for its annual Monterey conference, exists to spread great ideas, and its NYC salon was literally mind-expanding.

Our thought on geo-engineering is that the climate change crisis is such a serious threat to life on earth and growing at such an alarming rate that every possible solution should be explored, including this one. It may never be THE solution, but how likely is it that any one solution could achieve all that’s needed in whatever time we have left? It seems to us it deserves to be explored and the findings of research thoroughly discussed at each stage.

Where can you find out more? Here’s what Professor Keith said when we asked him: “There is not too much out there on the topic that is not over hyped. There is a discussion on realclimate.org. You can look at my review papers, #26 atwww.ucalgary.ca/~keith/Geoengineering.html is the one to read. There are the results of the NASA Ames workshop. Dan Schrag and I are running a high level forum at Harvard in November, I will prepare an annotated bibliography from that which should help.