Monday May 12, 2008
"It's almost like we hit a point where, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore,' and that point was about $3.50 a gallon."
Back in the day when I used to consult about transportation control measures (TCMs), we would often do local surveys and other opinion research regarding how to get people out of their (usually single-occupant) vehicles and on to transit alternatives. We would invariably find that pricing measures (such as increased parking fees) needed to be relatively extreme in order to change the minds of a substantial number of people. For instance, increasing a fee from $2 to $5 would only get you a few percent, and double-digit percentages required increases of $2 to $10 or more.
This article fills me with a little glimmer of hope that gas prices are starting to have this precise effect on transit ridership, at least in some markets. From a related New York Times piece:
“It’s very clear that a significant portion of the increase in transit use is directly caused by people who are looking for alternatives to paying $3.50 a gallon for gas.”
Well, duh. Unfortunately, it's likely that it will take even more dramatic financial incentives to get people to vote for things like transit infrastructure bond measures and the like, but it's a start.
Thursday May 08, 2008
Ah, Nature is truly a wonder. And not without a sense of humor. Consider that adorable walking taxidermist's hoax, the platypus. Truly a "what's up with that" moment in evolutionary history. Well, now we know the deep-down origins of this unique critter:
According to a study released Wednesday, the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri -- part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal.
Yep, the 2.2 billion base pairs spread across 18,500 genes of the platypus' genome have been decoded. Interesting article and, most importantly, I now know that a baby platypus is called a "puggle."
That's about enough cuteness for today.
Friday Apr 25, 2008
You know, sometimes it seems like little or no progress gets made in the direction of saner resource use, but then a little (LED) light gleams in the vast darkness:
As gas prices pass $3.50 a gallon nationally and the economy teeters on recession, independent used car dealers like Hoyos and massive chains like AutoNation Inc. are having trouble selling used SUVs as buyers prefer smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles likes hybrids and crossovers (CUVs). Crossovers such as the Ford Edge, Honda CR-V, and Toyota RAV4 have more interior room and more rugged styling that the average car, but with a lighter chassis and generally better gas economy than an SUV.
Go out and hug your Prius today.
Wednesday Mar 12, 2008
In this line of work, I read a lot of "environmental" news. Most of it is pretty grim and even veers toward doomsday-speak on occasion. Not so with this story. Not only is it an amazing example of interspecies communication, but also highlights that humans don't always have the answers.
Overall, a happy ending to what usually is a sad scenario. Yay!
Think I'll go re-watch "Whale Rider" now...
Thursday Feb 14, 2008
On this day when we reach out to express love and appreciation to friends and family, a big red heart goes out to the latest addition to Club Mammalia: Rhynochocyon udzungwensis.
This little sweetheart, essentially a kind of elephant shrew (which has always seemed a bit of an oxymoron) was discovered in Tanzania's Udzungwa Mountains by a researcher with Italy's Trento Museum of Natural Sciences.
If you find our new cousin's formal name a bit of a mouthful, he/she will also answer to "gray-faced sengi."
Monday Feb 11, 2008
Interesting article in Forbes about the end of open source as a counter culture movement. Of particular note was the use of Sun's acquisition of MySQL as an example:
Sun has changed its entire business model to focus on open source programs, which can be used and copied free of charge and enhanced, Wikipedia-style, by volunteers.
While I'm definitely not endorsing the overall message of the article (the writer clearly isn't one of Sun's biggest fans), it got me thinking again about how "environmentalism" really needs to give way to pervasive "green thinking." It should be the dream of all of us with "sustainability," "green," or "eco" jobs to eliminate the need for them. One of my favorite refrains for this year is definitely going to be: Don't ask how to get a green job. Go make your job green.
There's been a lot of discussion and education on open source that's come with being swept up by the OpenEco wave. We're committed to opening up the platform to developers not only because Sun philosophically embraces open-ness, but also because it's critical to the long term vitality of the community. There is huge amounts of enthusiasm out there to evolve OpenEco into a much more comprehensive calculation package, dashboard and information resource for organizations. The trick is executing on all that opportunity. Our vision/hope/wish is for a network of open source Java developers who are interested in using their skills to support sustainability, and injecting all that creativity into the OpenEco community. It would be unlike anything that's ever been tried. Pretty exciting (and daunting) stuff.
Namaste.
Monday Nov 19, 2007
Once customers catch on, they get kind of excited, she says. "They like being a part of something so green," says Ms. Pelkey. "Yeah, we serve burgers and fries, but we're also as environmentally friendly as they come."
This is a great example of showing "regular people" how greener choices are not, by definition, all about scarcity and denial of conveniences. Yes, I read Fast Food Nation and am well aware of the negative cloud around the industry, but I'm all about giving folks props when they do something positive.
I'm also intrigued by the Green Restaurant Association (GRA), mentioned in the article. This sounds like and excellent potential partner/source of participants for OpenEco. It would be cool to be a conduit helping the GRA reach more potential members as well as educate the OpenEco community about their mission and resources.
Friday Oct 19, 2007
So on Tuesday, Dave blogged about Sun's carbon strategy. In his usual good humored way, he posted a wry hypothesis that if you're buying offsets in order to be "carbon neutral," would it be even better to buy enough to be double carbon neutral? This made me smile and appreciate the way it highlights the somewhat arbitrary nature of offsets and their use in an organization's carbon strategy. Well, Environmental Leader appears to have taken his modest proposal at face value, which makes it even more hilarious, imho.
While still chuckling over the above, I ran across a report of what appears to be some buyer's remorse on the part of a couple of companies with respect to renewable energy credits. This feels like more validation for our arms-length approach to offsets. That's not to say that they're not a potentially useful tool in reducing worldwide carbon, but clearly there's a long way to go.
Friday Oct 12, 2007
Had the immense pleasure to meet with Thomas Friedman today (yes, that Thomas Friedman). He met with Dave (Douglas) a few weeks ago, and was interested in meeting some of the folks on his team and talking about corporate action on energy efficiency, climate change, and other related topics. He's been writing about this area quite a bit this year. I particularly liked this piece from last April, as well as some of his more recent columns, such as taking Toyota to task regarding their resistence to new federal fuel economy standards and this one encouraging the Bush administration to step up and lead on climate change.
Impressions: very cool, extremely fun to listen to, and an easy person to talk to. At one point he read a few lines of a column he'd started "in the cab this morning on the way over." Zowee. He makes it look so easy. Yes, I was a bit star struck, further solidifying the fact that I'm a geek. Couldn't care less if I get on an elevator with some TV "personality," but sit me in a room with a Pulitzer Prize winner (three times, I might add), and I'm all a-twitter.
Monday Oct 01, 2007
The giant Ayles Ice Island drifting off Canada's northern shores has broken in two - far earlier than expected.
Well, crap.
Saturday Sep 29, 2007
It's been a whirlwind week of carbon related events, all motivated by our launch of OpenEco.org, a new on-line community focused on assessing and reducing the carbon footprint of office-based organizations (for now).
First stop was New York City for the launch of the Carbon Disclosure Project's annual survey results. Keynote speaker was none other than President and potential First Hubby Bill Clinton (swoon). Wow, what a communicator. I'd nearly forgotten what an amazing speaker he is. And it's not like he's just mouthing the words of a prepared speech, but rather synthesizing knowledge on the spot and somehow making it seem like he's talking directly to you, personally. Of course, there's the two (that I could see) beefy Secret Service guys flanking him, reminding you that there might as well be a 6-inch thick piece of bullet proof glass between him and the audience, but you kind of forget that when Bill's talking so affably about the energy efficiency improvements Hillary and he have done on their farm house.
Second stop was the Corporate Climate Response conference in Chicago. Good program, great conversations. We showed off OpenEco and got a lot of supportive comments and expressions of interest. There has definitely been a lot of folks registering at the site and checking it out (370+ when I last checked). It'll be interesting to see how fast the database grows.
Got a lot of good press coverage this week, including:
* Measuring Green (Forbes)
* Sun encourages companies to fess up, publicly, about their greenhouse emissions (ZDNET, Green Tech Pastures Blog)
* Sun's OpenEco.org Gives Footprint Reduction the Web 2.0 Treatment (GreenerComputing.com)
Great to see all the interest, but what I want now is participation. Grab those energy bills and get started!
Wednesday Aug 22, 2007
Yesterday Sun launched its Eco Innovation Initiative. This was the first time I've been even slightly involved with planning and executing one of these launches, and I'm amazed there are folks at Sun who do this all the time. It's exhausting! However, the reason I was involved is really cool - more and more teams at Sun are including greenhouse gas reductions, in addition to money and energy savings, in their list of benefits when they talk about their product and services. It's great to see eco responsibility thinking starting to evolve into business as usual.
It was fun to see it all come together yesterday. The remarks by Dave Douglas, Bob Worrall and John Fowler were interesting and succinct (3 speakers, one hour = huzzah!). I thought they did a great job of telling the story and staying away from too much technical jargon. Keeping it simple is a key part of the message that was broadcast. As Dave pointed out, customers wanting to improve their data center's efficiency and reduce its environmental impact don't need to make Step One flying in a bunch of expensive consultants on a CO2-spewing airplane. Instead, they can start with these.
As great as the presentations were, the highlight of the event for me was getting to tour the new Santa Clara datacenter, one of three we highlighted during yesterday's launch. You can take a tour on-line by going here.
To re-live yesterday's event: http://www.sun.com/launch/2007-0821/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007aug20_eco_webcast
Sunday Jul 29, 2007
I need to vent. As someone who contributes regularly to favorite environment-related causes, I've become a target for pounds and pounds of mail from other organizations, hoping to catch me with my checkbook open and my green heart vulnerable to pleas to save this, protect that, stop those guys from wrecking untold damage on that pristine whatever, etc. While I can appreciate that there are thousands of NGOs out there, filled with sincere people trying to do what they can to save the planet, what I don't appreciate is the ridiculous waste of resources my weekly allotment of eco junk mail represents.
Even if these mailings are printed on recycled-content paper, they still have environmental consequences. Further, bringing those envelopes to my mailbox incurs energy use and its related carbon penalties. Particularly ironic when the literature begs me to help an organization combat climate change.
The most heinous of these missives those that include pre-printed address labels. I get at least one of these per week - envelopes stuffed with the requisite heart-tugging/outrage igniting letter, perhaps a picture of yet another "gift" the organization will send to me (using program dollars and natural resources), and at least 50 pre-printed return address labels. Are they printed on recycled paper? Is that adhesive toxic? Do they really think that in this age of digital communications, anyone has a use for 50, let alone 500 return address labels? I send exactly one snail mail envelope per month - at that rate, just the labels I received last week will cover me for the next 3 years!
So, ala the ever-wise Stephen Colbert, I'm putting all of these well-meaning but misguided organizations on notice - any entreaties that include anything sticky that's pre-printed with my address will be immediately ignored. It's hard for me to do this, since I'm supportive of the work many of you do. However, I'm hoping you can spend one or two minutes of your time trying to come up with alternatives. In this age of electronic information flow, why not send me a all-recycled-content postcard with a URL on it? How about you leverage new avenues like LinkedIn For Good? New possibilities are available every day, so don't just take the word of that fund raising consultant that silly address labels are the only way to go. Please.
Sunday Jun 24, 2007
Grist has become one of my first-thing-in-the-morning surfing rituals. One of the things I appreciate most about it is the tone - informative, but not afraid to funny. It's a welcome tonic for the pervasive earnestness (and not the Wilde kind) we eco folks wade in every day. Don't get me wrong, this is serious business requiring concerted and often sober action but geez, I know I need to lighten up at least once in a while, and there are definitely others out there who could use a guffaw or two as well.
There's a hilarious bit up there now about eco-semantics. And here I thought "Planet Earth" was the epitome of "eco-porn."
Sanjayan, a lead scientist and excellent columnist for The Nature Conservancy has a worth-a-read June column pondering whether it's even possible to win the fight for nature, and whether that's even the goal.
Dilbert was about the environment last week. Definitely worth checking out the whole series, starting with last Sunday.
Heading off to mark this beautiful fourth day of Summer with some geocaching goodness...
Friday Jun 22, 2007
I had one of those "down the rabbit hole" web experiences today. While investigating the significance of Sustainlane Government Knowledge Base being opened to the general public, I found myself in a corner of the Web I'd never visited, Resource Shelf. The SustainLane news was tagged as "Resource of the Week" on site, but was I able to just leave it at that? Well, no.
My initially brief quest then led me to the entry below, entitled Climate change: A guide to the information and disinformation. I was then swept into a new wonderland that's been created by the Society of Environmental Journalists. Who knew? The site is loaded with all kinds of juicy links, like RealClimate: Climate Science from Climate Scientists.
But wait! As I struggled to free myself from the thrall of information aggregation, I found one of the zippiest carbon calculators I've seen so far (though it's designed for use only by UK residents). Oooo, the colors, the colors...
Needless to say, I had to step away from the browser and re-focus on my chief mission for today, which is getting a deeper understanding of the methodologies being used throughout the world to quantify greenhouse gas emissions, and their relationship to each other. That may sound a bit dry, but in fact it's pretty interesting, as there's a great deal of consistency and information sharing between the many different governmental and non-governmental organizations who publish protocols for doing GHG estimates (essentially, the major ones are all based on the World Resources Institute GHG Protocol). It's encouraging to see people across the world working collectively on this problem, even though there's so far to go to reach that kind of consensus at the political level. Makes me hopeful. Happy Friday!
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