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Linking carbon charges to cleanup costs

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Money

Photo credit helmet13

When deciding on the price of a new product, one of the main criteria for setting the price is the cost of production. After all, charge less than the cost of production, and that will soon put an end to the company’s profits and possibly even the company itself!

So, if legislators are considering charging companies for the CO2 they produce, shouldn’t they set the price based on the cost of cleanup? Or is that just a silly idea?

How much does it cost to remove a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere? Obviously that depends on how one goes about the removal of the CO2 (whether by sequestration, growing 1 tonne worth of carbon or some other method) but surely the price companies have to pay for every tonne of CO2 they produce should be linked to the cost of cleanup. No?

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Save Toms not Tonnes!

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At the recent it@cork Green IT conference Gavin Starks of AMEE had an idea which he and Simon Wardley co-pitched to the audience, to change the carbon footprint metric from tonnes of CO2 to people!

The idea, as outlined in the video above was so well received that we decided to create a site to promote it and encourage anyone who also thinks it is a good idea to become involved. The site is at megatom.ning.com.

From the MegaTom about page:

The average European creates 10 tonnes of CO2 per annum.

The average American, 20 tonnes.

To avert the dangers of Climate Change, we need to drop our CO2 production to 1 tonne per person.

Problem: What is 1 tonne of CO2? How do you visualise it?

Answer: You don’t! You change the metric. 1 tonne = 1 person’s annual CO2 production.
1 average person. 1 Tom.

Because it’s not about saving tonnes, it’s about saving everyone.

For example, a 15 minute shower is 0.1% of a Tom, driving 100 miles in a standard car is 4% of a Tom and producing 1 laptop computer is 45% of a Tom.

How many Toms have you consumed? Don’t waste your Toms.

Save Toms, not tonnes!

If you agree that we should be saving Tom’s, not tonnes, why not go to the MegaTom, join and please leave any feedback/suggestions. Thanks.

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ICT could deliver approximately 7.8 GtCO2e of emissions savings in 2020

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Measuring time
Photo Credit aussiegall

James has, in previous posts referred to the fact that IT is responsible for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions but that it can have a disproportionate influence on the other 98%. This is something we believe fundamentally in GreenMonk so it is great to see others vindicating our position.

The Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) recently published a report, independently audited by McKinsey and Company called Smart 2020. The report is a fascinating read and comes to the conclusion that ICT could:

deliver approximately 7.8 GtCO2e of emissions savings in 2020. This represents 15% of emissions in 2020 based on a BAU [Business As Usual] estimation. It represents a significant proportion of the reductions below 1990 levels that scientists and economists recommend by 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. In economic terms, the ICT-enabled energy efficiency translates into approximately €600 billion ($946.5 billion) of cost savings. It is an opportunity that cannot be overlooked.

Apart from emissions associated with deforestation, the largest contributors to climate change are transportation and power generation, so how could IT help these functions?

According to the report the use of

  1. Smart motor systems – optimised motors and industrial automation would reduce 0.97 GtCO2e [0.97 giga tons CO2 emissions] in 2020, worth €68 billion ($107.2 billion)
  2. Smart logistics – global savings from smart logistics in 2020 would reach 1.52 GtCO2e, with energy savings worth €280 billion ($441.7 billion)
  3. Smart buildings – smart buildings technologies would enable 1.68 GtCO2e of emissions savings, worth €216 billion ($340.8 billion) and
  4. Smart grids – smart grid technologies were the largest opportunity found in the study and could globally reduce 2.03 GtCO2e , worth €79 billion ($124.6 billion)

Even though we have been heavily promoting the use of smart grids and demand response on this blog I was impressed that they could reduce CO2 emissions by 2 giga tons by 2020. This is one of the reasons why I was super-excited today when SAP’s Mike Prosceno invited me to attend their SAP for Utilities conference which is going to be in San Antonio Texas in October. This is a conference about the future of utilities and there will be a big focus on smart grids, smart meters and AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure).

How will IT help reduce emissions? It comes back to that old chestnut – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Or as Steve Howard, CEO, The Climate Group said in his opening address in the report:

When we started the analysis, we expected to find that ICT could make our lives ‘greener’ by making them more virtual – online shopping, teleworking and remote communication all altering our behaviour. Although this is one important aspect of the ICT solution, the first and most significant role for ICT is enabling efficiency.

Consumers and businesses can’t manage what they can’t measure. ICT provides the solutions that enable us to ‘see’ our energy and emissions in real time and could provide the means for optimising systems and processes to make them more efficient. Efficiency may not sound as inspirational as a space race but, in the short term, achieving efficiency savings equal to 15% of global emissions is a radical proposition.

Via Doug Neal (aka gblnetwkr)

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American Leadership: What Could Have Been

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I was just reading Industries Allied to Cap Carbon Differ on the Details from the NYTimes when something struck me. The US did the right thing in not signing up to Kyoto, but for the wrong reasons. You know why it should have refused? Because. Kyoto. Didn’t. Go. Far. Enough.

We should all be paying a lot more attention to the Climate Action Partnership, which includes both major polluters and environmental groups.

In January 2007, the eclectic group endorsed a bold national policy that called for reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 60 percent to 80 percent by 2050, an aggressive target that is in line with recommendations from an international panel of scientists. But the group, which now has 33 members, has failed to reach consensus on a variety of issues, including how to allocate carbon permits and whether to include a price cap for carbon credits.

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San Francisco rolls out carbon tax

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I see the LA Times is reporting that the San Francisco Bay Area Air Quality Management District‘s board of directors voted overwhelmingly (15-1) in favour of levying a carbon tax on businesses.

The tax will be 4.4 cents per tonne of CO2 emitted which, in reality is paltry:

More than 2,500 businesses will be required to pay the proposed fees. About seven power plants and oil refineries would have to pay more than $50,000 a year, but the majority of businesses would pay less than $1, according to district estimates.

But this rate will increase with time and this news is massively significant in other ways.

This is the first instance of a carbon tax in the US, according to the piece in the LA Times, although the New York Times reports that Boulder Colorado was first when it imposed a carbon tax in Nov 2006 on both businesses and homes.

Either way, this is an indication of things to come. The best way to reduce carbon emissions is to charge for them (and the damage they wreak).

More and more we will see the implementation of carbon taxes and this more than anything else will force us to reduce our CO2 output.

We in GreenMonk are firm believers that we need to get off the carbon economy as soon as possible and so we strongly welcome this new carbon tax.

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IPv6: Towards a Greener Internet

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As you probably know by now, we’re very interested in the idea of what might constitute a green API or protocol, so I was very interested when I received a link via twitter from @Straxus (Ryan Slobojan).

The Aon Scéal? (That’s Any News in Gaelic) blog by Alastrain McKinstry points to this piece by Yves Poppe which argues that IPv6 could save 300 Megawatts.

Easy to forget that most mobile devices used by Time Square revelers were behind IPv4 NAT’s and that always on applications such as Instant Messaging, Push e-mail, VoIP or location based services tend to be electricity guzzlers. It so happens that applications that we want always to be reachable have to keep sending periodic keepalive messages to keep the NAT state active. Why is that so? The NAT has an inactivity timer whereby, if no data is sent from your mobile for a certain time interval, the public port will be assigned to another device.

You cannot blame the NAT for this inconvenience, after all, its role in live is to redistribute the same public addresses over and over; if it detects you stopped using the connection for a little while, too bad, you lose the routable address and it goes to someone else. And when a next burst of data communication comes, guess what? It doesn’t find you anymore. Just think of a situation we would loose our cell phone number every time it is not in use and get a new one reassigned each time.

Nokia carried out the original study. Good work Nokia researcher guys! Another way of looking at the saved energy, which I think we’d all vote for, is potentially longer battery life of our mobile access devices. I am sure the folks at Nortel, who are so enthusiastically driving the green agenda for competitive advantage, would be interested in this research, and quite honestly its one of the first arguments I have heard that makes me think ah yes IPv6 lets pull the trigger. There are some good skeptical arguments in the comments here, but on balance I can definitely see the value of the initial research. Its surely worth further study.

While writing this article I also came across the rather excellent Green IT/Broadband blog. The author Bill St. Arnaud clearly believes in our Bit Miles concept, even if he doesn’t call it that.

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The current preferred approaches are to impose “carbon” taxes and implement various forms of cap and trade or carbon offset systems. However another approach to help reduce carbon emission is to “reward” those who reduce their carbon footprint rather than imposing draconian taxes or dubious cap and trade systems. It is estimated that consumers control or influence over 60% of all CO2 emissions. As such, one possible reward system of trading “bits and bandwidth for carbon” is to provide homeowners with free fiber to the home or free wireless products and other electronic services such as ebooks and eMovies if they agree to pay a premium on their energy consumption which will encourage them to reduce emissions by turning down the thermostat or using public transportation. Not only does the consumer benefit, but this business model also provides new revenue opportunities for network operators, optical equipment manufacturers, and eCommerce application providers.

European IPv6 Day, hosted by the EU is on the 30th May. Come to think about it the guy I should talk to about green IP is Vint Cerf of Google.

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McAfee goes Green in Vegas!

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So it appears you can go green in Vegas, beyond all my cynicism and that of others. I just came across some really interesting news from McAfee about its approach to greener conferences in that benighted location.

“Greening Kickoff,” an innovative project to minimize, rigorously measure and offset the environmental impact of a large corporate event in Las Vegas. The project, which focused on McAfee’s annual Sales Kickoff meeting as a pilot effort, reduced non-air travel carbon emissions by 16% while offsetting the remaining 1,865 metric tons of carbon emissions through support of reforestation projects.

I am not a big fan of offsetting, but I am a fan of reforestation. What I particularly like about McAfee’s approach here is that its not about warm and fuzzies, but real measurement and monitoring. It brought in a third party, ICF International, to audit its activities. The results? McAfee claims to reduced the event’s carbon footprint by 16% of its total non-air travel emissions. What else?

  • 25 metric tons saved by facilitating the sharing of rooms by participants
  • 3.2 metric tons and 56,357 gallons of water saved through participation in the hotel’s towel and sheet reuse program
  • 0.5 metric tons saved by providing a shuttle for airport and event transfers rather than travel by individual taxicabs
  • 0.5 metric tons saved by eliminating bottled water and providing tap water only
  • The carbon footprint of the overall event was approximately 1,856 metric tons of CO2, or 1.03 metric tons of CO2 per event attendee
  • 90% of the event’s carbon footprint resulted from air travel to and from the event
  • Excluding air travel, of the remaining 10% of the event’s carbon footprint, the breakdown was as follows: food (35%), hotel rooms (33%), amenities (19%), facility use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) (5%), solid waste (4%) and the event’s conference center (3%)

Well done McAfee- but I have to say I am really disappointed I didn’t come across this earlier. It would have been amazing to have someone come to talk to our free EnergyCamp unconference on Monday about the apppoach – particularly given the Vegas angle.

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Wal-Mart leading by example?

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Street sign for Wal*Mart Drive near Gordon, PennsylvaniaImage via Wikipedia

I spotted on the Wal-Mart site today that they are giving away 1m reusable shopping bags on April 19th (2008).

Why is that important? Well traditional shopping bags take up to 1,000 years to break down in the environment. Wal-Mart’s shopping bags are made from recycled materials and normally sell instore for $1. It is even more significant when you consider that Wal-Mart is the largest grocery retailer in the United States, with an estimated 20% of the retail grocery and consumables business.

Wal-Mart’s conversion to green is not new. In 2005 Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott announced that they was going to be a:

“good steward for the environment” and ultimately use only renewable energy sources and produce zero waste

Specifically he set the following aims for the company

  • reduce energy by 20% in existing stores and 30% in new stores in the next 7 years
  • increase fuel efficiency in Wal-Mart’s truck fleet (the 2nd largest fleet in the US) by 25 percent over three years and doubling it within 10 years
  • and cut solid waste from U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs by 25 percent in three years

The 3 biggest uses of electricity in stores are heating/air-conditioning, lighting and refrigeration. To tackle these costs Wal-Mart:

  • painted the roofs of their stores white to reflect heat,
  • put smart skylights to harvest light and reduce lighting requirements and
  • put refrigerated goods behind glass doors with LED lighting

As yet, there is no word on how well Wal-Mart is doing to meet its aims but in a more recent announcement Lee Scott re-emphasised that

Wal-Mart’s goal is to be supplied by 100% renewable energy, create zero waste and sell products that are energy efficient

He also has a vision of shoppers coming to shop in Wal-Mart while their plug-in-hybrid cars recharge in the parking lot (from power generated from renewable sources).

With 1.2 million employees, Wal-art is the United States largest employer. Having the company CEO drive a message like this to the employees through changes in the stores and to their massive customer base through initiatives like the reusable bag giveaway helps remind people about the problems associated with rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Filed Under: co2