Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

Dear {name of organization},

I know {PICK ONE: from your previous work, from our conversations, from your reputation} that you are passionate about addressing our climate challenges. As such, I was very surprised at the contents of the large {PICK ONE: FEDEX, Express mail, mail} package that recently arrived for me.

While I'm sure that your {PICK ONE: marketing collateral, report} is interesting and informative, I have to tell you that I recycled it to the best of my ability without reading it. All of the information that you chose to send to me (remember, I didn't ask for it), is already available online or could easily be put there. That way I could access it for effectively zero environmental cost, compared to your approach, which was far more wasteful. In addition to the impact of shipping your package, your material {CHOOSE ALL THAT APPLY: used non-recycled paper, is printed with inks that will make it hard to recycle, is bound in a way that makes it hard to recycle, has lots of environmentally unfriendly glossy pictures, included excess packaging, was shipped by air even though it wasn't time critical}.

As Marshall Mcluhan said, the medium is the message. Your message to me was that you only care about the environment when its convenient. I doubt that is the message that you really wanted to send, but that's what arrived in my mailbox.

If you'd still like me to take a look at some of your stuff, I'll look forward to an email with an attachment or link to the material.

Regards,

Dave

I just arrived back from an series of trips to find about a foot of mail, and the bulk of it was stacks of unsolicited material from supposedly sustainable organizations. Presumably you know who you are and can customize the letter above appropriately.

For the rest of you, feel free to reuse this letter yourself. Let's put an end to the insanity!

Last week I visited Milano, Brussels and Berlin in a quick trip through the EU. The trip was a mix of customer activities, government discussions and press interviews. Here's some random and unordered notes:

• I got to drive the Eco Rider scooter/bike thing that the German team has been driving around the country. It was lots of fun, and really captured people's imaginations. I'm big on gimmicky promotions, but the Eco Rider somehow transcended gimmickry and put the right kind of images in peoples minds.
• My sense is that Europe is 6 to 9 months farther along in "eco awareness" than in the US (California exempted - I think the EU and CA are about equal). Your average European is just more up to speed and thoughtful about the environment than your average American. That said, the Europeans aren't to the point where they'll do a project just for the environmental benefit, eco as ecology AND economics is just as true in Europe as elsewhere.
• The eco financing problem that I find rampant in the US is just as prevalent in Europe. People paying the energy bills are not the same as those making purchasing decisions. I'm now convinced this is a global problem that needs real attention.
• I kicked into high gear with the EU policy folks I met with in Brussels, as well as the press I met with in Berlin about the need for computer companies to publish accurate anticipated energy usage for their products. There's a lot of interest in importing Energy Star, but many people that they will get energy reporting as a result, and its not true. I know this isn't easy, and standards are still coming, but we're making good headway on this. I've really come to believe that having your vendor inform you of expected energy usage is Consumer Right #1 at this point in our history, and Energy Star just doesn't go far enough in this regard. I'm sure you'll hear more from me on this going forward, as I'm wound up about it.
• In Berlin I met with a large ISP and Sun customer, Strato AG, who is doing some awesome work. Step 1 was to move to Niagara servers to cut energy usage, and that's allowed them to get their power low enough to look at going for totally green power. Next step is upcoming T2 systems, which will hopefully give them room for significant growth within their current power envelope.

Overall a very busy and tiring trip, but also quite rewarding!

When I first read this op-ed in the WSJ last week, I thought "get real". The steady rise in CO2 is clear evidence that markets aren't working.

Then I reminded myself that, if externalities such as the potential impact of CO2 on the globe were reflected appropriately in the prices of things (such as cars and gas, in this case), then I would actually be in strong agreement with the authors! So hopefully Mr. Crandall and Mr. Singer will be leading the charge to get externalities correctly reflected in the market.

(As an aside, I also hope for GM's sake that they don't think that concern for climate change isn't being reflected in the market - they're way behind and I hope they're actually acting that way internally. We need the US auto makers to catch up on this issue.)

This was a good reminder to me of how much contortions we go through as a result of not having the market reflect key externalities as a matter of course. Obviously its hard to do, and also hard to even figure out what the cost of those externalities should be. But to tie it back to last week's post about offsets, its good to remember that personal offsets wouldn't even need to exist if we had the market pricing appropriately. In fact, the market would do a better job than people's current accounting, since the impact of the goods and services we buy would reflect the externalities correctly as well. People would actually be really 'carbon neutral' just by going about their business, as opposed to the partial version that most people and companies practice today where goods and services are ignored.

So one obvious question is, if through some means we get exernalities priced into the market correctly (through a carefully constructed cap and trade or tax system, for exmaple), what happens to all of the infrastucture we're setting up to offer personal offsets? What happens to the projects that are setting themselves up to get a piece of the offset pie?

Yesterday's post on tree offsets started a good conversation with Adam and Tom Arnold at Terrapass. Apparently Adam's post was part of an ongoing, and now that I've read the others I find we're on the same page. In particular, take a read through Adam's Rules of the road for carbon offsets: the trouble with trees. It's a more complete treatment of the topic than I provided yesterday. Bottom line is still the same: if you're buying offsets, know where they're coming from. It's up to you, but I'd stay away from the trees.

As self-appointed eco watch dog for scientific accuracy, I can't help commenting on Adam Stein's "Science corner: why carbon sequestration and clean energy are equivalent" on the TerraPass site.

I agree that sequestering a ton of CO2 and avoiding emitting a ton of CO2 can be viewed as scientifically equivalent, assuming that both activities happen within the same period of time. However, Adam ignores this time stipulation, and unfortunately the common practice in forest-based sequestration is to ignore it as well.

Here's the issue. Many tree-based carbon sequestration programs use the money to plant a tree, which will then sequester the targeted CO2 over a period of years. However, that period may be a long time, such as the 70 year period targeted by Dell's Plant a Tree program. That means that 35 years from now, only half of the CO2 will be sequestered.

If someone argues that we can wait a few decades to do something about CO2 emissions, alot of us, including, presumably Adam, would have a fit. However, the forest-based sequestration crowd follow Adam's argument and are somehow comfortable with sequestration which has 2/3 of its effect over 20 years from now.

What we really need is a net present value (NPV) of CO2, just like we have with money. A dollar in the future isn't worth as much as a dollar in hand today, so a discount rate is applied to the future dollar to give you a current value. Similarly, a ton of CO2 30 or 40 years from now isn't as value as a ton of CO2 today. In fact, I could argue that its worth a lot less, if in fact we are faced with a 10 to 20 year horizon to really make a real dent in our atmospheric CO2.

Unfortunately, since we have no NPV for carbon, and the idea of it isn't widely understood, people are putting programs into place that pretend that the value of a future ton is worth a ton today. And when defenders of sequestration-based offsets apply flawed reasoning, and worse yet call it 'scientific', it only lessens my already weak faith in the offset system as an element of a functional and effective carbon market.

Note: I've ignored another potential issues with Adam's argument. He is assuming that investments and circumstances cooperate in order to keep sequestered CO2 sequestered. Our ability to do this at massive scale still seems a little dicey to me.