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Fantastic Serendipity: What’s Your Global Action Plan

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Anyone that uses social software tools knows how they sometimes create interesting coincidences. Someone will write about the same thing, on the same day, and mention you, say, when you blogged about them without seeing their post first. That kind of thing.

I was really pleased, and not a little bit surprised this morning when i went over to check out the ComputerWorldUK Green zone, where this blog is syndicated, and came across a call to action from Global Action Plan.

GAP is carrying out a survey – let’s hear your green plans. So please fill it in here.

This survey, by the newly formed Environmental IT Leadership Board, aims to find out the level of awareness of IT impact on the environment that exists between IT managers.

Chaired by the environmental charity Global Action Plan and backed by internet solutions provider Logicalis, the Environmental IT Leadership Board is the UK’s first end user green IT team. The group is comprised of members from Lloyds TSB, British Medical Association, John Lewis Partnership, E. ON UK and others, making up a diverse and influential group, committed to creating a positive change in the IT sector.

The Environmental IT Leadership Team aims to create an independent expert user group focused on exploring and publishing best practice sustainable IT strategies. While there have been other groups driven from the manufacturer side, this is first from the user perspective.

It is brilliant to see major UK organisations showing this kind of leadership.

You’re probably wondering what is the big coincidence? Well, about a month ago I volunteered to help GAP with a couple of projects, and seeing them here at my digs at ComputerWorld dovetails so brilliantly with that. I am looking forward to working with them.

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Why Don’t You Just Turn Off The Television And Do Something Less Boring Instead?

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From 21st Century Citizen come suggestions for small things that could make a difference in the fight against global warming. One of the suggestions is turn off the TV and do anything. Join the Anything But TV club. Seems fair. We need to engage with challenges, not just watch them flickering past.

My own favorite small thing to make a difference is turning off the plugs at the wall when I leave the office, and when we turn off the TV in the evening at home. There is no need to power all of those appliances-or more pertinently their power supplies-overnight. Its good to turn off the plugs rather than just devices because otherwise you forget about phone chargers and so on…

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On Clover-choked New Zealand, Christine Keeler and Food Miles

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christine keeler

According to 21st Century Citizen the New York Times today carries an opinion piece about New Zealand-based scientists who “recently published a study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel consumption”.

Paraphrasing Christine Keeler’s immortal words: “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Who sponsored the research?

Given this claim:

“they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed.” [italics mine]

my money is on a quango connected to the New Zealand Lamb Board.

picture borrowed from the V&A museum. Its nice to see the contact sheet rather than just the iconic chair shot.

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On Africa: The Bush Administration Does the Right Thing

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And that’s something you don’t hear from me too often. According to the New York Times the US will now be able to buy local cereal crops when administering aid, rather than shipping US surpluses abroad. Grain dumping overseas is a bad thing- it punishes local farmers by wrecking market prices, and uses up unnecessary food miles. This article explains the problem in some depth.

Small changes can lead to large effects, while unintended consequences are a problem for any policy area. So its very good to see the US administration making it easy to buy local crops at times of extreme need. Buying local helps the economy in ways dropping in grain never could – and we use less oil. This is aid through the grassroots.

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Carbon calculators – Top down or bottom up?

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Right now, personal ‘carbon calculators’ seem to be all the rage. Encouraged as a primary method of getting individuals to start to address their personal carbon footprint, and make lifestyle changes to lower personal CO2 emissions, most of the calculators have up until now come from large corporate companies. A couple of weeks ago, however, and responding to a general feeling of confusion amongst the public, the UK Govenment launched its own definitive carbon calculator website – billed as the most comprehensive, accurate tool of its kind. True? Well certainly the amount of time it takes to work things out at the end of each section gives the impression it’s doing some major number crunching. But as with all of its ilk, it has flaws. For instance, why are only my personal flights (a measly three in the last year) included, yet the ones I’ve taken on business (a more eco-conscience bothering 17) not? That skews my score entirely. Now a new site in the US – ‘Make me sustainable’ – promises to monitor carbon emissions on a daily basis – the thinking here is that carbon monitoring becomes an everyday part of your routine – like cleaning your teeth or updating your facebook status, so you start to think about the impact of your actions more. Sadly, you need to be in the US to use it, as it calculates various factors depending on where you live. Anyone in the US who’s trying it out, we’d love to know what you think of it.

The fundamental issue with all of these systems is that they rely on some level of estimation and guess-work, it’s inevitable. So perhaps, if we’re really serious about monitoring our emissions, we need real-life personal monitoring systems, that are discrete and ‘fit’ with our lives. That’s where Andreas Zachariah – a graduating MA student in Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art comes in. His “Carbon Hero” calculates a user’s carbon footprint from transportation by identifying the different froms of transport being used as they moves through space. The idea is that you carry the key-fob sized unit with you, and then download the data to your PC later. Then the data is collected by the computer’s software, which tells you the exact amount of carbon dioxide emitted from your movements, and how many credits are needed to offset it. Could this be the future? Well, the product has alread won a British Sustainability Index award, so watch this space.

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The end of America’s CO2 affair?

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Getting any kind of G8 deal on climate change has been quite an achievement, based on conversations with people on the ground in Germany. And having the United States make the right noises is a true development. Fiona Harvey, in her new FT blog that will examine energy and environmental issues, sensed a shift yesterday.

“We have to wait and see what happens in Bali in December before we can make a final judgement. But progress it certainly is. George W Bush has repeatedly scorned the UN and its climate change talks in the past. This time, he says he wants the US to be “actively involved, if not taking the lead, in a post-Kyoto framework, post-Kyoto agreement”.

Of course, that could also mean the US wants to participate in order to stall agreement on a binding commitment to cut emissions, as some green groups suspect.

But even if that is the case, it still means the talks can start this year. In 2009, there will be a different president who may take the US participation in a different direction. At least the process will have begun, rather than having to be started from scratch by a new president in 2009.”

We spend a lot of time trying to sense whether America really is changing its attitudes towards climate change and the ways action can be taken. And while Bush’s policy making is one thing, it’s what the doers on the ground are up to that counts for the long term.

Dante’s Peak: Would Pierce have got everyone out in a Prius?
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America’s renewed lust for the environment goes much wider than the Silicon Valley clean boom. For example, an amazing number of people you talk to in the US are now very interested in finding ways to reduce their dependency on oil, for starters. And they won’t sacrifice mobility to do it. I call the latter the ‘Dante’s Peak’ trait – a hard-wired desire to have the immediate ability at any time to put your entire family into a truck that can speed you away from exploding volcanos, or whatever else might come along. Such traits just aren’t part of the European psyche, and this difference needs to be understood. Conversely, European angst over aviation emissions, a constant and major factor here, is just not on the US radar. Americans in the street can’t believe Europeans worry about aircraft emissions being a bad thing. In a vast country with completely different patterns of population density and transport infrastructure to Europe it seems hard to imagine Americans starting to wonder whether they ought to fly. Hell, they didn’t transform the world with 707s and DC-8s, only to give up the mass-scale, iconic marvel and convenience of jet travel.

The contradiction is that while we are all shocked that Bush is now facing into the environmental wind – and that the detail on what this means for citizens is bound to differ between continents – today in the United States there are examples of extraordinary state or city-level leadership on the environment, with things moving very fast. City mayors and governors far away from the Arnie-induced Californian green-boom are developing exciting policies. Take Austin in, of all places Texas. It’s becoming one of the US’s top hotspots for environmental startups. Americans understand that new markets create new energy, if you excuse the irony – energetic campuses, energetic startup firms, flows of venture funds and more.

Read more at Re*Move…

Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau, a global think tank.

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Microsoft: Green From The Roots Up?

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I am really liking this announcement from Microsoft and The Clinton Foundation. Rather than trying to push top down initiatives, its designed to support local government organisations that want to reduce carbon emissions. Its a very greenmonky story at first glance –

“The Clinton Foundation and Microsoft Corp. today announced a long-term partnership to develop a suite of technology tools that will enable cities to accurately monitor, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The technology will include both software and services.”

My complaint – why is this initiative only aimed at the world’s 40 largest cities? Sure they account for the lion’s share of world pollution, but its a core roots up concept that every little helps, and small contributions can add up to big macro effects. It is nice to see a tech vendor not just making a green datacenter play though.