Category: Aside

Energy unprincipled

I’ve been browsing the ALEC model legislation on ALECexposed, some of which infiltrated the Montana legislature. It’s discouragingly predictable stuff, but not without a bit of amusement. Take the ALEC Energy Principles:

Mission: To define a comprehensive strategy for energy security, production, and distribution in the states consistent with the Jeffersonian principles of free markets and federalism.

Except when authoritarian government is needed to stuff big infrastructure projects down the throats of unwilling private property owners:

Reliable electricity supply depends upon significant improvement of the transmission grid. Interstate and intrastate transmission siting authority and procedures must be addressed to facilitate the construction of needed new infrastructure.

Like free markets, federalism apparently has its limits:

Such plan shall only be approved by the commission if the expense of implementing such a plan is borne by the federal government.

Go ahead, shut down the EPA

Companies self-regulate just fine, without any rule of law, like they do in Nigeria:

Some of the results are “horrifying” and “unprecedented,” Brown says. The wells serving at least 10 Ogoni communities, for instance, have unsafe levels of hydrocarbons; one well had levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, that were 900 times greater than those deemed safe by the World Health Organization. In some areas, the researchers measured 8 centimeters of oil floating on top of groundwater and oil-soaked soils 5 meters deep. “Areas which appear unaffected at the surface are in reality severely contaminated underground,” the report concluded. In one bit of good news, the researchers concluded that spilled oil had not tainted local fish, a major source of protein, although it had ruined numerous fish farms.

The future

IBM was founded a hundred years ago today. Its stock has appreciated by a factor of 40 from 1962 (about 5 doublings in 50 years is 7%/yr).

Perhaps more importantly, the Magna Carta turned 796 yesterday. It was a major milestone in a long ascent of rule of law and civil liberties.

What will the next century and millennium bring?

Vonnegut does the reference modes of stories

Via NPR,

All of us, even if we have no knack for science, look at the weather, at our children, at our markets, at the sky, and we see rhythms and patterns that seem to repeat, that give us the ability to predict. …

Do any of us live beyond pattern? …

I don’t think so. Artists may be, oddly, the most pattern-aware. Case in point: The totally unpredictable, one-of-a-kind novelist Kurt Vonnegut … once gave a lecture in which he presented — in graphic form — the basic plots of all the world’s great stories. Every story you’ve ever heard, he said, are reflections of a few, classic story shapes. They are so elementary, he said, he could draw them on an X/Y axis.

Systems thinkers, watch for:

  • one big reference mode diagram
  • quantification without measurement
  • a discrete event, modeled with finite slope

Bigfoot II

I just rediscovered the Carnegie Mellon EIO-LCA tool, an online model for input-output lifecycle analysis. I ran it for the “Electronic computer manufacturing” sector to see how the results compare with Apple’s lifecycle analysis of my new MacBook.

The result: 284 tons CO2eq per million dollars of output. That translates to 340 kg for a $1200 computer. This is almost the same as Apple’s number, except that the Apple figure includes lifecycle emissions from use, for about a third of the total, so Apple’s manufacturing emissions are about a third lower than the generic computer sector in the EIO-LCA tool.

Directionally, it’s interesting that Apple’s estimate (presumably a process-based accounting) is lower, given that manufacturing happens in China, where electricity and GDP are both carbon-intensive on average. I wouldn’t read too much into the differences without digging much deeper though.

2011 Climate CoLab contest – How should the 21st century economy evolve bearing in mind the reality of climate change?

From my friends at the MIT Climate CoLab, a cool experiment in collective intelligence:

To the members of the Climate CoLab,

We are pleased to announce the launch of the 2011 Climate CoLab Contest. This year, the question that the CoLab poses is:

How should the 21st century economy evolve bearing in mind the reality of climate change?

This year’s contest will feature two competition pools:

  • Global, whose proposals outline how a feature of the world economy should evolve,
  • Regional/national, whose proposals outline how a feature of a regional or national economy should evolve.

The contest will run for six months from May 16 to November 15. Winners will be selected based on voting by community members and review by the judges.

The winning teams will present their proposals at briefings at the United Nations in New York City and U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. The Climate CoLab will sponsor one representative from each of the winning teams.

We encourage you to form teams with other CoLab members who share your regional or global interests. Fill out your profile and start debating and brainstorming. If you would like to join a team, please send me a message.

Learn more about this year’s contest at http://climatecolab.org. Please tell your friends!

Best,

Lisa Jing
For the Climate CoLab Team

Bigfoot

There were three surprised when I recently ordered an Apple Macbook Pro. The first was how good the industrial design is compared to any PC laptop I’ve had. The second was getting a FedEx tracking number – straight from Shanghai. The third was how big the carbon footprint of this svelte machine is.

IMG_2711
Here it is, perched on a massive granite stair that took prybars, Egyptian pyramid-building techniques, and considerable sweat to place (not to mention the negative contribution to my kids’ vocabulary). The two bigger blocks: about 370kg (over 800 pounds). The Mac’s lifecycle carbon footprint: 350kg (2/3 manufacturing & transport, 1/3 use).

Vital lessons

SEED asked eleven researchers to share the single most vital lesson from their life’s work. Every answer is about systems. Two samples:

“You can make sense of anything that changes smoothly in space or time, no matter how wild and complicated it may appear, by reimagining it as an infinite series of infinitesimal changes, each proceeding at a constant (and hence much simpler) rate, and then adding all those simple little changes back together to reconstitute the original whole.”
—Steven Strogatz is a mathematician at Cornell University.

“Many social and natural phenomena—societies, economies, ecosystems, climate systems—are complex evolving webs of interdependent parts whose collective behavior cannot be reduced to a sum of parts; small, gradual changes in any component can trigger catastrophic and potentially irreversible changes in the entire system that can propagate, in domino fashion, even across traditional disciplinary boundaries.”
—George Sugihara is a theoretical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The rest @ SEED.