IFTF's Future Now

Climate change knowledge and action: Less connection than we would expect?

Political scientists at Texas A&M recently published an article arguing that public campaigns to educate the public about the dangers of global warming may make people less, not more, worried about climate change.*

People generally believe that when you have more information about a risk, you act to avoid or control that risk, and that there's some positive correlation between how much information you have, and how hard you try to fix a problem. This is the knowledge-deficit model.

As people are exposed to more information about what scientists know about how human activities like CO2 emissions are related to increasing global temperatures, then one should expect two things. First, one should expect to see higher amounts of information to be related to higher degrees of personal efficacy and responsibility for global warming and climate change. Second, one should expect to see higher amounts of information to be related to heightened perceptions about the risks of global warming and climate change. Together, these hypotheses are straightforward applications of the knowledge-deficit model to the issue of global warming.

That's not the case. In fact, they report two slightly counterintuitive, but disturbing, patterns. First,

more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.... [C]ertainly contrary to the assumptions underlying the knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected. Directly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feel for it; and indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it.

The authors themselves add the caveat that "The effects here are statistically significant, but they are modest in magnitude." Further, several people have argued that since the study is based on a survey taken in 2004, just before the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it doesn't capture how the terms of public debate around climate change, or the ways people respond to information about climate, changed after the movie.

* Paul M. Kellstedt, Sammy Zahran, Arnold Vedlitz (2008) "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States," Risk Analysis 28 (1), 113–126.

Technorati Tags: climate, decision-making, risk

New study on Chinese-EU energy cooperation

SciDevNet reports on a new study proposing cooperation between the EU and China on alternative energy research and development:

China and the European Union (EU) can significantly advance low-carbon technologies if they cooperate closely on technological development and market access, according to a new report.

'Interdependencies on Energy and Climate Security for China and Europe', outlines common challenges faced by the China and the EU in dealing with the impact of climate change on energy security — despite differences in their economic development.

The report was presented in Beijing last month (28 February). Contributors include UK think tank Chatham House and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

In order to meet its fast-growing energy demands, China will need to add power generation capacity of 1260 gigawatts by 2030. And despite stable economic development, the countries of the EU will need to generate 862 gigawatts of additional energy by 2030 to replace outdated generation facilities.

If conventional technologies are used, both China and the EU will be locked in a high-carbon development model, the report warns.

But if they work together, the EU and China — which together account for 30 per cent of the world's energy consumption — could create unprecedented opportunities for global transition to low-carbon energy generation, says the report.

China's huge energy demands, low-cost manufacturing, and cheap local technological talent offer a shortcut for the production of clean energy technologies such as wind, solar and clean coal.

China has already produced 80 per cent of the world's energy-saving lamps — many of which are based on technology created in the EU.

The report recommends that EU research bodies establish research and development centres in China and increase the involvement of Chinese expertise in the development of clean energy technology.

It also suggests that the EU builds 'low-carbon economic zones' in China and establishes a joint technology platform to improve energy efficiency in the building sector.

Technorati Tags: China, cooperation, energy, Europe

"Sensor Deprivation"

Following up on yesterday's post on proposed regulation of environmental sensors in New York City, research scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have an opinion piece in today's New York Times:

The problem is that the bill as written would cover all “environmental sensors,” and in the extreme interpretation even laboratory analyses, used by students, teachers, researchers, activists, unions and many other groups. Their work has far more to do with ecology, education, public health and worker safety than with terrorism. These sensors allow them to measure things like greenhouse gases in order to document air pollution.

There are many examples of nongovernmental groups collecting important environmental data based on laboratory analyses. Indeed, the original identification of PCB contamination of the Hudson River did not come from the government but from a study by Sports Illustrated magazine that included data on striped bass collected from the river by a private citizen, Robert H. Boyle.

When a steam pipe exploded in Midtown Manhattan last year, scientists were able to quickly allay fears that asbestos was in the air. In the wake of 9/11, private groups using both hand-held particle sensors and samples that were analyzed in laboratories enabled us to better understand the health risks of the disaster. Future environmental and public health research will rely increasingly on sensors that immediately measure contaminant levels.

One thing that's interesting about the piece is that these example highlight the importance of these device's use in the hands of activist groups or private citizens, not just research scientists like themselves. If knowledge is power, sensors are engines.

Technorati Tags: environment, security, sensors, terrorism, ubicomp

Use a sensor, go to jail

The Village Voice (via Jason) reports on a proposal in New York City to essentially have all environmental monitoring devices registered by the police.

Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism... and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own... that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons... to get a permit from the police first. And it's not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you "will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety," the first draft of the law states.

Last week, Falkenrath made his case for the new law before the City Council's Public Safety Committee, where Councilman Peter Vallone introduced the bill and chaired the hearing. Dozens of university researchers, public-health professionals, and environmental lawyers sat in the crowd, horrified by the prospect that if this law passes, their work detecting and warning the public about airborne pollutants will become next to impossible.

Given how important environmental sensors are to all kinds of scientific research, not to mention environmental activism (e.g., monitoring of pollutants in low-income neighborhoods), this seems like a pretty extreme move.

But Falkenrath pressed on, saying that unless the police can determine who gets to look for nasty stuff floating in the air, the city would be paralyzed by fear.

"There are currently no guidelines regulating the private acquisition of biological, chemical, and radiological detectors," warned Falkenrath, adding that this law was suggested by officials within the Department of Homeland Security. "There are no consistent standards for the type of detectors used, no requirement that they be reported to the police department—or anyone else, for that matter—and no mechanism for coordinating these devices. . . . Our mutual goal is to prevent false alarms . . . by making sure we know where these detectors are located, and that they conform to standards of quality and reliability."

Futurists regularly talk about the potential for cheap environmental sensors to serve as tools for sustainable development, more efficient energy use, etc.; I'm not sure how many of us (or how many computer scientists, ecologists, and others) ever thought that it would make sense to have the police "know where these detectors are located, and that they conform to standards of quality and reliability," any more than they would have a compelling interest in making sure all clocks and watches were accurately set. It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds.

Technorati Tags: environment, security, ubicomp

Amigo

Recently I came across a video overview of the Amigo project, which is developing "ambient intelligence for the networked home environment." It's a pretty standard day-in-the-life-of-the-home-of-the-future video.

Like many of these videos, the point is to give readers a sense of what life in the networked, infomated future would be like. The challenge you always have with these videos is that there's a tension between highlighting the technology-- which is all about novelty-- and focusing on the people and how they live-- which is probably not going to be so very different. As a result, some of these videos inadvertently make the home of the future look as appealing as a PC, because they choose to foreground the interactions people will have with their smart doors or mirrors in their hallways.

Technorati Tags: smart_home, video

Servers and SUVs

British environmental group Global Action Plan has released a study [pdf] of the carbon footprint of the British IT industry. They argue that "servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry:"

"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth [actually, "The Inefficient Truth"-- ed.] states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

Part of the reason is that many IT managers don't have incentives to conserve energy: most neither pay their own energy bills, nor see how much energy they consume. It's a nice example of how turning a real cost being into an externality dulls incentives to conserve-- and makes it harder for well-intentioned people to do so.

Technorati Tags: energy, environment, UK

But the good news is we'll save fuel sailing from Asia to Europe

The Northwest Passage will soon be open, and doubtless more intrepid captains sailing between Asia and Europe will be using it. The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that

Of particular note is imminent opening of the fabled Northwest Passage through the channels of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. This shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was first navigated by Roald Amundsen in the early 1900s. It took his group over two years of arduous and dangerous navigation through narrow lanes of open water amongst thick, compact ice. Analysts at the Canadian Ice Service and the U.S. National Ice Center confirm that the passage is almost completely clear and that the region is more open than it has ever been since the advent of routine monitoring in 1972. The Northwest Passage traces from Baffin Bay in the South toward M'Clure Strait.

[from NSIDC; large version here]

I haven't seen an estimate yet of how long it'll be before it's possible to sail along the northern coast of Russia.

[via The Guardian]

Technorati Tags: Arctic, climate, North Pole, Northwest Passage

Walk Score - Location Based Sustainability Mash-Up

Location based services is a rapidly growing online category.  Many of these layer data onto maps to create new and useful tools and applications.  Walk Score is a great example of this trend, and it also leverages the trend towards sustainable living and life practices.  Description of Walk Score from the website:

We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

While Walk Score is currently focused on how a location relates to services, over time they easily could add information on trails, bike paths, open spaces, public transportation, etc.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Danish survey of the Lomonosov Ridge

A couple weeks ago, Russian explorers planted a flag at the North Pole-- not on the ice, but the ocean floor-- as part of its claim that the North Pole is connected to Russian territory via the Lomonosov Ridge. Now, Denmark is mounting an expedition to map the Lomonosov Ridge's connection to Greenland:

Danish researchers have set sail for the North Pole to collect geological data, on a mission similar to Russia's trip earlier this month.

The month-long Danish expedition will study the Lomonosov Ridge. Russia believes the underwater feature is linked to its territory.

Denmark will investigate the ridge to see if it is geologically connected to Greenland, a Danish territory.

Despite the nationalist (and commercial) impulses behind the expedition, it still manages to be curiously international:

The Danish mission, called Lomrog (Lomonosov Ridge off Greenland), is supported by a Swedish icebreaker called Oden and a Russian nuclear icebreaker called 50 let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory), which was leased by Sweden.

Mr Sander said the Russians had simply "offered the best value". "The ship has a Russian crew - they'll do what we ask them," he added.

The research team - 45 specialists from Canada, Denmark and Sweden - plans to collect bathymetric, gravity and seismic data to map the seabed under the ice, the Danish science and technology ministry says.

Unconfirmed rumors also suggest that the strange 8-foot Lego man that washed onto a beach in the Netherlands was part of a secret Danish robot team that was headed to the North Pole. No word on the rest of the team.

Technorati Tags: Arctic, denmark, North Pole, science

Risk Management: Wind Energy

Hedgeweek reports that

US Futures Exchange (USFE) is to list wind power futures, its first renewable energy contracts, starting August 24. Seven contracts derived from NORDIX® Financial Wind Indexes will trade with monthly expiries. ...USFE's futures contracts are the first listed exchange products designed to reflect the needs of the greater renewable energy community. USFE also plans to develop a comprehensive suite of futures contracts for the benefit of renewable energy, including hydro, solar, geothermal and biomass.

Futures have an important role in managing the risks of commodity producers, because they allow them some control over future pricing. By enabling futures trading, this lowers the risk inherent in being an alternative energy producer.  A lower risk profile implies lower prices.

For those who want more, a good overview is provided at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's online brochure "The Economic Purpose of Futures Markets," particularly if you skim down to Table 1, which ties how a commodity producer might trade Futures to protect themselves.

Farewell, Nukes - or at least a Bunch of Them

My brother is an energy analyst, and we got to talking the other day about the future of energy. He pointed out a very interesting fact that I think hasn't gotten nearly enough attention in the sustainability discussion - the massive wave of nuclear plant retirements that is coming over the next two decades.

The problem is that some 20 percent of the nation's electrical generating capacity will need to be replaced by 2025. That's the lion's share of our carbon-free generating capacity, and I don't think even the most wildly optimistic forecasts of renewables deployment will make up for it. It makes carbon output reduction that much harder. You may say, why don't we just delay the retirements? Well, if the brittle reactor core that was discovered in 2002 at the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio is any indication of the state these plants are in, I wouldn't bet on it.

The Nuclear Energy Industry has a comprehensive list here.

Canada stepping up naval presence in Arctic

A few days ago we noted a Russian announcement of a new claim to oil- and gas-rich territory near the North Pole, territory that's becoming more accessible as the ice caps recede. Today, the Associated Press reports that Canada is stepping up its claims of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage:

Canada announced plans Monday to increase its Arctic military presence in an effort to assert sovereignty over the Northwest Passage - a potentially oil-rich region the United States claims is international territory....

"Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it," Harper said. "It is no exaggeration to say that the need to assert our sovereignty and protect our territorial integrity in the North on our terms have never been more urgent."...

As global warming melts the passage - which now is only navigable during a slim window in the summer - the waters are exposing unexplored resources such as oil, fishing stocks and minerals, and becoming an attractive shipping route. Commercial ships can shave off some 2,480 miles from Europe to Asia compared with current routes through the Panama Canal....

Canadians have long claimed the waters.

The article notes that "the U.S. Geological Survey estimates [that the region] has as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas."

Canada's CBC reports that

The federal government will fund the construction of six to eight new Arctic patrol ships to help reassert Canada's sovereignty over the North, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday.

The Polar Class 5 Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships will be custom-built, state of the art and made in Canada.... The ships will cost about $3.1 billion, with about $4.3 billion for operations and maintenance over their 25-year lifespan.

However, despite the competing territorial claims, there are also multinational plans for commercializing the Passage:

The Russian and Manitoba governments have emerged as unlikely partners in a push to create maritime and air cargo routes that would cross the Arctic, saving time and money on transporting goods between North America and Asia.

If successful, Russian icebreakers could be operating in Canadian waters, clearing the way for freighters docking between Churchill and the Russian port city of Murmansk while Winnipeg would emerge as an air hub for flights from various Asian countries....

[N]ot only are Russian companies keen on taking advantage of a shortened route to the North American market, but China and India have also expressed their interest.

And as usual, the scientists are the ones acting like adults.

Technorati Tags: Arctic, Canada, conflict, Northwest Passage, Russia

Claiming the North Pole

The receding of the Arctic ice is bringing a new territorial competition to claim the North Pole. In 2004, Danish scientists began to survey the area between Greenland and the North Pole, hoping to make a claim that "Greenland's continental socket is attached to a huge ridge beneath the floating Arctic ice," and should be treated as Danish territory.

More recently, Russia has announced plans "to annex a vast 460,000 square mile chunk of the frozen and ice-encrusted Arctic:"

According to Russian scientists, there is new evidence backing Russia's claim that its northern Arctic region is directly linked to the North Pole via an underwater shelf.

Under international law, no country owns the North Pole. Instead, the five surrounding Arctic states, Russia, the US, Canada, Norway and Denmark (via Greenland), are limited to a 200-mile economic zone around their coasts....

To extend a zone, a state has to prove that the structure of the continental shelf is similar to the geological structure within its territory. Under the current UN convention on the laws of the sea, no country's shelf extends to the North Pole. Instead, the International Seabed Authority administers the area around the pole as an international area....

On Monday, however, a group of Russian geologists returned from a six-week voyage on a nuclear icebreaker. They had travelled to the Lomonosov ridge, an underwater shelf in Russia's remote and inhospitable eastern Arctic Ocean.

According to Russia's media, the geologists returned with the "sensational news" that the Lomonosov ridge was linked to Russian Federation territory, boosting Russia's claim over the oil-and-gas rich triangle.

This is part of a bigger competition between Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway, and the U.S. to claim the Pole. Why are Arctic countries now starting to stake these claims? In the near term, it means control of the substantial energy reserves believed to be in the territory around the Pole (as the Guardian notes, the territory Russia plans to claim "contained 10bn tonnes of gas and oil deposits"). In the longer term, it will factor into control over the Northwest Passage that seems likely to open up as the polar ice caps continue to melt.

More broadly, this is a good example of how climate change could alter the dynamics of global conflicts. There's plenty of thinking recently on climate change and national security, revolving around the potential instabilities created by migration, conflict over resources, and the like. But it's also the case that some standing conflicts have been contained by local climate. One of my uncles, a now-retired Air Force officer, once told me that putting the Minuteman ICBM base in North Dakota helped stabilize the Cold War: you knew that your enemies were freezing too, and no one wanted to fight the Russians and a blizzard at the same time.

It's worth wondering whether there are conflicts today that will get worse if winters get shorter, say, or now-contested but inaccessible territories become easier to reach.

Technorati Tags: climate, environment, North Pole, Russia

Yahoo! Seeks Carbon Neutrality at the Peace Talks, But What They Really Mean is "Carbon Reduction"

Carbon neutral is officially becoming the new political correctness, an internally contradictory shorthand for a complex set of assumptions about equally complex problems and their solutions. But alas, its caught on. Yahoo chief David Filo announced on his blog a widely anticipated move for Yahoo! to go carbon neutral this year.

Jerry Yang and I just announced at our quarterly employee all-hands that Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

Full post from David Filo's blog...

Amid the growing backlash over whether carbon neutrality is effectively, or even in some not-so-extreme circumstances, actually worse than doing nothing, this is a questionable move. But Yahoo! is clearly taking a flexible approach, as File writes:

We know carbon neutrality isn’t without controversy. And it’s honestly deserved if companies and individuals don’t first make an effort to find direct ways to reduce their impact. We’ll continue to be vigilant about cutting ours, looking for creative ways to power our facilities, encourage even more employees to seek alternative commutes, and generally inspire Yahoos around the world to think differently about their energy use. (For example, in honor of Earth Day, we’re challenging Yahoos to decrease their consumption by 20% this week to help build lasting habits.) We’ll also be deliberate about investing in offset projects that can verifiably deliver their expected environmental benefits.

We think our offset program counts, but since this is a new and emerging market, we expect to learn as we go, and we’ll be transparent with you along the way.

I think the bigger fallacy here, and in any carbon neutrality plan, is that anyone in today's economy can possibly ever become carbon neutral. I think if we're going to be honest and transparent, we need to look at the entire ecological footprint and fuel composition of what we're doing and consuming, whether its in business or personal life, and no one, no company is going to be strictly carbon neutral on this planet for a very, very long time. Let's be honest, and stick to calling it "carbon reduction".

Ten Year Forecast meeting

Today we're holding the Institute's annual Ten Year Forecast conference, at the Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose. It actually started last night, with a set of games designed by Jane McGonigal to illustrate (or embody, or get people to play out) some of the big trends we're talking about today.

This is the 32nd Ten Year Forecast meeting-- so far as we can tell, one of the oldest continually-running futures conference today.

Much of what we're talking about in this year's forecast deals, in one way or another, with responses to climate change. Perhaps not surprising an overarching theme, but it's playing out in everything from our ethnographic work and surveys, to our forecasts on the impact of 3D printing and the organization of science.

These conferences are an enormous amount of work, but our clients and friends quite like them, so they're worth it.

Technorati Tags: climate, conference, environment, future, IFTF, Institute for the Future, san jose

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Are Mobile Phones Disorienting Bees?

The recent global die-off off bee colonies has been another side of the rapidly shifting global food system. If the spread of wireless infrastructure turns out to be a culprit in damaging delicate apiaries, things could get a lot more complicated. Oh, the law of unintended consequences.

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? - Independent Online

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

Crowds and good environmental behavior

Live Science reports on a new study indicating that peer pressure-- or the example of neighbors-- is a significant reinforcer of environmental behavior.

Better take out the recyclables—your neighbors are doing it. That's the “follow the crowd” mentality that often turns residents into planet huggers who make these green decisions, new research shows.

Rather than statements that scare people into Earth-friendly behaviors, one scientist says a better approach would be to play to a person’s herding tendencies.

“One spur to get people to act is to honestly tell them that’s what the majority of people are doing in this situation.” said Robert Cialdini, a psychologist at Arizona State University, author of the new study....

Cialdini and his colleagues surveyed nearly 2,500 California residents and found they offered three main motivational reasons for household conservation: protecting the environment, being responsible citizens and saving on energy costs.

They gave the lowest rating to “because neighbors are doing it,” But this factor showed the greatest correlation with reported energy conservation, Cialdini said.

In another study, Cialdini worked with a hotel that wanted to encourage guests to reuse towels. They experimented with four different messages, one of which was “Join Your Fellow Citizens In Helping To Save The Environment.” That message, they found, "increased towel reuse by about 28 percent."

Technorati Tags: environment, psychology

Green business and the future of sustainability

I've recently been doing some work on the future of sustainability. The project is part intellectual history (how are people and organizations going to define and think about sustainability in the future?) and sociology of practice (how will these ideas be put into practice?). it's a classic example of how being a futurist is (or can be) exactly the same as being an historian of science: you're asking all the same kinds of questions, and using the same approaches just along a different time axis.

So I was interested to see that the New York Times has a special section on green business. It's got a number of interesting articles-- Denmark's mixed experience with wind power is eye-opening, for example-- but for me, the pieces were illuminating as data-points on two big trends.

Consumer choice. One is the growing ability of consumers to better measure the environmental impacts of everyday choices, and a growing variety of tools to reduce those impacts. Both are equally important.

To simplify a bit, in the past, information was more high-level, and choices were binary. You could know in general terms whether certain kinds of products were likely to be environmentally sound, and you could either buy them or not; but that was about it. Companies and products could pitch themselves as organic or environmentally-friendly, but the claims were sometimes more accessible than the proof.

Now, however, consumers are slowly getting access to more information about the energy required to produce or transport goods, and the environmental impacts of goods and services. As an article on labeling notes,

Just as food products are labeled with calorie and nutritional information, consumer products are beginning to bear details about their environmental impact, like the amount of greenhouse gases produced in making, transporting and selling them.

The evolution of the concepts of "food miles" and "carbon footprint" don't just represent a growing general awareness of environmental impacts of agriculture, industry, and modern life in general; they also reflect an attempt to make sense of information that wasn't easily available in the past.

(Incidentally, providing this information to consumers can also be a revealing exercise for companies. When it decided to create a label showing "the energy used in making the shoes, the portion that is renewable, and the factory's labor record," shoemaker Timberland "was surprised to find that more than half of the energy used (and greenhouse gases generated) in making a pair of shoes comes from processing and producing the raw materials. The next-biggest energy drain is the retail environment (think of all those brightly lighted malls), followed by factory operations and, finally, transportation — almost a complete inversion of what Timberland had assumed.")

Where the choice used to be buy or don't buy, other options are emerging. Utilities are starting to offer access to green power, subsidies for installing solar panels, or rebates for conserving energy. Expedia offers travlers the chance to buy carbon offsets with their airline tickets (and doubtless some airline will soon claim to be greener than competitors, thanks to their modern fleet of planes, in-flight trash reduction efforts, etc.). Terrapass offers drivers the option of zeroing out their car's emissions.

The critical thing here is the proliferation of both knowledge about the environmental impacts of goods and services, and the growth of choices in how to deal with those impacts. And all the indicators are that consumers will have more of both in the future.

Competitive advantage. Vermont hopes that its natural beauty and environmental ethic will attract green businesses to the state. Of course, states have long offered businesses incentives to attract factories, call centers, or corporate headquarters; the Times notes that

What makes Vermont’s pitch unusual is that officials view the state itself as a lure for moving a company here or enlarging an existing one. Officials are trying to use the clean air, open space and connection to the earth, which brought early environmentalists here in the 1970s, to attract businesses.

This kind of pitch is likely to become more common in the future, and even move from the level of markets and quality of life to something more basic: you should relocate your business here because we've got great quality of life and environmentally-conscious consumers now, and government simulations show we're going to have stable water supplies in 20 years even as mean temperatures increase and snow packs get smaller.

Technorati Tags: business, environment, green_economy

The mystery of disappearing bees

The New York Times has a worrying article on the mysterious decline in honeybee populations:

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable....

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal....

Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

The article goes on to talk about the growth of a commercial pollinating industry-- essentially, beekeeper who travel the country, setting up hives that pollinate crops-- and the threat this die-off poses to them, but the bigger worry is more fundamental. Pollinating insects play a critical role in agriculture, and a decline in the number of pollinators-- especially a long-term decline in both wild and domesticated pollinating insects-- would mean pretty bad things for food prices and production.

Technorati Tags: business, ecoservices, environment

Please Stop Eating Tuna Now. And Cod.

Can you imagine a world without fish?

Over at my embryonic Blue Economy blog, I often post about the foreboding forecasts many marine ecologists are issuing about the imminent collapse of fisheries throughout the world. The Economist ran a shocking piece ("Fins with the blues", subscribers only) in the January 27th issue, however, that deserves promoting to this blog.

It turns out that in places like the Western Atlantic, breeding populations of mature blue-fin tuna (the most-sought-after for sushi consumption) has fallen by 90 percent since 1970. In the Mediterranean Sea, stocks of blue-fin have fallen precipitously by 80 percent in the last three years alone. As a result, the Japanese are leading a global effort implement a global monitoring system that could help do away with purse-seine fishing, which uses giant nets to indiscriminately catch entire schools of tuna (and whatever they are hunting, which presumably gets thrown away).

The cod fisheries of the North Atlantic look like they are also pretty much done for now as well.

So please stop eating tuna now. And cod. And Chilean sea bass. And rush over to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch site and print yourself a wallet-sized dining guide. I carry both the East Coast and West Coast versions. That way you can enjoy a (more) sustainable meal next time you dine out.

I'm trying to not sound like a Cassandra here, but I'm growing increasingly concerned that the global warming debate is going to steal any thunder that this issue might have. We're really on the brink of destroying the last wild food supply, and one of the largest reservoirs of biodiversity. (And incidentally one of the few ecosystems that might actually benefit from global warming). Global warming is incredibly critical, but its such an intractable problem. Fisheries management is a totally solvable problem, just a question of commitment and enforcement.

It's worth doing, if only for the sushi.

My New Year's Resolution: Assuaging Carbon Guilt

I had a conversation over dinner with the smart guys of the NYCwireless Board of Directors the other night. The gist of the conversation: U.S. occupation of Iraq is more like our occupation of the Korean penninsula than the Vietnam conflict. We'll be there another 50 years.

So, thinking about this future geopolitical mess around energy, I paid more attention to the electric bill this month. Since I dumped the Prius when we left California, that and my air travel (more on that in a second) I don't know what else to do.

I guess you could call it a New Year's Resolution.

We consumed 331 kilowatt-hours of electricity last month for our 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan (not including the power I consume indirectly to light the streets, run the subways, common laundry facilities, etc). Generating that much power with fossil fuels contributes anywhere from 150 to 300 kilograms of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Our heat is provided by building-wide forced hot water, and our cooking gas is absorbed in our monthly common changes so I don't have data on that. In the summer, the bill spikes because of increased air conditioning use. At least we're on the northeast side of the building though, so I don't have to bear the burden of a southern exposure.

Split that between me and my wife, and over the year, I'm looking at about 2000-3000 kg of CO2 emissions just for household purposes.

I'm guessing I drive about 2,000 miles a year in rental cars: according to TerraPass, thats 1,233 lbs of CO2 per year based on a Toyota Matrix, the kind of ZipCar I use most often.

Now for air travel. According to the wizard at TerraPass, just for what I have planned so far this year I'm looking at about 37,307 lbs CO2 based on burning 1,907 gallons of jet fuel to travel 95,434 miles.

So that's a grand total of 44,040 lbs of CO2 emissions for me in 2007.


Based on all this, Here are the immediate steps I took:

Switching to Wind Power

New York State now has competition in electric power generation. I chose Renewable Choice because it claims to supply 100% of power from wind generation. New York State's Public Service Commission provides tons of information on competitive power suppliers, but doesn't even link to their websites! (Cost, about $20-30/month or $250-360 over the next year)

Reducing Household Power Consumption

• Replaced all the incandescent bulbs at home with fluorescent ones (Cost: $75)
• Turned up the temperature setting on my refrigeration
• Will now let hot food cool down on the counter before putting in the refrigerator

Reducing and Offsetting Air Travel

It's by far the biggest (about 80-90% of my total output), and its going to be the hardest one because my work with the Institute requires me to travel often and long distances. While there is a raging debate about carbon offsets, it seems a reasonable short-term solution to me. So I purchased a TerraPass GlobeTrotter pass for $149.99 which claims to offset the impact up to 100,000 miles of air travel.

Over the next year though, I want to find creative ways to use video-conferencing technology to eliminate some air travel for face-to-face meetings.

Diet

I'm going to lay off the beef for a while. Methane from cattle farming is a major greenhouse gas, much more than CO2.

John Thackara on Slums as Design Inspiration

I was at the centennial celebration of the University of Michigan's Taubman School of Architecture and Planning this past weekend, and was treated to a wonderful address by John Thackara, among the highpoints:

Just as biomimicry learns from millions of years of natural evolution, we can adapt the social innovation of other times and places to our present, ultra-modern needs.

For example, a lot of people already know how to live more lightly than we do. Hundreds of millions of poor people practise advanced resource efficiency every day of their lives. That’s because they are too poor to waste resources like we rich folk do.

Design schools should relocate en masse to favelas and slums. These informal economies are sites of intense social and business innovation

....

Paul Hawken reckons that over one million organizations, populated by 100 million people, are engaged in grass roots activity designed to address climate and other environmental issues. This worldwide movement of movements flies under the radar, he believes, but "collectively, this constitutes the single biggest movement on earth”

.......

Big companies, and governments, are also readying themselves for transformational change. I promise you that strange bedfellows will be teaming up in the near future.

Eugenio Barba calls this “the dance of the big and the small”.

Of course, the whole text is on John's Doors of Perception blog.

Mining and earthquakes

A recent National Geographic article reported on research suggesting that some earthquakes are caused by human activity.

The removal of millions of tons of coal from the area caused much of the stress that triggered the Newcastle quake, [Columbia University scientist Christian D.] Klose said.

But even more significant was groundwater pumping needed to keep the mines from flooding....

[M]ining operations... sometimes require as much as 150 tons of water to be removed for each ton of coal produced....

Coal mining isn't the only human activity that can trigger earthquakes.

Klose has identified more than 200 human-caused temblors, mostly in the past 60 years. "They were rare before World War II," he said.

Most were caused by mining, he said, but nearly one-third came from reservoir construction.

Oil and gas production can also trigger earthquakes, he added.

Three of the biggest human-caused earthquakes of all time, he pointed out, were a trio that occurred in Uzbekistan's Gazli natural gas field between 1976 and 1984 (map of Uzbekistan).

Each of the three had a magnitude greater than 6.8, and the largest had a magnitude of 7.3.

Human-triggered earthquakes are particularly dangerous, Klose said, if they occur in seismically inactive areas.

That's partly because people aren't prepared for them. But also, he said, "regions that are naturally inactive are very trigger-sensitive, because stress has built up over long periods of time."

Technorati Tags: environment, mining, risk

Insurance, weak signal

One useful source of signals about current thinking-- and betting-- about the future is the insurance industry. I learned this after one colleague told me that he would be more in favor of nuclear power if insurers were more willing to underwrite policies against nuclear accidents.

So this article from the Baltimore Sun is notable:

Insurer to limit policies in state: Allstate won't write new homeowners on water as storm risk moves north

Allstate Corp., one of Maryland's largest insurers, will stop writing homeowners' policies in coastal areas of the state, citing warnings by scientists that a warmer Atlantic Ocean will lead to more strong hurricanes hitting the Northeast....

Hammered by losses from storms such as Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew, insurance companies are raising rates, dropping coverages and refusing to accept new customers in certain areas....

Allstate also decided recently to let thousands of homeowner policies lapse in the Carolinas, New York and Texas, and to no longer write new policies in parts of Virginia and all of Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey....

This isn't expected to result in major shortages of insurance in the region-- there are still lots of other companies writing new policies-- but it's part of a larger pattern.

The scope of catastrophes in 2005 is viewed as a tipping point that prompted a revamping of how companies view risk and business strategy. Many scientists say that higher sea temperatures in the Atlantic and associated changes in atmospheric circulation are fueling the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.

Risk Management Solutions, a company that forecasts the risk of natural disasters for the insurance industry, changed its computer modeling this year and predicted that more hurricanes would make landfall over the next five years. That means annual insurance losses could increase by up to 30 percent in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and 50 percent in the Gulf, Florida and the Southeast, the company said.

Technorati Tags: environment, future, insurance

Hong Kong's Bad Air Costs

Hong Kong's future seems to be rapidly headed downhill. In addition to economic competition from Shanghai as a finance hub, and Beijing's determined push to exert political control over its democratic institutions, now the environment is worsening to the point where Western companies are divesting holdings of Hong Kong companies.

As The Economist recently reported:

Singapore and Hong Kong have long competed for the title of Asia’s premier financial centre and favoured destination for foreign professionals. Singapore’s claim received a boost in November when Merrill Lynch, an American investment bank, declared that Hong Kong's air pollution was so bad that investors should sell shares in developers there and buy shares in their Singaporean rivals. Spencer White, the bank's analyst, also forecast that Hong Kong office rents might fall 5% in 2007.

Singapore has its own air-pollution problems, but this is usually an annual bout of so-called “haze”, caused by farmers in neighbouring Indonesia setting fire to tropical forests to clear land. Hong Kong’s problem, by contrast, is a year-round miasma churned out mainly by factories on the Chinese mainland. “About 40% of those in my social circle who work in the financial sector are looking to leave [Hong Kong] because of the pollution,” Mr White told a Singaporean newspaper. His investment advice was nothing more than “common sense”, he said, and he predicted Singapore would benefit as more people move there.

Forests, global warming, and carbon sequestration

A new study suggests that "[p]lanting trees to combat climate change is a waste of time," as "most forests do not have any overall effect on global temperature, while those furthest from the equator could actually be making global warming worse."

"The idea that you can go out and plant a tree and help reverse global warming is an appealing, feel-good thing," said Ken Caldeira of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California, a co-author of the study. "To plant forests to mitigate climate change outside of the tropics is a waste of time."

The carbon dioxide used by trees for photosynthesis helps cool the Earth by reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But forests also trap heat from the sunlight they absorb.

Professor Caldeira and his colleague Govindasamy Bala, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also in California, said that outside a thin band around the equator, forests trap more heat than they help to get rid of by reducing CO2

Their research comes in the wake of criticism from scientists of forestry schemes to offset carbon emissions, which they argue let consumers carry on polluting with a clear conscience. The schemes are big business; within three years, the market is expected to reach £300m.

Dr Bala's study, the first simulation to link carbon dioxide and the heat-absorbing effect of trees, found forests had different effects on global warming depending on latitude....

[F]orest canopies, because they are relatively dark, absorbed most of the sun's rays heating falling on them. Grassland or snowfields, however, reflected more sun, keeping temperatures lower. Planting trees above 50 degrees latitude, such as in Siberia, could cover tundras normally blanketed in heat-reflecting snow.

In the tropical regions, though, water evaporating from trees increased cloudiness, which helped keep the planet cool.

Technorati Tags: climate, environment

Animal attacks

File this under the wildest of wildcards, but rae the number of attacks by animals formerly thought to be relatively harmless or difficult to provoke on the rise?

My ever-sharp colleague pointed me to an article about a stingray attack in Florida, in which the stingray leapt into a boat and stung an 81 year-old man. Today, Reuters reports that five people in a village in Bangladesh were killed by rampaging elephants. The New York Times had a remarkable article speculating about "an elephant crackup" earlier this month, which some scientists argue is a consequence of the breakdown of elephants' biological and social environments:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem....

it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities....

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, [Oregon State University professor Gay] Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.

Elsewhere, Bradshaw elaborates her argument about elephant aggression, and also suggests that this new interpretation of its causes is part of a bigger shift in animal psychology.

Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part, revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths. Could it be that elephants, like humans, also suffer psychological trauma as a result of violence?

Until a few years ago, making such inference and diagnosing elephants with PTSD would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism. But no longer. Elephant psychopathology, chimpanzee infanticide and other un-animal-like behaviors are part of a growing body of research that suggests science is building toward a radical paradigm shift. Streams of new data and theories, critically from neuroscience, are converging into a new, trans-species model of the psyche. Humans are being reinstated back into the species continuum that Darwin articulated, a continuum that includes laughing rats, octopuses with personalities, sheep who read emotions from the faces of their family members and tool-wielding crows.

We now understand that all vertebrates, and it is argued even some invertebrates, share many biological structures and processes that underlie attributes once considered uniquely human: empathy, personality, culture, emotion, language, intention, tool-use and violence. Furthermore, we are able to see beyond species differences in ways we have never been able to before. Neuroimaging advances such as PET and fMRI can help map more elusive subjective qualities—such as emotion, states of consciousness and sense of self—to specific regions of the brain. In conjunction with a rich legacy of observational data and theories on animal behavior and human psychology, neuroscience is bridging long-standing conceptual and perceptual gaps.

Whether or not this paradigm shift conforms precisely to science philosopher Thomas Kuhn's definition, its potential effects on science and society are revolutionary. The idea that humans share a psyche with other animals is enormously challenging. First, it alters the basic model around which biomedical and other disciplines have organized theory and terminology. Concepts like sense of self, empathy and intention have largely been considered exclusive to humans, and have therefore defined what animals are not. Such perceived dissimilarities have shaped theory, practice, law and custom for centuries. The human-animal gap influences how we live, how we formulate scientific questions, how we practice science and even what we eat. Today, in contrast, models of species' similarity are replacing models of difference, and the lines between species have become increasingly blurred—blurred to the extent that many insist on limits to stem cell-chimera research to avoid mixing the neuronal and psychological capacities of humans and other species.

Are there other interesting statistics suggesting an increase in the number of attacks by animals that previously were not especially aggressive (as in the case of the stingray), or a change in the kind of aggression exhibited by animals (as in the case of the elephant)?

Technorati Tags: animals, psychology, science

Inuit architecture and climate change

One of the challenges of being a futurist is that you have to develop techniques for finding interesting, out-of-the-way things that either suggest some new phenomenon, or provide quirky confirmation of known trends. One of my colleagues lives near a bookstore in San Francisco that carries an eclectic and international assortment of magazines; he goes in every few weeks and picks a few things at random.

One of the things I use is Google Alerts. Today, my "Buckminster Fuller" alert turned up an article in the Nunatsiaq News on an unusual house in Nunavut (a territory in the far north of Canada).

It looks like Martians have landed in Pond Inlet, where an odd structure crouches on a nearby hillside. It resembles three enormous pop cans fused together, standing one and a half metres above the tundra on three pointy legs.

In fact, it’s a prototype home being built by Richard Carbonnier, an architect who works by day as a project officer for the Government of Nunavut....

When finished, the building will be a two-bedroom, 1,100 square foot home, which Carbonnier calls “Inuksuk Residence” – a name he feels is appropriate, since he says the building stands “like a landmark” on the hillside....

Apparently the region has seen its share of unusual architecture.

The Arctic has a long history of goofy architectural schemes. Take Iqaluit’s high school and elementary school, which both look like they belong beneath the ocean, with only the odd porthole providing natural light.

And Igloolik’s Nunavut Research Station looks like a crash-landed flying saucer.

Geodesic dome buildings were another trend in Arctic architecture, with at least four built around Nunavut and Nunavik.

But few of the dome buildings remain standing today, other than Iqaluit’s Kamotiq Inn, and the museum in Inukjuak.

Unfortunately, the tripod design is more than whimsical:

Carbonnier says the tripod design is far more stable than a typical, four-cornered home, and that this will be important if the climate continues to warm, and permafrost continues to melt.

In the Nunavik community of Salluit, some buildings have already begun to buckle as their foundations sink into a boggy mess.

In another article, the paper notes that the melting permafrost is undermining buildings in a number of northern towns. This is hardly a local phenomenon, as the New York Times noted in 2005:

For the four million people who live north of the Arctic Circle, in remote outposts and the improbable industrial centers built by Soviet decree, a changing climate presents new opportunities.... [Oil companies will soon reach] vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas.... But the thaw itself is already causing widespread anxiety. In Russia, 20 percent of which lies above the Arctic Circle, melting of the permafrost threatens the foundations of homes, factories, pipelines.

A rather perfect summary of the problem of climate change.

Technorati Tags: architecture, climate, environment

California's Kiss Goodbye

Some of you may know that I'm relocating back to New York City in September and will continue working remotely for IFTF. Well I couldn't get away without at least one noticeably freaky earthquake - California just blew me a 4.7 magnitude kiss goodbye from Sonoma!

See the recent California earthquake map. I wasn't sure what had happened, though my whole building shook and I knew it was more than a truck. It came up on the map in less than a minute. This blog entry was up less than 5 minutes later!

I sure hope the grapes are ok up there in wine country.

Household carbon cap and trade in the UK?

According to The Telegraph, Britain's DEFRA is studying the possibility of implementing household cap and trade markets for atmospheric carbon.

Labour plans carbon cap on household energy use

Plans to impose a limit on the amount of carbon that every household in the country is allowed to emit are being drawn up by the Government.

The proposal, which gets one obscure reference in last week's Energy Review, is to impose an overall cap on household energy use, starting in five years' time.

The "cap and trade" scheme, to be administered by energy suppliers who would hand out energy saving equipment to bring down household consumption, would be revolutionary in its effect on how we heat and light our homes....

The proposed new "cap and trade" arrangements would impose a cap on overall household emissions and allow companies to trade any amount of ''undershot'' below that target with other companies by selling them permits to emit carbon, or purchase more permits to pollute if they overshot.

In other words, it would be like the European Union carbon trading scheme now in place for big companies, except that it would be the responsibility of the supply companies, not the domestic user, to reduce household emissions overall....

Cap and trade markets for sulfur dioxide are everyone's favorite example of how markets can be used to reduce pollution; but those succeeded in part because the number of players involved was not very large (when the U.S. implemented cap-and-trade in the 1980s, it knew that power plants were the main generators of sulfur dioxide), and those players could apply (however grudgingly) prior familiarity with commodities markets. Creating enough knowledge about how households are consuming energy and producing (or contributing indirectly to) emissions would, the article notes, "require more snooping about what we use energy for - through smart meters."

Technorati Tags: UK, energy, environment

China's latest export: Pollution

As some member of the punditocracy recently observed, one unintended consequence of the United States' outsourcing manufacturing to China is that it has improved our national carbon footprint: as we manufacture less, we generate less CO2 and other pollutants. But as the New York Times reports in a long article, we're now reimporting some of that pollution back:

One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants....

Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.

The sulfur dioxide produced in coal combustion poses an immediate threat to the health of China's citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops....

Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China's by 2030.

While the Times reports it as something new, the fact that Chinese industrialization is contributing to pollution in the northern Pacific is old news elsewhere. A couple years ago, when I was in Seoul, the city was shrouded in a yellow haze that my host said was from Chinese factories and farms. At first I didn't believe it, but scientists have also been tracking the global spread of Chinese pollution for years. As the Pacific Rim Aerosol Network reported in reported in 2000,

rising industrialization in Asia is discharging millions of tons of previously undetected contaminants annually into the winds that travel across the Pacific Ocean. These aerosols make people sick and destroy crops in Asia, may be polluting American waters and could dramatically change global climate.

However, the Times spends lots of space on Chinese reliance on coal, and has a number of interviews with Chinese families about the tradeoff between pollution and standard of living, and Chinese efforts to reduce its coal use and energy consumption.

Technorati Tags: China, environment

Desert cities and climate change

A new UN study argues that Desert cities are living on borrowed time, thanks to the decreasing accessibility of water, growing populations, and changes in the salinity of what water is left available.

The 500 million people who live in the world's desert regions can expect to find life increasingly unbearable as already high temperatures soar and the available water is used up or turns salty, according to the United Nations.

Desert cities in the US and Middle East, such as Phoenix and Riyadh, may be living on borrowed time as water tables drop and supplies become undrinkable.... The problem now facing many communities on the fringes of deserts, says the UN environment programme report, is not the physical growth of deserts but that rising water tables beneath irrigated soils are leading to more salinisation....

[T]he greatest threat to people and wildlife living anywhere near deserts is climate change, which is already having a greater impact on desert regions than elsewhere. The Dashti Kbir desert in Iran has seen a 16% drop in rainfall in the past 25 years, the Kalahari a 12% decline and Chile's Atacama desert an 8% drop.

Most deserts, says the report, will see temperatures rise by 5-7C by the end of the century and rainfall drop 10-20%. This will greatly increase evaporation and dust storms, and will move deserts closer to communities living on their edges.

[Hat tip of Bill C.]

Hertzian Space and the City

Donnie Gonzales, a student of Exploratorium curator/artist Ali Sant's at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has developed an interesting new notation system for warchalking - the graffitti-esque practice of making marks on sidewalks and buildings to inform passersby of available networks.

Yesterday, I got to spend the afternoon running all over Potrero Hill and the Mission District of San Francisco with Ali's "Site Specific" design studio class and architect/professor Jordan Geiger critiquing final projects.

There are some real interesting ones that are pushing understanding of where what they call "Hertzian space" (i.e. wireless signals) intersects with urban space. I would especially recommend looking at Smile - grabs photo of you from public webcams while you're standing there being photgraphed - and Mobile Phone Booth, a hood that gives you privacy whilst you chat on your mobile in public spaces.

I'm really impressed by the student work at CCA, and Ali's class - they are building a real West Coast competitor to programs like NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and Parson's Design and Technology track.

Carsharing conference

The principality of Monaco (best-known to a certain generation of Americans as the place where Grace Kelly went after leaving Philadelphia) recently hosted a Monaco Euro Cities Carshare Implementation Workshops:

What is carsharing?

The idea of carsharing - basically an arrangement whereby you no longer have to own and bother about your car but still have one easily available to use when you need it (think no-wait car rental right around the corner with no paperwork or hassle) - has been around for several decades, and Europe early emerged as a world leader in the field. You may not ever have heard of it, but today there are more than six hundred cities in the world in which you can have handy use of a car when you want without owning one.... The World Carshare Consortium, an NGO out of France (http://worldcarshare.com) reports that based on actual experience, if you live in a city, drive less than ten thousand kilometers (6000 miles) a year, and don't use your car every day, you may be a perfect candidate for carsharing.

Why cities are looking at it?

While carsharing growth in the past has primarily been driven by individuals making the switch for their own personal reasons of economics and convenience, cities and government agencies concerned with matters like the environment, transportation, energy and the economy are starting to give it more attention for reasons of their own.

From the perspective of the city, carsharing offers a number of advantages - not least because a single shared car can... [replace] anywhere from six to twenty privately-owned] cars depending on the city and the project.... Carsharing [also] permits major economies of parking spaces....

But the collective advantages of carsharing do not stop there.

Studies in cities around the world in which carshare has become part of their transportation arrangements show that the switch to carsharing also works to improve environmental and air quality significantly, and works to encourage increased use of public transport, as well as more use of bicycles and walking.

Carsharing schemes are interesting examples of how unique, trackable objects can morph from being exclusively privately-owned goods, to something of a temporary commons.

Technorati Tags: cars, cooperation

New NASA polar ice cap study

Not much comment required:

Impact of Climate Warming on Polar Ice Sheets Confirmed

In the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken of the massive ice sheets covering both Greenland and Antarctica, NASA scientists confirm climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth's largest storehouse of ice and snow.

Antarctica lost much more ice to the sea than it gained from snowfall, resulting in an increase in sea level.

Other recent studies have shown increasing losses of ice in parts of these ice sheets. This new survey is the first to inventory the losses of ice and the addition of new snow on both continents in a consistent way throughout an entire decade.