Author Archive for monkchips

Tom Friedman: So Is The World Flat Or Not?

Published
by
monkchips
on July 21, 2008
in oil
. 1 Comment

Sonoma County Hot Air Balloon Classic.
Creative Commons License photo credit: _e.t

We recently lauded the NY Times’ Thomas Friedman for arguing that oil is like an addiction and needs a minimum price floor to ensure current investments in greentech are sustainable. But there is a problem with Friedman (or perhaps with us)- his rhetoric is so effective that often you’re blinded to inconsistencies in his positions.

My issue, basically is that Mr Friedman can’t maintain his position that globalisation is an end-game, underpinned by cheap transport, in the face of current oil price realities. I have been known to say that the problem with The World is Flat is the same as the problem with The End Of History. Both works were in some sense absolutely correct, but were out of-date as soon as they were written. Spiking oil prices are putting paid to the World is Flat (when gas is expensive transportation and logistics get surprisingly bumpy) just as 9/11 pumped up, then smashed the End of History’s Neoconsensus.

In a sense these works are the opposite of Science Fiction; they are history books. Rather than find aspects of the future in the present, and extrapolate them with imagination to create a vision of the future (its just not evenly distributed), Friedman and Fukayama are masters of describing a point in time, and how we got there. Indeed with titles like The World is Flat and The End is History we would be surprised if either writer were really inspired to work out what happens next. For that we need visionaries like Al Gore.

I’d love to hear more from Friedman about the implications of his newly found love of higher oil prices.

Collaboration On A Grand Scale: Japan and Carbon Capture

Published
by
monkchips
on July 2, 2008
in Asia
. 1 Comment

geisha
Creative Commons License photo credit: Asar_mz

Greenbang points out that “24 Japanese power and energy-related companies have jointly launched a research company to develop carbon capture and storage technologies.”

The companies, each investing 3 million yen, include 10 power utilities, and seven oil-related companies, as well as civil engineering firms, steelmakers and chemicals firms. Greenmonk is a big believer in collaborative innovation, particularly across organisational boundaries.

Japan has a history of successfully retooling its economy to deal with economic challenges and scarcity (see Collapse by Jared Diamond). Its a country with a particularly strong sense of duty and continuity. The Japanese government is targeting an annual reduction of 100 million tons in carbon dioxide emissions through CCS technologies in 2020. That’s a start.

Salmonella Tomatoes: An Argument For View Source and Food Miles

Published
by
monkchips
on June 12, 2008
in food
. 4 Comments

Tomatoes -- Are They Poison?
Creative Commons License photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

You may not be familiar with the term food miles. Wikipedia describes it thus:

“The point was to highlight the hidden ecological, social and economic consequences of food production to consumers in a simple way, one which had objective reality but also connotations.”

Many people are very skeptical about the “hidden costs of transport” arguments against food that has been shipped thousands of miles. But public health offers another, very clear reason to more deeply consider the provenance of the food we eat. The current salmonella scare in the US is pretty chilling.

As things currently stand in food supply chains we usually have little or no idea of where our food came from. There are very few of us are that are like my friend Chris Dalby, who only buys food from farm shops, but that’s surely going to change as more and more products turn out to be contaminated. Increasingly we’re going to want to be able to “view source” for the food we eat. Food miles encourages us to do just that.

Tim O’Reilly said:

HTML, the language of web pages, opened participation to ordinary users, not just software developers. The “View Source” menu item migrated from Tim Berners-Lee’s original browser, to Mosaic, and then on to Netscape Navigator and even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Though no one thinks of HTML as an open source technology, its openness was absolutely key to the explosive spread of the web. Barriers to entry for “amateurs” were low, because anyone could look “over the shoulder” of anyone else producing a web page. Dynamic content created with interpreted languages continued the trend toward transparency.

Just like the rise of the web we’re going to need new standards, new linking and tagging mechanisms, and new ways of thinking if we’re to going to be able to trust modern food networks as they become increasingly complex.

Paul Krugman talks about the rise of Bit Miles

Published
by
monkchips
on June 6, 2008
in bit miles
. 0 Comments

Paul Krugman is a famous NY Times columnist. I did a double take when I saw the title of a recent piece: Bits, Bands and Books. He is talking our language:

Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Krugman talks to the new business model challenges involved, and he is right to do so. But I think he could usefully think about the green (cutting waste by not overprovisioning and shipping physical goods) arguments behind a Long Tail, digital everything world.

Ironically the open source business model he describes is a lot like RedMonk’s.

Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

On HP Labs, Sustainability, Energy Demand Management and Bit Miles

Published
by
monkchips
on June 5, 2008
in sustainability
. 2 Comments

I spent today in Bristol at HP Labs, learning about the company’s relaunch of its R&D organisation. I came away impressed with the crispness of the new vision. In the past HP Labs came across like an academic organisation, removed from commercial concerns. I am happy to report though that the new approach and tone seems much more focused and business like.

From a Greenmonk perspective the real meat came this afternoon when Chandrakant Patel, Director, HP Sustainable IT lab (and dab hand with a sketch pad, which made for lovely slides.) joined the session via web conference.

The conference worked a charm; I found myself nodding along and giving out non-verbal queues to a face filling a six foot screen. The contrast couldn’t have been starker with BT’s CSR event this week: the telco’s Boston-based head of videoconferencing didn’t fly back to the UK to avoid the air miles footprint (good), but instead of live conferencing he prerecorded a video (bad). Note to BT-showing can be a lot more effective than telling, especially when you have a room full of influencers ready to be impressed.

The 98%: dematerialise it

But what of HP Lab’s strategy for sustainability? Chandrakant’s first slide carried the same basic message at my own Green stump speech: that is, IT only accounts for 2% of global energy consumption (and so carbon emissions), wheras the great majority of the problem is found in areas such as buildings and heating, supply chain logistics and transport - the 98%.

IT is a small percent, but it has a unique opportunity to attack the 98% problem.

HP has more skin in the game here than you might think - because of its printing business. While HP didn’t use the term Bit Miles it did talk a lot about “Long Tail Printing”. That is, digital printing at the point of use, avoiding the need to pulp a bunch of copies of some book or magazine noone ever read. Bear in mind that print technology is now moving into three dimensions, so you can potentially print objects not just characters on paper. The potential for print and micro-fabrication to reduce transportation cost is vast. Chandrakant talked about the need to create an “IT ecosystem” for the printing industry, to ensure it is carbon positive rather than negative. The HP Labs’ approach he said was to replace conventional supply chains with sustainable IT ecosystems.

Of course not everything in the vision is new. On the contrary:

“We need to leverage the past to create the future.”

One of the key problems with the 98% is the complexity of the metrics involved. How do we really know, asked Chandrakant, that the carbon used to create the Halo video conference wasn’t greater than the flight he chose not to take? There is a need for irrefutable metrics. And we don’t have 15 years. HP Labs is now working on prototypes to model and predict the impact of different re-engineering strategies, then measure and monitor the results. “These tools”, said Chandrakant’s UK equivalent Chris Preist, will analyse consumption of available energy and greenhouse gases across the lifecycle.

HP’s vision here is nothing less than to give businesses the tools they need to simulate the greenhouse impacts of potential new products and services. What if I used IBM tools here, or a BT network? What if I chose Apple hardware over Windows laptops? And so on.

This could be an entirely new frontier in product design and lifecycle management.

In order to create these kind of footprint models we’re going to need manufacturing companies to share information about their production and logistics processes. Needless to say I suggested after the briefing that Preist talk to Gavin Starks of AMEE as soon as possible.

Hurry Up I said

When it came to Q&A my question was why such initiatives are in the Lab, rather than in the field. At least one industry- air travel - is no longer viable with oil prices above $80 a barrel. Other industries won’t be immune to the rise of transportation costs.

Chandrakant responded by contrasting HP’s current approach, going public early, with earlier efforts to persuade data centers to invest in smart cooling technology.

“Unlike in 1998, we need to act fast. This time we’re going out and talking about it immediately.”

Preist added: Why is HP being open and transparent? in order to solve the challenges we have around sustainability we have to scale. Talking of opening up, HP also plans a “Sustainability Hub… “, that is, an online place to share and pool information.

So what about the 2%?

HP does of course have a plan for low carbon data centers, which involves using beams of light rather than wires in data center equipment. This idea is not so far fetched- we’re all used to idea of TV traveling along optical fibre now, so why not bits along a beam? Atoms are cheaper to move than atoms, and photons are cheaper to move than electrons.

Using this photonics approach HP estimates it can make a 75% reduction in carbon footprint for data centers. Not bad for starters! I like HP’s narrative of dematerialisation, whether we’re talking about printed pages or processors. Don’t make things manifest unless you actually need to. That’s a key to sustainability.

“The ultimate goal is photonics, but we need intermediate steps. We have teams beginning to transfer technology but we’re looking for partners, that can co-create in this area… that’s critical.

Greenmonk Take

I came away generally impressed with HP and its progress in sustainability thinking. It has some super bright people thinking far beyond the 2% and ready to work with customers in a range of industries in becoming more sustainable. But even more importantly its increasingly clear the IT industry is not only fully aware of the need to become more sustainable but also is quickly reaching a consensus on how to tackle some of the problems. I see a lot of hope for standards, information sharing, and IP cross-licensing. The public sector may not get it. Manufacturing may not get it. The general public may not get it. But IT - IT gets it. It doesn’t matter whether I am talking to Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, or Sun the agenda is pretty well shared now. The green data center is important but completely overhauled supply chains and ways of living even more so.

disclosure: HP is not a client, but paid my train fare to Bristol. Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Sun are clients.

Green Collar Workers: Sustainable Employment

Published
by
monkchips
on June 4, 2008
in energy and transportation
. 1 Comment

I had not come across the term Green Collar workers until recently, when I heard it from Tom. Having written a piece today in praise of bubbles I wanted to balance that out with some thinking on the kind of sustainable economic changes a green tech revolution could drive so I was happy when businessgreen.com pointed to this report titled Job Opportunities for the Green Economy very interesting.

The conclusion:

“45 occupations employing over 14 million people across the US could benefit from increased investment in green measures.”

Green can mean job creation. That’s a critical argument for our politicians to internalise. This report is particularly interesting because it points out how existing skills (sheet metal work, for example) are valuable in a green context.