Bailout for the Earth

Bob Doppelt letter in the Eugene Register-Guard:


How about bailing out the Earth?

Dear President Bush, President-elect Obama and members of Congress,

You recently committed more than $8 trillion in federal bailouts, equity buys into banks and investment houses, loan guarantees and other actions to save the economy. I’m a major player in the economy and I too urgently need your help.

I employ more than 3 billion people. My total economic activity in 2007 was $64 trillion. My size alone should rank me as your top priority for a bailout.

Part of my enterprise includes the food trade. I produce about 2 billion tons of food and feed about 6.4 billion people each year. Just as with the housing market, excessive development and debt are placing a huge strain on my business. If it fails, many people will starve.

I’m also in the natural resource business. I recently provided more than 55 billion metric tons of construction and industrial materials, biomass and metal ore to the world economy. But much of this material is wasted, demand keeps rising and my supplies are running low. If consumption and waste keep growing, global economy activity will suffer.

My long-lived fishing business is in deep trouble. In 2004, this unit produced more than 95 million metric tons of fish with an estimated value of $84.9 billion. About 25 percent of my fish stocks already are overexploited or depleted and more than half soon may collapse. If nothing changes, my business may be gone by mid-century. This would impair the 2.6 billion people that rely on my fish for at least 20 percent of their daily animal protein intake.

My diversified portfolio also includes the provision of clean air and water. But my patented systems are under assault by the very people that benefit from them.

Vehicles, chemical plants, coal fired power plants, incinerators, heavy industry and other sources are degrading the air I produce. Outdoor and indoor air pollution is responsible for 3 million deaths each year through diseases such as pneumonia, chronic bronchitis and lung cancer. My water enterprise faces similar stresses.

My recycling business is by far the largest in the world. Through years of experience I’ve developed sophisticated methods of breaking down organic materials, and even some synthetic substances, and reintegrating them into the soil to make nutrients for new plant growth.

Some of my tenants, however, are impairing my assets by carelessly dumping herbicides, pesticides and other toxic substances into the organic matter that my recycling business relies on. I’d hate to lose this business. After all, it supports my food and forestry units and plays a central role in my clean air and water divisions.

My heating and cooling business faces the most serious threat Over time, I’ve figured out an ingenious way to keep humans and other organisms healthy by dispersing a carefully calculated blend of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and other gases in the atmosphere. These gases trap just enough of the solar radiation that is reflected back to space to keep global surface temperatures within a tolerable range.

But some of my tenants irrationally have chosen to destabilize the heating and cooling mechanisms that sustains them by adding even more gases than my systems can sustain. Every one of my enterprises is withering already under the negative effects of excessive greenhouse gases. Many are likely to collapse soon unless those gases are quickly reduced to their original levels.

As you can see, I’m in serious trouble and sinking fast. The collapse of your economy, which is completely dependent on the resources and services I provide, will be trivial if I go down. If you really care about your economy, you will take immediate steps to bail me out.

The $700 billion you initially committed to bailout the financial sector would be a good preliminary investment. Not only would this money help reverse my decline, it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and thus support your economic objectives.

Mr. president, Mr. president-elect, and members of Congress, I am the Earth. I’m too important to fail.

Bob Doppelt is director of resource innovations at the University of Oregon and heads the university’s Climate Leadership Initiative.

Snow in Portland - and also global warming

I have the pleasure of spending the holiday season in Portland OR, where we had more than 15 inches of snow. Unaccustomed to this volume of snow hanging around for so long, the city was nearly paralyzed for several days. People grumbled about "unheard-of" amounts of snow, the "deep freeze," etc.

Then, on Dec 23rd, the Oregonian published a fascinating graph of annual snowfall in Portland from 1871-2008. Two words immediately sprang to mind: Global warming. From 1871-1900, the average annual snowfall was 18.6 inches. For the past two decades, it was about 4 inches. In between, the average dropped monolithically. The trend is clear: Much warmer temperatures in Portland are prevailing now.

Today the city is thawing. Perhaps from the warmth of sharing Christmas with family and friends? Be well and happy, everyone. Enjoy this time in peace.

Hot or cold, we can always choose freedom, peace, and love.

Green Tech takes a new turn

I'm quite surprised by this blog entry by a Dell Vice President. It accuses Apple of not being truly green.

Several Dell folks were surprised and perplexed to see Apple's new "green" MacBook ad since its release last month and we've been watching the discussions in the blogosphere. After chatting with our environmental teams about the topic, we realized that instead of ignoring it, we should have a conversation about the real meaning of being green from the viewpoint of a Fortune 500 company.

[And then some specific points, before this conclusion:]

We wish Apple would be more bold in making a difference rather than making ads. If they do both, then fantastic, run all the ads you want. But don't forget what this is all about. And, remember, we're just getting started.

The content and comments are the usual huffing and puffing you see online. What interested me is that it is new for technology companies to criticize each other about how truly "green" they are. This just hasn't happened; tech companies have been content to collectively make green claims that few really believe in, and never to make them a competitive issue. It seems that has changed, and greenness is now fair game as a differentiator.

I wonder how that will play out...

Business for the new millennium

Help support the changes that we need in business to create a sustainable society. Gifford Pinchot, founder of BGI, speaks his appeal on YouTube.

Happy holidays. I enjoy this time as one of personal reflection on what matters most.

Science and the Personal

The practice of science requires diligent removal of the first-person “subjective” observer. Scientists strive to see Nature without the imposition of their own hopes, judgments, or fears – to see the external world free of human projections, and simple in its freedom.

This clear seeing is in fact a form of deep Love. To be seen is to be loved. This is immediately clear with children, who must be seen as they are, without projections from their parents, in order to feel fully loved. And so it is with Nature. To see our world without human bias is to love it. People who constantly color the outside world with their own desires and aversions do not perceive the love that scientists experience directly.

The shadow side of this wonderful love can be ignorance of first-person experience. Trained to remove themselves, scientists are often out of touch with their own internal experiences. Subtly or not, personal considerations are belittled. Science sees the Universe as a vast, multidimensional space with one point missing – the origin.

This poses challenges when relating the scientists’ Love to ideas of Truth. The quest of science is to identify those truths that exist regardless of who observes them. This would be fine if acknowledged as such, but the common vocabulary goes much farther, naming these observer-independent truths as The Truth, and all other types of knowledge – those that do depend on the observer – as “not really true.”

There is a psychological price paid for believing that one’s personal experience is neither important nor fully true. Few scientists are aware of this psychological pain because it is obscured by the very habit of removing and censoring oneself from one’s experience.

I speak not as a scholar, but in the first person – as a practitioner of both science and meditation. I directly know something of the different types of knowledge these disciplines offer, and something of the psychological wound that scientists can carry.

Consumer Electronics Industry: Sustainability Report

Note: I was an author of this new report from the Consumer Electronics Association on the progress toward sustainability in the CE industry. I hope it makes clear that sustainability in electronic technology has not been achieved, but many companies are choosing to embark on the path. The calculations and survey data are genuine contributions - I didn't find any other instances of systematic synthesis and comparison of resource usage or recycling/reuse by the CE industry.

Download the report here. The following article appeared on GreenBiz.

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Shrinking Products, Energy Sipping and Reusing Anything: Electronics Industry Makes Green Progress
By GreenBiz Staff
October 22, 2008

For many consumer electronics companies, recycling and making energy efficient products are not new concepts. But whether companies embraced those ideas long ago or just recently, the consumer electronics industry has made large strides in improving the environmental impacts of its products, facilities and supply chains.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) overviews industry efforts and specific company successes in its new report, Environmental Sustainability and Innovation in the Consumer Electronics Industry. After first identifying 31 companies with the largest market share, the CEA analyzed the operations of the 20 of those companies that track and report environmental data.

The report highlights practices and industry trends that, intentional or not, are reducing materials use, bringing down energy consumption and providing a host of other environmental benefits both directly and indirectly. Smaller products that provide multiple functions (phone, GPS, music player, camera, etc.) lead to fewer raw materials used, smaller packaging and fewer shipments needed to move items around.

Companies are looking beyond what they manufacture, improving efficiency within their offices and facilities. Just as quickly as companies started switching to CFLs and biodegradable diningware, they are now looking at LEDs and reusable plates and silverware.

Showing that the practices are more than just good ideas, the CEA highlights individual company efforts:

• Epson makes its packaging from trees grown specifically for that purpose and plants 20 percent more trees than it cuts down.
  
• Lenovo's energy efficient EPEAT Gold monitors contain 25 percent recycled materials, and the company recovers gold, silver and other precious metals from products at the end of their lives.
  
• Nokia has reduce the amount of no-load energy (the electricity cell phone chargers consume when they are left plugged in after a phone is charged) sucked up by its phone chargers by 90 percent over the last nine years, and its phones now alert users to unplug chargers.
  
• Panasonic's current plasma TVs consume 96 percent less energy than its plasmas from 2000.
  
• Kodak has recycled 1.2 billion single-use cameras since 1990, recycling 120 million last year. Almost all of the company's new single-use cameras contain recycled parts.
  
• Intel runs a capital funding program solely for conservation and efficiency efforts, approving more than 200 projects since 2001 that have saved more than 400 million kilowatt hours of electricity.
  

Looking beyond just those main 20 companies, the CEA surveyed 64 electronics companies, discovering 64 percent of them recycle, 14 percent are setting up recycling programs and 38 percent reuse parts of products they make or use. Those companies with successful recycling operations said they have benefitted from having clear metrics and goals, company-wide education and communication of goals, support from top leadership and linking changes to the promotion/review process.

Lean and Green still makes sense

Will the current financial challenges mean that "green" goes out the window? This article from the Financial Times - Staying on Course in a Tougher Climate - says "No"; companies will not abandon their previous course. Consider these quotes from the article:

• ”Our goal is still to be one of the world's leading brands in corporate sustainability and we regard it as central to business strategy,” says Francis Sullivan, deputy head of corporate sustainability at HSBC.
  
• “[We] continue to move forward with our environmental initiative to address climate change,” [Bank of America] says. “Now, more than ever, there is a critical need for financing to develop environmentally sustainable products and technologies, accelerate the deployment of existing technologies, and increase energy efficiency.”
  
• “Sustainability will remain critical to our business, even during an economic downturn,” says Ian Cheshire, group chief executive at Kingfisher. “As a major international retailer, we have a responsibility to tackle issues such as climate change and work towards a more sustainable future.”
  
• “How would it look,” [an advisor on green strategies] asks. “If companies drop [their interest in green issues], everyone will understand that they didn't mean it after all. What will that do to their relationship with their customers – or with their staff?”
  
• “Seven out of 10 people think that in tough economic times it is more important for a company to behave responsibly,” [a polling company] says. “The onus is very much on companies to continue to behave responsibly in line with consumer expectations. That pressure is not going away.”
  

I also think it's a terrific opportunity for the US to be a model for the rest of the world. If we abandon sustainability during a time of economic distress, we communicate that it's OK for other countries to do so, and perhaps by extension for developing countries to postpone their green behavior until they are "caught up" economically. But if we stay the course, we communicate that we really do operate from deeper values than "carnivorous capitalism." Which do we want?

San Francisco 1905: Reality TV from the past

A friend sent this link to a film made from a cable car traveling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1905. (That is pre-earthquake, by the way). I found it fascinating. I watched the entire 8 minutes.

Most noticeable to me was the speed. Compared to modern life, it felt downright relaxing. Quite reasonably paced to my mind. Of course, people at the time thought this was hyper-fast big-city life! Everything is relative.

Also, I noted the dearth of women. Public life was male life.

And I enjoyed watching all the modes of transport: Cable cars, motor cars, horses, buggies, bikes, even an electic streetcar. And the traffic behavior is... somewhat more spontaneous than we have now! Actually, the way the vehicles and people move about reminded me strongly of places like Shanghai, where there is also a seeming element of randomness (and yet it all kind of works somehow).

Anyway, this footage is a rare opportunity to witness life 100 years ago from the eyes of someone there. Reality TV from the past. One final note: Every human in that footage is probably dead now. All their hopes, loves, dreams, fears.... where are they now? It can add perspective to our own lives to remember this.