Will's Thoughtstream

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The Canadian government moved Friday to ban polycarbonate infant bottles, the most popular variety on the market, after it officially declared one of their chemical ingredients toxic. The action, by the departments of health and environment, is the first taken by any government against bisphenol-a, or BPA, a widely used chemical that mimics a human hormone. It has induced long-term changes in animals exposed to it through tests.

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A report in today's Science describes how researchers recorded the drainage of one such lake in Greenland. The lake was roughly 5.6 km², but drained completely in less than an hour and a half. The lake's contents rapidly made their way down to the bottom of the ice sheet, 980 m below the surface. During this period, the average drainage rate was 8700 m³/s. For reference, the average flow rate for Niagara Falls is only 5700 m³/s.

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I was really surprised to learn a few years ago that when an environmental impact lifecycle analysis is done of an everyday personal printer, the biggest environmental impact turns out not to be the manufacturing of the printer, the ink cartridges, the packaging, or disposal of the electronic waste: the biggest environmental impact actually turns out to be the paper used during printing. Printing less definitely helps. But in addition, consistently printing on both sides of each sheet of paper is an easy and quick way to halve the amount of paper you use.

There's lots of printers that come with the ability to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. A few all-in-one style printers from HP that include this ability are the HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One (about $240), HP Officejet 9110 All-in-One (about $400), and HP LaserJet 3390 All-in-One (about $425). Laser printers tend to be even more of a bonus from an environmental and economic perspective. My mom owns an HP laser printer, and she buys one toner cartridge every couple of years for about $80. Compared to the inkjet printers I've used, that's a lot fewer replacement cartridges.

If you just want a simple printer, without the scanner, copier, fax features of an all-in-one, then two HP products that come with automatic duplex printing are the HP Deskjet 6940dt Color Inkjet Printer (about $120), and the HP Deskjet 6980dt Color Inkjet Printer (about $160).

With any of these printers, it's important that your printer settings are set to use the auto-duplexer. Under Windows XP, go to Settings->Printers and Faxes. Right-click on your printer and choose Printing Preferences. Under the Finishing tab, check Print on both sides, and underneath check Automatic. Then click OK to save your settings.

If you already have an HP printer, and it doesn't support automatic duplex printing, check out this video for a demo of how to manually duplex print.

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I’ve used EcoSky, a Portland-based green web hosting company for quite some time, and I’ve been very happy with their services. A recent Sustainable IT article on Greenest Host got me thinking about green web hosting in general.

What is a green web hosting company?

Generally, it is a company that is at least using some form of renewable energy to power their web and mail servers. Some companies may generate that renewable power themselves using solar panels, such as California based Greenest Host, or wind power. Other companies may buy their renewable power from the utilities. Some companies may buy conventional electric power, but then use purchase carbon credits to advertise themselves as carbon neutral. A review of the green web hosting companies I could find through Google found most to be committed to 100% renewable power, with solar and solar/wind combinations to be most common.

What kind of green hosting company do I choose?

While any renewable power web hosting company is going to be greener than the alternate, those companies that have committed to their own on-site renewable power generation, such as solar or wind, are making a long term commitment to green power. They’ve already made the investment in power generation, and there’s little incentive for them to switch to non-renewable power. I think these companies are the best choice, because they are unlikely to revert back to conventional non-renewable power simply to save money or because of a change in ownership. That said, any green hosting company is still a great choice.

A secondary benefit of green web hosting companies is to drive improvements in the energy efficient of web servers. Energy efficiency is of importance to all IT data centers, including web hosting companies, as electricity to power servers and provide cooling is one of their primary operational expenses. Virtually every large IT supplier is now creating energy efficient servers to help meet this demand. Traditional computers use anywhere from 60 to 120 watts (way more for gaming machines), but a computer built to optimize energy efficiency will consume less than 25 watts. Green web hosting companies, because of the higher cost of their electrical power, have even more incentive to find innovative ways to save power.

Green Web Hosting Resources:

Directory of Green Web Hosting Companies

EcoSky, true solar powered web hosting
AISO, true solar powered web hosting
Greenest Host, true solar powered web hosting
Smooshy Lab, 100% solar powered,
Ecological Hosting
Eco Web Design, UK based Solar Powered Web Hosting
Dream Host, carbon neutral web hosting
Solar Load by Hosting Direct, wind powered
Tree Center, wind and solar powered
Think Host, 100% wind/solar powered
SustainableWebsites, 100% wind
XERT Communications, Australian based 100% renewable powered
Ilisys, Australian based carbon neutral

Green ISPs

EcoISP
Green ISP

More information

TreeHugger article on several green web hosting companies
Eco Business Links, directory of about 10 green hosting companies

Posted by will hertling at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a pair of interesting posts this morning on the green job market. Triple Pundit has a nice discussion about the options available for those who wish to live by their ideals:

Will socially-responsible entrepreneurs have to be content with living a saintly pauper's existence? The financial success of green and socially-responsible companies like Clif Bar, Patagonia, Seventh Generation and others would seem to indicate that there may be a way to sidestep the saint vs. sellout dilemma. Hundreds of graduating MBA students may soon help to forge a path between these two limiting options.

Graduates of the class of 2007 are finding the job market is receptive to those who want to do good by the environment. As public awareness of global warming grows, companies are scrambling to put in place greener practices, to present themselves as more eco-friendly and to develop products and services to fill a new demand for all things green. The phenomenon is creating jobs in fields like urban planning, carbon trading, green building and environmental consulting. "The environmental job market is the strongest that it's been in many years," says Kevin Doyle, president of the Boston-based consulting company Green Economy Inc. and coauthor of "The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference."

But is an accurate representation of the green job market?

As a graduate of a green MBA program, I think that these two articles are looking only at the good news, and concluding that things are great. But when you look at the whole picture, a different story emerges.

Sure, there are more green jobs than ever before. I see them inside the major Fortune 50 company in which I work, I see them in my local community, I see them at major green companies like Patagonia. This is definitely positive news, especially as compared to five years ago, when the number of jobs was far fewer.

But the number of applicants far exceeds the number of positions available for them. Patagonia has over 700 applications for each job that they open. Several recent sustainability jobs in Portland, Oregon each had several hundred applications.

More than 99% of applicants are not getting the jobs they want. What about the less than 1% that do? Are they able to live by their ideals and make a living? Hardly.

A recent sustainability job at a for-profit financial company for a data analyst paid less than $15 per hour - less than $30K per year. You won't be eating a lot of organic food or wearing much sustainably made clothing at those kinds of wages. A comparable job at a Fortune 500 company would probably pay $80K to $100K. So living by your ideals does have a cost - about $50K to $70K per year.

I agree that the job market for sustainability jobs is improving, especially as compared to five years ago. But even with a green MBA, it is still far more difficult to find a green job than a non-green job, and only a small fraction of the green jobs out there would allow you to achieve income parity with a non-green job.

Posted by will hertling at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a cool mashup that's a wonderful example of technology helping create awareness of a quality of life and sustainability issue: Provide your address to Walk Score, and it will dynamically evaluate the walking distance to the key places, such as grocery stores, parks, and libraries.

Our home in Portland, Oregon scored a 69. My childhood home in Brooklyn, New York scored a 77. How about your place?

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I already wrote about Rebecca Blood's Eating Organic on a Food Stamp Budget project. Via her site, I found a link to an interesting article in the Washington post about four U.S. representatives who are taking a food challenge:

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) stood before the refrigerated section of the Safeway on Capitol Hill yesterday and looked longingly at the eggs.

At $1.29 for a half-dozen, he couldn't afford them.

According to the rules of the challenge, the four House members cannot eat anything beside their $21 worth of groceries. That means no food at the many receptions, dinners and fundraisers that fill a lawmaker's week.

At yesterday's weekly lunch meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass) was mesmerized by an attractive roast beef sandwich with cheese. He noted the potato chips came in two flavors: sour cream and plain. But his own lunch consisted of some lentils he cooked for himself and brought to work in a plastic container.

I think it is fascinating to watch these lawmakers grapple with a situation that they've probably never had to deal with before. I've read that some people think it is nothing but a gimmick, but I disagree. I have a lot of admiration for these people for putting themselves in a new situation and committing themselves to deal with it. Granted, even if they ate nothing for a week, they wouldn't starve to death or develop a lasting illness. But certainly they are gaining a better understanding of the difficulty of shopping on such a limited budget, and of the necessary tradeoffs that people of low income must make. Here are two examples:

"No organic foods, no fresh vegetables, we were looking for the cheapest of everything," McGovern said. "We got spaghetti and hamburger meat that was high in fat -- the fattiest meat on the shelf. I have high cholesterol and always try to get the leanest, but it's expensive. It's almost impossible to make healthy choices on a food stamp diet."

At the Safeway, Ryan seemed to grow depressed as he realized the limits of his budget. "It's unbelievable," he said, filling his small grocery basket with peanut butter, jelly and bread. He bought a big bag of cornmeal that he says he'll try to fashion into grits for breakfast and polenta for dinner. And he grabbed some canned tomato sauce and pasta on sale. No money for meat, milk, juice, fresh fruit or vegetables, save for a single head of 32-cent garlic to flavor the tomato sauce.

In addition to Ryan and McGovern, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) and Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) has taken up the Food Stamp Challenge.

You can read Ryan's blog and McGovern's blog about their experiences.

Other related resources:

• 100 mile diet: eating only foods from within 100 miles


• The Eat Local Challenge


• Penny-wise Eat Local Challenge


• Above Average Jane Foodstamp Challenge


• Oregon Governor's Theodore R. Kulongoski’s food stamp challenge

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An article in The Independent talks about the massive bee disappearance spreading all over the world. A few quotes from the article:

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".

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Last year I received a bonus from work, and discussed with my friend Gene the things I was thinking about spending it on. He suggested getting a handheld game console, as a way to get back into gaming, which we both used to enjoy. He saw it as a way for him to use his down time waiting for planes, waiting for his partner when going out, and so forth.

It sounded really fun, and I was heading down the path of getting one when I realized that I had none of the kinds of downtime that Gene had. I have no time that isn't used for something.

It made me realize that if I was thinking about bringing anything new into my life, then its impact on time would need to be the primary criteria. If I brought in anything new, it would either need to have a 1 to 1 replacement of time spent on something else, or it would actually need to save me time. But it couldn't require me to find new time, because there just isn't any. (Three children under age four, full time work, attachment parenting...you get the picture.)

Enjoyment or satisfaction, traditional criteria for a purchase would have to be secondary to time. If something had immense enjoyment but required me to find time for it, then I wouldn't actually get to use it, and so I would never realize the enjoyment benefits of it.

A handheld gaming console might be fun, but since it would take time I don't have, there's no point. An MP3 player might be fun, and it would simply replace time I already spend listening to the radio, so it's a better decision. (Although there is some up front time cost to organizing mp3s, playlists, etc.) I haven't been able to find any good examples of something you can buy that brings you enjoyment and saves you time. But if you have any ideas, let me know, because half a year later, my bonus is still sitting waiting for me to spend it. It turns out that this time criteria is a pretty strict filter, because I still haven't bought anything.

Posted by will hertling at 7:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rebecca Blood may be known for her seminal book on blogging, but she's my hero for figuring out how to eat organic on less than $37 per week per person. Blogging is nice, but eating is way more important. And feeding two adults and three children organic, local food has been, for me, pretty expensive. This may transform my life. Highly recommended!

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I've been pondering how technology impacts the culture inside in a corporation, such as HP. While I was in my Sustainable Business MBA program, I wondered if technology could create a set of systems conditions that would foster a bias towards a more democratic and participative workplace, and that that bias would then shape a company to become more environmentally and socially responsible.

I'm still pondering that question. It seems clear that outside the corporation, Web 2.0 is having a cultural impact that is biasing our culture as whole towards greater transparency and participation. And in parallel with that, we see that corporations are increasingly adopting environmental and social responsibility as part of their corporate strategy. But what's happening inside the corporation?

I don't have the answer to that yet, but I did give myself my own reading list as a sort of self-created study at home class. Here's my list:

• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Amazon. 
  
• The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolution Business by Don Tapscott and David Ticoll. Amazon.
  
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. Amazon.
  
• The Transparent Leader: How to Build a Great Company Through Straight Talk, Openness and Accountability by Herb Baum, Tammy Kling. Amazon.

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A great visual history of minimum wage from Oregon State University. (via rcb)

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AskPablo has a wonderful post on Triple Pundit about calculating the "well to wheel" efficiency of automobiles:

With gasoline prices as high as they are many people are concerned about vehicle efficiency. Other people who are concerned about their impact on the future of our climate care about vehicle efficiency as well. Where does the energy that we put into our cars actually go? And what is the overall efficiency of a car?

I believe that Pablo's post does much to illustrate the various impacts on fuel consumption, and I highly recommend it.

However, I think Pablo does miss out on one key calculation of efficiency. The point of driving anywhere is generally to get you from Point A to Point B. But note carefully that the purpose is to get YOU the driver (or the driver and passengers) from Point A to Point B, and not the vehicle. We rarely drive just to move our car from one place to another.

So to get a true efficiency calculation, we need to add in the amount of work done to move the car separately from the work to move the person. A simple way to do this is to use the percentage of the mass of the payload compared to the mass of the car. I couldn't find gross vehicle weight for Pablo's car, a Toyota Matrix XR, online, but let's assume that it is 2500 pounds. Then let's assume that the average driver is 175 pounds and that, for the sake of this calculation the overwhelming majority of trips are single occupancy trips. With those three assumptions, we see that the driver makes up only 7% of the total mass being moved from one place to another. Therefore 93% of the work being done is to move the car from place to place, while only 7% is to move the person from place to place. (To be totally accurate, we should probably separate out the impact of mass from the impact of drag coefficient, but I'll leave that to Pablo since he is more skilled than I.)

So while Pablo calculates a well-to-wheel efficiency of his car at 19.9%, I think the true efficiency is closer to 1.3%: 19.9% vehicle efficiency * 7% payload-vehicle efficiency.

That's really astounding: 98.7% of the energy input is really a form of waste. No wonder bicycles are one of the seven wonders of a sustainable world.

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I've previously written about Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent science fiction novels that incorporate environmental themes. Well his latest novel, Sixty Days and Counting, is absolutely outstanding. In it, he continues the story started in Forty Days of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below about abrupt climate change. But in Sixty Days, we move beyond the abrupt climate change event itself and into the realm of political and cultural change, technical solutions and global environmental mitigation.

This is a book that is entirely about creating a positive future vision. It's about imaging what is possible if we were all working together really address the social and environmental crisis all around us. Having been interested in, and actively studying environmental issues for about ten years, and having studied sustainable business practices in the MBA program at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, I have a respect for the complexity of environmental and social issues: it's usually not as simple as banning this or that, or engaging in confrontations with big corporations. We can't, for example, look at logging as solely an environmental issue when it is also an issue of wasteful business practices, personal choice, and worker's jobs.

It feels as though Kim Stanley Robinson has been reading all the same books I have, been in the same book groups, taken the same sustainable business MBA classes, studied systems thinking extensively. Sixty Days and counting seems to tackle so much - so many issues, the political aspect, the business aspect, the cultural impacts, local impacts, global impacts. It's hard to imagine what someone would make of this book who didn't have the same background. It is even possible to grasp all the incredible concepts on this book? Reading the reviews on Amazon, people definitely do have strong opinions on the book.

Some of my favorite parts of the book are U.S. President Phil Chase's blog posts. Here's one long example, from page 361:

I think for a while we forgot what was possible. Our way of life damaged our ability to imagine anything different. Maybe we are rarely good at imaging that things could be different. Maybe that's what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination.

"Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of
economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the priviledges princes of these new economic dynastics, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happines. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could only appeal to the organized power of the Government."

That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation 1936. In the same speech he said, "There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We lived on in that strange new feudalism, in ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said "people are like that," or "human nature will never change" or "we are all guilty of original sin," or this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself." And we went along with that analysis, and it became the law of the land. The entire world was legally bound to accept this feudal injustice as law. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts - all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say that things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naive, insane, utopian.

But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can't quite remember how it happend or what it means. Change is real and unavoidable. And we can organization our affairs any way we please. There is no physical restraint on us. We are free to act. It's a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a "flight from freedom" - that we fly into cages and hide because freedom is so profound it's a kind of abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to ensure.

So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream, things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Some present that making a plan is instant communism and the devil's work, but it isn't so. We always have a plan. Free market economics is a plan-it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know-it's blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis now without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saving, We have to solve this problem so first let's put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?

Because we're going to have to imagine our way out of this one.

Posted by will hertling at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yahoo's carbon-neutrality is a smart investment from Sustainable IT.

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A story about sustainability and building community (see left sidebar), as told by Gifford Pinchot. Excerpt:

Here's one example of what happened and how developing a sustainable business can impact an entire community. An unemployed logger had a son who had a smokehouse that used to smoke salmon for the tourists. He had tourists from Germany asking him “can you send us fish back home?” So the logger went to some of his friends who were fishermen and said, “I need fish and I will pay you four times what you get wholesale for those fish. But you have to refrigerate them and give them to me when I want, not when you catch them because I need a steady supply all year long.”

So the fishermen joined together and bought a refrigeration plant that had been shut down. Then the logger found some folks who used to have a cannery that had shut down and they got that going. And he found some folks who were making guitar tops out of big leaf maple which was considered junk wood and was left lying on the forest floor....

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Open the Future has an excellent post on "Stop Disasters", a game whose goal is "to reduce the harmful results of catastrophic natural events -- the disaster that gets stopped isn't the event itself, but its impact on human life".

Like a miniature version of SimCity, the Stop Disasters game features a tile-based game where it is up to you to build disaster defenses, create housing and hospitals, and disaster mitigation infrastructure, all within a limited financial budget and time.

I played one disaster scenario (tsunami), and enjoyed it, although I unfortunately failed to save 62 lives. I look forward to improving my game and playing the other scenarios.

It would be wonderful to see some games around global climate change, environmental sustainability, peak oil, and water shortages.

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The Green Grid is a consortium of eleven major IT companies, including AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun, and VMware (via Sustainable IT). They have published three whitepapers on environmental data center topics. One of those is Guidelines for Energy Efficient Data Centers (pdf).

After starting to read the whitepaper, I think they are missing their biggest energy saving opportunity by trying to solve the efficiency problem backwards.

In one section of the white paper, they talk about "system design issues that commonly reduce the efficiency of datacenters" including:

Continue reading "The Green Grid: Guidelines for Energy Efficient Data Centers" »

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A recent feebate (wikipedia, better definition) proposal would use price signals to achieve overall water savings without artificial restrictions on usage:

Garden-lovers could ignore Canberra's water restrictions if they are prepared to pay for the privilege, under a proposal being considered by the Commonwealth. The voluntary scheme would allow households to use as much water as they liked, but for a significantly higher price. The extra revenue would then be given back to customers who use less water as a reward for their efficiency.

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Here's an article on creating a new title: Chief Sustainability Officer. An excerpt from the start of the article:

The Internet Age spawned a new C-level title: CTO, or chief technology officer. The case for hiring a CTO was clear: The business-technology tides were turning quickly and dramatically, and traditional, old-school C-level execs really weren't equipped with the tech savvy to make sure their organizations were keeping pace and staying competitive.

Well, we've entered a new age, the next logical step to follow the Internet Age. Some might call it a Green Age; I prefer referring to it as an Age of Sustainability.

The original business case for Chief Sustainability Officer came via Rick Walker at GreenBiz. Read on for a few excerpts:

Continue reading "Chief Sustainability Officer" »

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I just discovered Sustainable IT, a blog on green information technology. Some recent posts include:

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Columbia News Services's article MBA graduates make some green while helping the environment features interviews with Bainbridge Graduate Institute President Gifford Pinchot and graduate Erin Gately, and even mentions Wal-Mart's growing attention to sustainability:

But increasingly, companies are seeing business opportunities in the environmentally conscious sector. Wal-Mart has set a goal of reducing its solid waste by 30 percent in the next three years and recently asked more than 60,000 of its suppliers to improve efficiency and cut costs by reducing packaging. The retailer has already reduced packaging on its Kids Connect line of toys, saving about 1,000 barrels of oil and $2.5 million in freight costs in the process, according to Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg.

Wal-Mart’s increased focus on sustainability suggests that business people with environmental expertise will be increasingly in demand.

“We’re always looking for top people,” Lundberg said. “Certainly an educational background in sustainability would be a plus for any candidate looking to come to Wal-Mart.

Posted by will hertling at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I think about raising chickens on my city lot, of course the primary concern that I have is that the eggs should be colorful. (This may be a sign that I'm not ready to raise chickens.) Luckily, I'm not the only one who feels this way, because the chicken breed selector tool asks 6 questions to help you find the perfect chicken breed for you. And one of those questions is egg color -- white, cream, brown, light brown, dark brown, green/blue, or blue -- you can find the egg color that's right for you.

And you can find rare breeds, docile birds, winter hardy birds, and specify the importance of egg laying rate. A handy tool.

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An artist ruminates on the generation of "stuff" through the artistic creation process. Oh, and I happen to be married to this artist. :)

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Even though I've spent some time looking at peak oil, I don't bring it up in conversation or posts frequently. It's not that I doubt peak oil at all. (In fact, most of my retirement money is invested in companies based on assumptions about a peak oil world.) Rather, the problem is that the information about peak oil is so alarming and so extreme, it's impossible for other people to accept.

I recently emailed an associate and noted blogger (who has posted on a number of sustainability issues) why she hasn't posted more about peak oil. She said that she posted once, and then was ridiculed by a noted, respected, and seemingly intelligent author and Wired magazine contributor for buying into peak oil.

After hearing that, I felt compelled to post more about peak oil, even if that meant being ridiculed myself. Peak oil is the sort of thing which you ought to at least be informed about, even if you reach different conclusions than I do.

From Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash, here is a snippet of the factual and yet hard to grasp economic impact of peak oil:

In May 2004, Simmons explained that in order for demand to be appropriately controlled, the price of oil would have to reach $182 per barrel. Simmons explained that with oil prices at $182 per barrel, gas prices would likely rise to $7.00 per gallon.

Simmons predictions are downright tame compared to what other analysts in the world of investment banking are preparing themselves for. For instance, in April 2005, French investment bank Ixis-CIB warned, "crude oil prices could touch $380 a barrel by 2015."

$380 a barrel is roughly $14.50 a gallon. It's easy to see why people have a hard time buying peak oil. And remember that most everything we buy, use, or consume has been manufactured and made its way to use using fossil fuel energy. In fact, for every calorieof food energy we consume, ten calories of fossil fuel energy went into bringing that food to us. This means that not only should we expect the price of gasoline to rise 5x over the next ten years, but we should expect the price of everything we buy and consume to rise about 5x over the next ten years. And unless your ten year income plan includes a 5x increase in available cash, then expect to consume a lot less...

The difficulty with "solving" peak oil is that two things are happening simultaneously: oil consumption (demand) is increasing by 2-3% per year, while oil extraction rates (supply) is decreasing by 3% a year or more. While people look to fixes like oil sands, natural gas, and liquified coal, the issue is that these fixes aren't enough even to maintain existing consumption of fossil fuels, let alone the relentless increase in demand.

Read on if you would like to read a few quotes and facts on peak oil from a presentation at a major IT manufacturer.

Continue reading "Peak Oil - the biggest news you haven't heard" »

Posted by will hertling at 3:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Note: I discovered more detailed data from the Environmental Defense website, and recalculated the emissions per car. I found different results, and so this post has been heavily changed since the original posting. - Will

A comment at Rebecca's Pocket on automotive emissions by manufacturer (based on an article in the Washington Post) needed a response to some formulas used to calculate emissions per vehicle. I did the math and found different results from the original commenter. Here are my calculations:

The first thing I did was put the data into a spreadsheet: the manufacturer, the number of cars manufactured, and the amount of carbon emitted in millions of metric tons (MMTc).

Then I took the number of cars manufactured, totalled it up, and divided each manufacturer's share to get % cars manufactured. I did the same for MMTc to get the percentage of carbon emissions per manufacturer. Finally, I divided the % carbon by the % cars to get a ratio that gives me carbon emissions per car.

Here's the spreadsheet:

The last column indicates roughly emissions per car. Looking at the emissions per car ratio, we see that lowest to highest looks like: Honda (0.82), Toyota (0.94), Nissan (0.97), GM (0.99), Ford (1.04), DaimlerChrysler (1.08).

Carbon emissions is pretty basic: the only two factors involved are the number of miles driven and the miles achieved per gallon. Any two cars burning gasoline will emit the same exact carbon emissions per gallon of gas.

The predominance of Japanese vehicles having the lowest carbon emissions is most likely due to the higher average gas mileage of those vehicles, but there may also be some differences in the average number of miles driven.

Posted by will hertling at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love Google Lab's new search Trends feature. I used it recently to look up several sustainability related trends.

Here's the trend for sustainability:

You can see that over the past two years, the search volume for the trend has remained relatively level, while the news reference volume has been gradually increasing.

The same search also shows the top ten cities, ranked by normalized search (i.e. searches on sustainability as a percentage of all searches for the given city). I was surprised to see that the top five positions were held by Australian cities, and glad to see the sustainability mecca of the U.S. (Portland, Oregon) on the list.

Read on for my discoveries about sustainable business search trends...

Continue reading "Search and News Trends for Sustainability and Sustainable Business" »

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This diagram of corporate ownership of natural and organic food companies is nothing short of alarming. Are there no independents left at all? (via triplepundit)

Corporate Ownership of Natural and Organic Food Companies

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I recently read Hungry Planet after waiting for three months (!!) on the library wait list. It's a very popular book, and with good reason. A collaboration between photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Alusio, this book profiles the eating habits of thirty families from around the globe. The centerpiece of the book, if you will, are photographs of each family surrounded by exactly one weeks worth of their groceries. These are amazing photographs, and the book is worth getting for the photographs and captions alone. I loved reading about families from Greenland, Bhutan, China, Okinawa, Cuba, and their wildly divergent culinary experiences. 4 out of 5. Buy at Amazon or Place hold at Multnomah County Library

Posted by will hertling at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One bookshelf in my office is the one I think of as "The Way the World Really Works". This is a collection of books that exposed me to radically different thinking than anything I had seen in traditional education or traditional media. I think of these books as correcting some knowledge deficiency or inadequacy that exists in most of us in western culture.

Continue reading "The Way the World Really Works" »

Posted by will hertling at 3:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |