Wednesday Apr 22, 2009
Unless you're Dramarama, today is Earth Day. At least, it's US Earth Day; "International Earth Day" is observed every March equinox as well.
Anyway, "Happy Earth Day," I guess. I always have mixed feelings about calling out a specific date as the day we're all supposed to think about the Earth, presumably blowing it off the other 364.25 days of the year. This point of view is not unique, and Grist compiled a good set of essays exploring a range of points of view on the subject. They kind of missed the mark with their unfortunately named Screw Earth Day campaign, however. I get that they were joking, but I'm pretty sure they didn't want its funniest attribute to be found in deliberately misreading the message "Screw Earth Day" and replying: "Isn't that the problem? We screw the Earth every day." I'm gonna say they sort of misfired on the tone, particularly with that YouTube video they posted today. Pretty unfunny.
My favorite on-line Earth Day observance is Nasa's Top 10 Greatest Hits for the Earth. The geocacher in me loves that online voting ranked GPS at #1. Nasa has provided other eye candy in the form of images of our Big Blue Marble from the International Space Station. Enjoy. Then go outside and enjoy the real thing.
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.
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.
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.
Friday Dec 08, 2006
Since I started my current job, I inevitably end up having conversations about the environment and environmental news with just about everyone. I was catching up with a former co-worker today, and the topic turned to climate change sceptics, the phenomenon of labeling "Spare the Air" days and the like as "liberal conspiracies," and the psychology of littering, among other things. It quickly turned into an exercise in listing as many signs of environmental degradation and people's indifference to it as possible. Before we both slid into an abyss of depression, I offered that there was also good news about the environment, if you looked for it. "Where?" asked my friend. "Certainly not on the TV news."
He's right, for the most part. Even though it's encouraging to see climate change and other environmental news making it to the mainstream media (Al Gore was on Oprah this week, for heavens sake), I suspect that one of the reasons is that the media loves bad news, and there's a lot out there to choose from when you talk about Planet Earth.
In the spirit of demonstrating the existence of good news about the environment, here are a couple of stories I saw today:
- In an, admittedly, largely symbolic but still significant move, the City of Los Angeles released water back into the Owens River. Back when I was an environmental consultant, I did a project in the Owens Valley to determine the best way to mitigate their substantial particulate problem. The obvious answer, of course, was to put water back in the Owens Lake, which had been dry for decades. Now, after years of legal wrangling, this may be the first step on the road to recovery for that ecosystem.
- The United States senate has approved H.R. 5646, a bill that asks the U.S. EPA "examine the environmental impact of data centers, explore ways to reduce energy demand, and encourage the adoption of more energy efficient server technology. (quoted from Sun's own official statement)." The big win out this, I think, will be raising awareness in the regulating community about the growing impact of computing on the environment. Here's hoping the bill is signed soon and the study yields some helpful results.
Friday Nov 10, 2006
Got to attend the Bay Area Air Quality Management District climate protection summit in San Francisco today. As a sponsor, Sun was given 8 minutes (give or take) to speak to the audience about the work we're doing to help address climate change. In the face of having to be the follow-up to an hour-plus keynote tour de force by none other than Al "it's the climate, stupid” Gore, Dave did an excellent encapsulation of our Innovate, Act, Share activities, and generated some affirmative applause from the crowd while he was speaking (and after).
Speaking of Al's talk, it was interesting that there seemed to me many in the audience who had not seen “An Inconvenient Truth.” I could hear people murmuring with surprise or alarm when he clicked through the terrific and terrifying “then/now” shots of Kilimanjaro, the Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves, and a host of the world's shrinking glaciers. He gets bonus points for inserting some San Francisco Bay Area-specific content and even remembering to mention Sun and some of the other sponsors. What a guy. He was off to Australia later today. Wonder how many frequent flyer miles he's racked up this year?
After a lunch comprised of locally grown ingredients (kudos to BAAQMD for that), the group split into sector-specific (e.g. government, NGO, business, youth, etc.) sessions to discuss obstacles that arise when trying to address climate change in our own organizations, and generate ideas for near term (next 12 months) action. Some key themes that arose in the business-oriented session:
* Local companies want a mechanism (or set of solutions) for calculating GHG emissions, as well as sharing best practices and success stories. This doesn't mean just an on line clearing house of information, however. The group (myself included) reinforced the importance of getting together and exchanging ideas in person.
* Another key message was the desire by the regulated community to be allowed enough flexibility to innovate; many had stories about being hobbled in their efforts to do something better for the environment (like harnessing landfill gas to generate power, rather than burning it off via flaring) by rigid or slow regulatory frameworks and processes.
* Agencies such as BAAQMD and the California Air Resources Board need to work to integrate regulation of “criteria pollutants (ozone, particulates, etc.) with new regulations limiting greenhouse gases.
Several participants reiterated the importance of getting top-down support within a company for climate change initiatives. Listening to them describe their struggles to engage with their executives, I was reminded of how happy I am to work for a company where top management gets it.
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