Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

As I've become more aware of the environmental impact of things I do, certain things from my day-to-day life jump out at me as being totally environmentally irresponsible. And you know what? I'm probably going to keep on doing them. They're my eco vices.

Here's three of them:

Skiing trips - pile the family into a large SUV (need 4WD and room for lots of gear), and drive into the mountains during the harshest conditions. Spend the day on a mix of manmade and natural snow (what's the carbon and fresh water impact of manmade snow?), hang out in a lodge heated to 60 degrees over the outside temperature, and get pulled up the mountain numerous times by a huge electrical pully system. Best family time we have, wouldn't miss it for the world. (Note: golf and waterskiing are probably in the same bucket)

Reading the newspaper - each week part of my trash ritual is getting the recyclable paper out to the curb. Generally its a big recycling bin, most of which is newspaper, full of ads and information I could easily get online. The paper is created (huge water usage), printed, driven to my house in the middle of the night, I read about 5% of it at most (all of which is now on the web somewhere), and then its put out to be driven somewhere else to be recycled. But there's something about sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and having the newspaper in your hands.

Heiniken - How absurd is it to sit down at night and drink a beer that was brewed in Holland, or Japan, or where ever? A bottle of fermented water was shipped by multiple means of transportation to your favorite restaurant or beer distributor. In the end the bottle (and the beer) hopefully get recycled, 10,000 miles from where they were produced. Sure I support local breweries, but sometimes there something about a particular beer...

One thing that all of these show is how our current economy doesn't really account for the environmental impact of many products and activities. Its amazing (at multiple levels) that you can brew beer, make a bottle, package it up, ship it to me from Holland, and I can buy it at a store for around $1, and that money is enough to cover all of the costs and a little profit for all of the people and processes who touched it along the way.

So what are your eco vices?

Rajesh and Jonathan forwarded me an awesome article on the irrationality of not pursuing energy efficiency. It features this chart:

The article goes on to explain:

"The result is a testament to economic irrationality. The measures below the horizontal line have a negative abatement cost—in other words, by carrying them out, people and companies could both cut emissions and save money. At a macroeconomic level they would boost, rather than reduce, economic growth."

Recently, in our Broomfield datacenter we did an $80K capital improvement that should yield around $100K of savings in electricity per year. There's nothing that unique about our datacenters, and I suspect that similar savings exist in most others. So why aren't we seeing a mad rush to do datacenter efficiency projects?

The article hints at the reason in the middle: in most organizations the people paying the energy bills aren't making capital decisions, and the people making capital decisions aren't paying energy bills. For example, if our IT guy in charge of the improvement above can get credit for the energy savings, his project has a positive return in under a year. If he can't get credit for the energy savings, this project never shows a positive return.

This should be easy to fix, right? Well, not really. We're dealing with it internally on a case-by-case basis, but I'd love to see us institutionalize it better. Others have more trouble. I was recently at a major university which gets lots of government grants, and electricity gets paid for out of "overhead" payments that come with lots of strings attached. And, oh, by the way, these payments are based on a fixed percentage and don't change if you make yourself more efficient.

I gave a talk at a conference last week which included practical advice on how to reduce carbon emissions in businesses. Step 1 was to figure out where your energy goes today. Step 2 is to get your finances lined up so that you can factor energy savings into the ROI on capital improvements. Starting efficiency projects without this isn't the end of the world, but its sure helps. There's nothing worse than having efficiency projects get a bad name because they always cost money and don't have a return. This is especially painful when these projects, in fact, often have fantastic ROIs.

So if you're involved in IT, or in eco in general in your organization, make sure you work this issue up front. Energy efficiency makes financial sense, but only if you can bring the finances under one umbrella.