Earth Prospectus

The Myth of No Touch

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 22:28:00 +0000

One of Steve Jobs’s most enduring legacies is Apple’s insistence on the separation of touch (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) and “desktop” (macOS, Windows) operating systems. There are all kinds of reasons that people in the Apple universe come up with to justify this dogmatic view. The one I notice most frequently is that the “touch targets” in desktop OS’s were designed for mouse interactions, while those on phones and tablets were specifically crafted for the less precise, chunkier human finger. (It’s the reason Jobs famously said about the tablet that “if you see a stylus, they blew it.”)

But it’s always a good idea to be careful about adopting any kind of dogmatic view, especially in an industry as fluid as tech. Things change really quickly and if you staked out a very public position before those changes took place, you stand a very good chance of being artificially hemmed in by that position later on. This, it seems to me, is what is happening with Apple, and it’s working to the benefit of their competition (mainly Microsoft). It’s still very early in this paradigm, but I’m convinced it’s happening.

Let’s take a look at the touch experience on laptops. As a longtime Apple user, I can’t say I’ve had much experience with full-on touchscreens like those on the SurfaceBook, the Dell XPS 13, the HP Spectre, and many others. But I am the owner of the new, touchBar-equipped MacBook Pro, and I’m amazed this neat little strip isn’t being analyzed in the context of Apple’s complete disavowal of full-on touch screens in macOS. Because after a few months of using it, it seems obvious to me that the touchBar is a compromised offering, in the same way Apple characterizes the competition's touch screens.

Take a look at this image of a user lifting their hand from the trackpad, awkwardly reaching up to the touchbar, and then withdrawing their hand to bring it back to its normal position.

The funny thing here is that this image was taken from a CNET video interview of Craig Federighi, in which he actually says that having controls right in front of you (read: on the touchbar, rather than on the screen) eliminates the need to move your hands from the keyboard or trackpad. Is this not patently absurd?!

As a lover of all things Apple, it really makes me quite sad. And I think it’s the reason Microsoft was free to invent the magical new Surface Studio, which is being rightly praised by most people as the kind of thing we would have expected from Apple.

I have ordered one - my first Windows machine in over a decade - and I will be reviewing it as soon as possible. As I have addressed elsewhere, I have Parkinson's Disease. And, having tried the Studio several times in stores, I'm fully expecting it to radically improve my ability to work effectively, even when my symptoms are acting up. More on that in the review.

In the meantime, I would like to leave you with the following thought: Dogma should be avoided at all costs, especially in business. Apple could have avoided being trapped by their own words if only they had been slightly less emphatic. Perhaps, for example, if they had said “We don’t think touchscreens are conducive to traditional OS’s right now…” they wouldn’t be forced to find (absurd) reasons to justify their inaction today.

We’ll never know, but I’m afraid it may have been a costly mistake for Apple. I’m more excited about the Surface Studio than any gadget I’ve purchased since my first iPhone. In between I’ve bought a lot of Apple products (a whole lot). We’ll see if my own personal shift is illustrative of a broader trend in the industry.

Future Tense Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 22:25:00 +0000

For many years I've suspected that people think predominately in one tense, occassionally in the second, and rarely in the third. Think of it like a college major and minor. For example, I have a strong future oriented approach to life, with occasional attention to the present. I hardly think about the past. It is right and natural for different people to have different orientations, as long as we have some kind of balance, and that each tense gets at least some consideration.

Recently it occurred to me that societies as a whole probably also share these tendencies. For example, off the top of my head I would say that France would be an example of a "past driven" society. The US, I think, is very much a present based one. And perhaps native cultures orient more towards the future?

One cannot be too rigid about these types of characterizations, but I think they're very useful when contemplating the biases of different cultures, and of how and whether these biases drive important societal decisions and directions.

These thoughts were triggered one recent, early Fall morning while driving outside of Baltimore. My eyes were drawn to the horizon, which looked crystal-blue clear, with those bright white and puffy clouds that seem only to come around this time of year. For whatever reason, I had the odd feeling that it had been a very long time – an inordinately long time – since I had seen such a thing.

Why was this? Had it really been as long as it felt? Perhaps I had just not been spending enough time outside? No, that couldn't be it – I’m outdoors for at least a couple of hours almost every day. And then it hit me – I spend most of my waking hours with my face attached to a screen. If I'm not in my office or at home on my computer, I'm out somewhere staring at my phone. And when I look around, I mostly see others doing the same. What I seemed to have been discovering on that morning drive was that I was actually forgetting what the sky looks like!

This is all-important because I think it gets to the root cause of the enormous environmental problems we face. We in America live in a culture that is so hyper present-focused that there is no room to think about – let alone plan for – the future. It's made worse by the particular kind of present focus we have. Rather than the “Zen” kind, where we are alive in the moment, we are usually pursuing the numb kind, to “ease the crushing pain of modern existence."

Any thoughts of the future in this paradigm are confined to the "everything will turn out alright" variety. Which is troublesome, because everything is most definitely not going to be all right. Not unless we take decisive measures to address the trajectory we have been on for an alarmingly long time. (Climate change is perhaps the chief example of this kind of wishful thinking.)

Our pop psychology culture has given us this false notion of what it means to be in the moment. It most certainly does not mean numbing yourself to everything around you. To be in the moment in the true sense of the idea is to be fully present, alive in your surroundings and yourself. This awareness necessarily implies a need and desire to take care of everything, to understand that your little world needs to be nurtured and protected.

Instead, we seem to "live for the moment" in a way that fosters an almost total blindness for what is yet to come. This strikes me as profoundly wrong. I think to be human is to have the ability to think and live in all three tenses. A healthy regard for our past helps us understand the way forces outside of our control cause many things to happen. A present mindset is what makes us feel alive, a part of things, happy. And a future one, well, it forces us to think about things beyond ourselves, to hope for the best and plan for the worst, and to make we don’t leave a burdensome mess when we die.

What do you think it will take for us to learn to account for the future? Can we tear ourselves away from our digitally induced stupor long enough to address the problems that many of us are dimly aware of now, but that will be painfully obvious to almost everyone tomorrow? Would a mass awareness of these tense biases help? I’m not so optimistic. But my future-oriented brain occasionally flashes glimmers of hope that - like a spoiled teenager faced with the sudden reality of adult life - America (and the rest of the world) will grow up in time to tally up the costs of our present ignorance.

Overcoming the Need for Affirmation

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 13:47:00 +0000

A very good friend of mine, upon reading my last post about starting a business, had the following feedback: (I'm paraphrasing here) "I loved it! But do you think the upbeat tone undermines your credibility?"

Aside from this being the first and very likely last time in my life someone characterized me as "too upbeat," I found this quite interesting. Of course my first reaction was to start worrying that I had made a mistake and therefore should consider immediately taking the post down. But after relaxing for a bit, and thinking it through, I decided against it. Instead, I will address where I think this friend (also an entrepeneur, and a much more experienced one than I) was coming from.

Starting a business is miserable. I don't care if you love what you do more than you love your own mother, riding the startup roller coaster will beat the living crap out of you more times than you can count. If I had a dollar for every time I said I was going to quit we wouldn't need to be raising money right now. This may sound funny, but the truth here couldn't be more serious - starting a new enterprise will, in all likelihood, drive you nearly insane.

Why is this? For me, it all comes down to caring way too much about what other people think. This is an affliction I've had my whole life, but there's nothing like starting a business to shake it out of you. I can't count the number of times I either asked or thought about asking people if they thought my idea was good, or whether they thought I was going to "make it". As if it mattered at all what someone else's assessment of my chances were. You either do something or you don't, Yoda. You can collect 100 signed statements from the smartest people in the world that your idea is great, that you're great, that they're certain you're going to be the next big thing, and all you'd have is a pile of 100 worthless pieces of paper.

Let me put it this way: everyone I asked, in the very beginning, told me my idea was great. Almost every single person. And I asked a lot of them -- businesspeople, professors, friends -- and aside from the friend I told you about in the last post (the one who laughed at me), there was unanimous and enthusiastic encouragement and faith in what I was about to do. And yet, if I had stayed with that original idea and plan, I would no longer be in business. So what gives?

I've thought a lot about this and here's what I think I've learned. There are two flavors of help you can ask for: the relatively substance-less "you can do this!" flavor, and the very substantial "I need this specific or tangible thing from you" variety. When you're just starting out, you'll likely be living on the first kind, but you'll probably find that you can never get enough of it. No amount of affirmation, no matter who's delivering it, can sustain your enterprise - let alone your fragile psyche.

It's the second type that you'll need to learn how to cultivate. It can take many forms -- probably the most useful in the beginning are connections (or, better, leads), but that's not all. We'll explore this more in a future post. For now, I'll close by saying that the misery you're almost guaranteed to experience will teach you (over and over again) to stop giving a shit what other people think. While I can't tell you that it's fun, I will say that - having survived four years of learning this lesson - I'm far less reliant on emtpy affirmations than I was before. Don't you think that's great?

The 3 un-Lessons of Starting a Business

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 14:54:00 +0000

There is no shortage of advice about the right way to go about starting a business. Without much effort at all, you can find thousands of books, podcasts, seminars, classes… So to spare you the effort of looking for the right formula, I’m going to start with the punchline -- there is no right way. (There are TONS of them.) But the best thing, by far, that you can do is... be lucky. And if you want to do really well, you're going to want be very lucky.

Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. First of all, we should probably address the question of just who the hell I think I am to tell YOU how to start and run a business? Great question. I'm nobody! But I did start a company four years ago and, well, it's still going. So I must be doing something right, right?!

Maybe.

The thing is, I’m not even doing what I set out to do in the first place. You see, my company “pivoted” (to borrow an obnoxious and overused buzzword that many startup-types will not-so-fondly recognize) a couple of years after we launched because - well, it's obviously because we weren't succeeding with the first idea. So when the second idea fell out of the sky, we were prepared to take it, run with it, and pretend that we were going to do it all along.

What lessons can be gleaned from this experience? I’m happy to tell you, but I’m going to do it a bit differently. Instead of dishing out yet another serving of self-help-scented occupational advice, which you can find on half the bookshelves of any Barnes & Noble, we're going to un-learn instead. And so, I present to you the three un-lessons of entrepreneurial success:

Un-lesson #1: Don't wait to have "the right idea".

Chances are, however good your idea is, you will end up doing something different anyway. The most important thing you can do to be an entrepreneur is to be an entrepreneur. If you're anything like anyone I've ever met, you're going to fail - a LOT. People say that all the time, but they usually mean it in the "you're going to lose all of your money and go out of business" sense. Yes, that might happen, but you're probably more likely to fail less spectacularly (and to do it repeatedly). Anyway, the point is that if you want to be in business, you had better like the idea of being in business, at least as much as you like the idea you're going into it for.

Un-lesson #2: You don't have to pretend to know what you're doing.

You're not going to fool anyone, and you're going to need lots of help (see #3 below). It's probably a good idea to think of yourself as a student in the early stages. In my case, I became accustomed to feeling like an amateur for at least the first two years, and probably still feel that way roughly half of the time. On top of that, people will often think you're crazy - as much as we consider ourselves a nation of self-starters, most people expect that you'll fail, and will enjoy making you feel that way. One good friend of mine openly laughed when I told him my original idea. (He later became our biggest and most important client - after we pivoted, of course.) Which leads to the next un-lesson:

Un-lesson # 3: Ask lots of questions, and accept lots of help.

This is an un-lesson because there's this myth of the Genius Entrepreneur who knows it all and drops their Big Idea on an adoring and grateful world. I don't think that happens, at least not enough for any reasonable person to expect it. You're therefore going to need other people to make things work. And despite what I said about people expecting you to fail, it's not all gloom and doom. Many, many people will want to help you. Sometimes it will be another entrepreneur who wants to mentor others and pass on knowledge and experience. Other times it will be friends who want to live vicariously through you. The best kind is probably the quid pro quo type - if someone expects something in return for helping you, it means they see potential in you and/or what you're doing. Lean on those connections.

The final un-lesson for today is - forget all of these lessons!

Remember what I said in the very beginning: there is no answer. You're starting something entirely new, so how can you expect to do exactly what other people have done and still make your unique thing work? You're an entrepreneur - embrace the uncertainty.

The Case for Pessimism

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:27:00 +0000

Hello, and welcome to the first spring edition of Earth Prospectus! Let's jump right in with something you probably don't hear everyday – we need more pessimism. This occurred to me while reading an editorialby Peter B. Kelemen in the New York Times the other day. I recommend you read it as well, but the basic message is that the warnings of imminent catastrophe from environmentalists hinder constructive action on the very real problems we face. Here’s an excerpt:

the climate that worries me most is the climate of fear, the belief that our current trajectory leads inevitably to total disaster. This belief discourages constructive action, and can result in irrational acts by people in despair, individually, or as nations, willing to do anything to derail the juggernaut we are told is carrying us, inevitably, to destruction.

I disagree with the notion that the (very honest) assessment of our trajectory leads to paralysis and inaction. Rather, I would say that the real impediment to making the changes we need is the uniquely American fantasy that everything will just work out in the end. I am reminded of a conversation I had in New Mexico many years ago with a friend who had just moved there from the Northeast. She said – and I know she thought this was true – that the hordes of people moving there from wetter climates were essentially going to “bring the rain with them”.

New Mexico is a desert. The average annual rainfall in Albuquerque is about 9 1/2 inches. And while I don't think most people living there literally believe that flocks of North Easterners are going to magically make rain appear, I do think the rapid expansion of southwestern cities like Albuquerque and Tucson and Phoenix et al is evidence of a tacit belief that the extreme pressure on the water supply will somehow just solve itself. Some of this is a radical form of technological optimism (a concept that will be discussed in future posts), but most people just don't consider how unsustainable their lifestyle is because of this persistent Hollywood fantasy that America is the land of happy endings.

While I agree with Kelemen that a climate of fear is in many ways paralyzing, I mostly think that Americans (myself included) need a hard, cold, fact-laden dose of reality. So let’s look at some numbers, in this case related to global warming:

We need to reduce our global carbon emissions to 2 tons per capita by 2050 to have a chance at safely stabilizing the climate
Global per capita CO2 emissions were roughly 4.9 tons per capita in 2011
US per capita CO2 emissions were roughly 17.3 tons per capita in 2011

So, even with the optimistic drop in US CO2 emissions due to the increased use of natural gas over coal, our per capita emissions are still more than 8 times higher than they ultimately need to be. And this is not to mention the rapidly growing emissions in developing countries like China and India. Without drastic changes, there's not much room for optimism here.

I'm not arguing that threats of a looming catastrophe are the most effective means of catalyzing action. What I am guessing, though, is that they are a natural corrective to the childishly naïve American notion that our collective actions don’t have real consequences, and that everything will just be fine. In this case it's going to take a lot of work and systemic changes to make it so. And telling the ugly truth is a huge part of getting that process started.

What Do We Mean When We Say "The Environment"?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:09:00 +0000

While reading this article by Elizabeth Kolbert on Dutch attempts to create a new wilderness, I was reminded of the complexity involved in understanding our relationship to the environment. So, with apologies to my friends and colleagues who have heard this from me before, here goes...

Attitudes toward the environment vary greatly with time and place. Up until the Industrial Revolution, there was no explicit need for a separate philosophy on the environment (at least as we currently understand the term). For most of our history, “the environment” (or “Nature”) was inextricably bound with the everyday experience of human life. We were very much of nature, and could not have conceived of a need to put it in its own category.

This began to change when some of the less glamorous effects of rapid Industrialization became more apparent. In the US, widespread attention was first paid to these effects when some far-thinking individuals saw that the natural world was being irrevocably altered, and that it might be best for us to at least begin thinking about what this meant and how to deal with it.

A robust national conversation ensued (in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s) that eventually took the form of two “factions” – Preservationists vs. Conservationists. While the two sides of this debate do not appear to have been hostile towards one another, the competing philosophies can still be recognized in the environmental discussions of modern times. More on that later.

Preservationists – John Muir was the most prominent example – believed that Nature was sacrosanct and therefore must be preserved in its “pristine” state. They argued for setting aside of large swaths of wilderness, or preservation, for this purpose. Muir founded the Sierra Club – the oldest and perhaps most famous environmental organization in the world – largely to promote these ends.

Conservationists argued for a more active human role in the existence of nature. The most influential original Conservationist was Gifford Pinchot, who received training in France and returned to the US to promote his beliefs, and who later became the first chief of the US Forest Service. The fact that the Forest Service exists under the Department of Agriculture is testimony to the staying power of Pinchot’s philosophy – trees are treated, in effect, as crops that need to be actively managed by humans – not left alone or untouched as the Preservationists might prefer.

In many ways, the factions of modern environmental thought can be seen as a continuation of the Conservationist vs. Preservationist discussion – though it should be noted that what originally began as a discussion now often devolves into shouting matches between more radical environmentalists and everyone else. But I digress… What is important here is that modern environmental thought has many of the same boundaries that existed over 100 years ago – some people believe that nature must be protected and separate, while others feel it must be integratedand managed.

I will return to this idea, but first we must give proper due to the true creator of modern environmentalism as we now know it – Rachel Carson. Carson wrote Silent Spring, which described the detrimental effects of the ubiquitous use of chemical pesticides. The widespread application of these chemicals was responsible for not only the successful management of insects in agriculture (their intended use) but also for devastating “side effects” on the rest of the environment. In agricultural communities, for example, birds were disappearing (dying) in huge numbers as they consumed DDT and other chemical products that were being liberally applied.

Carson meant to bring awareness about this and many other problems associated with a blind faith in Industrial Progress. She was, of course, derided and attacked by corporations and politicians as being “naïve” or “alarmist”, but her book is almost solely responsible the birth of modern environmentalism, and much of the progress that has been made in “greening” industry and society can be directly traced back to her work.

Carson is now (rightly) revered, but part of her legacy may be a sort of reactionary response to any form of technological intervention in the natural world. In the next post I'll take a look at how this and other historical attitudes towards the environment inform contemporary thought, and how they may be holding us back from addressing our problems.

Are Large Corporate Chains Actually Better For The Environment?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:28:00 +0000

We live in truly extraordinary times, and climate change is at the top of the list of reasons why. Stop and think about it for a moment – we've altered the chemistry of our planet so that we are actually witnessing in real time the accelerated transformation of our climate. We’re moving from a period of thousands of years of relative stability (a period that allowed us to build our civilization) to something radically new in the human experience. Turn off all the noise – the politics, the petty arguments, the reams of scientific evidence – and you come back to the fundamental truth that we are conducting a great experiment, the results of which will determine our continued ability to support a historically massive (and growing) human population.

If we're actually going to do something about this in enough time, we will all be required to rethink our most basic assumptions, leave our biases aside and work together towards a solution. I'm realizing more and more that, even though I consider myself to be open-minded and "freethinking", this is going to be extremely difficult for me as well.

For many years I’ve lived what most of mainstream America would describe as a leftist and even hippie-ish existence. This lifestyle was most pronounced in my 20s (now a long time ago), which included a couple of years working on a composting farm in Vermont and about six months cow-and-goat-herding/cheesemaking on a remote farm in France. While in Vermont I lived mostly in Montpelier, which did and I assume does pride itself on being the only state capital lacking a McDonald's. This is not an accident – the citizens of this amazing little town actively fight to keep it small and independent. A key component of this fight is the effort to keep large corporate chains out and small local businesses in.

I was proud to be a part of this spirited community when I lived there, and I have to admit I even bragged about the no McDonald's thing once or twice. And to be completely honest, I've long held a bias against large corporations. (This has lessened somewhat over the years, certainly in the last couple as I've worked with many global corporations on their sustainability initiatives. But the vestiges remain.) This bias is obviously completely consistent with mainstream liberalism in America and mainstream everything in most other countries. But these extraordinary times lead to an extraordinary question: are corporate chains actually better for the environment?

How could this possibly be true? Well, it may just come down to efficiency. Here's an example: this week I was reading an articleby the amazing Atul Gawande examining whether or not the medical care industry can follow in the footsteps of corporate restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory, a giant chain that has managed to deliver high quality food at reasonable prices. (Or so they say – I've never actually been to one.) The question Gawande is trying to answer is whether or not hospitals, for example, can also deliver higher quality and better care to patients by rigorously documenting best practices and standardizing their delivery to patients. (That this is not the norm should leave us all more than a little bit afraid…)

I was particularly struck by a piece of evidence cited in the article: by rigorously tracking past consumption patterns and creating computer models that predict likely future sales and orders, Cheesecake Factory restaurants have managed to cut their food waste losses to about 2.5%. In other words, they are 97.5% efficient in ordering the right amounts of food to serve their thousands of daily customers. As a former composter who continues to obsess about food waste in our society, this was bound to draw my attention. And when you consider the fact that the average US restaurant wastes anywhere from 4 to 10% of pre-consumer food, it stands out even more.

Most people now know the story of Walmart and how they've managed to drive consumer prices down, at least partly due to the fact that they're able to realize tremendous efficiencies of scale. Perhaps less known but certainly no less important is their push for sustainability, which started with efforts to green their own stores by increasing energy efficiency, installing solar panels, decreasing waste etc. But they quickly learned that if they were really going to make a dent in the problem they had to influence their suppliers (i.e. the companies whose products they sell) to green their own businesses as well. This all points to the possibility that a company like Walmart, with its vast size and reach and mind-boggling operational efficiencies, can in fact be "greener" than a mom-and-pop store in downtown Mainstreet USA.

I want to be clear that I'm not arguing against the existence of mom-and-pop stores in favor of corporate behemoths. I'm simply trying to put forth the idea that we need to re-examine our basic philosophies and prejudices if we're going to solve what might be the greatest challenge in our history.

So, are you ready to rethink everything you've always taken for granted? Humankind may very well depend on it.

Louis CK Unwittingly Demonstrates Our Need For A Carbon Tax

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:48:00 +0000

Happy new year everyone! Apologies for the long gap between posts – it was holiday season, family obligations… actually, that's not it – the truth is I had nothing really to say and couldn't find anyone else to say things for me.

But we're back, it's a new year, the election is over and we still have the same old environmental issues to deal with. And on that note, I saw Louis CK perform at Boston Symphony Hall last week. I'll admit to having hopped on the bandwagon in the last couple of years – I certainly had no awareness of him in his two decades worth of up-and-coming days – but that doesn't take away from the sheer enjoyment of watching someone who's such an obvious master of his craft, who has worked hard in an ultracompetitive field with little chance of ultimate success, reach the top levels of his profession and reap the rewards.

A big part of his shtick is the "I'm just your average person who points out all these hypocritical truths that we take for granted or are afraid to mention" persona. And a centerpiece of that routine is his publicly stated credo that he will never sacrifice his assigned time with his two daughters (he's a divorced father) for professional obligations. This means he often finds himself flyingback and forth between distant gigs and his home in New York City just so he can make it on time to be with his kids.

Now just to get a few things out of the way, I do not begrudge Louis CK any of the spoils he's receiving at this point. The rewards he's earned, I think, make up for the unrecognized toils of thousands of other comedians and artists like him who just never make it. More importantly, I really think he's a sage – the truths he tells normally go unspoken, and do more good for society than the (and you had to have seen this coming) damage his kind lifestyle does to the environment.

And this damage is considerable. Consider this: the average American is responsible for spewing at least 20 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. This is already five times as much as the average person globally. But air travel is highly carbon intensive, and a person flying as much as I'm guessing Louis CK does can easily produce 30 or more tons of additional emissions, bringing his total personal carbon footprint to greater than 50 tons.

It's pretty clear that we would quickly meet our doom if everyone in the US – let alone the world – had a footprint that large. But this is precisely the argument for carbon taxes. America is better off with Louis CK shining a mirror on our behavior. Louis CK is better off traveling frequently so he can give us our medicine and still be a good father. This arrangement is a luxury with environmental costs that someone needs to pay.

The most efficient way to do this is to tax the polluting activity. This accomplishes a few things – it allows Louis to keep doing what he's doing and stay healthy doing it, while also covering the related costs to the Commons. And if this trickles down to higher ticket prices for those of us who pay to see him, so be it. This is the reality of our world. We can no longer choose to be blind to the high environmental costs of our chosen lifestyle.

A carbon tax also discourages frivolous use of high-impact activities (such as flying). I am singling out Louis CK here but, as discussed before, the actions of any one individual add up to nothing. The real problem in the case of air travel is that many of us are doing it (with increasing frequency), and with no consideration whatsoever for the damage it's doing. (I am guilty as charged here.)

I would be much less happy in a world without Louis CK or what he represents. Let's just get real about the price we’re really paying to enable it.

The Conservative Case for Environmentalism

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:30:00 +0000

The so-called core beliefs of the political Left and Right are much more fluid than we might think at first glance. This is borne out in American history, where the fundamental tenets of left and right have morphed over time. We are reminded of this in popular culture today, as the movie Lincoln shows us that it was radical Republicans who sought to abolish slavery (civil rights of course later emerged as a Democratic priority). Prior to that, President Andrew Jackson was a champion of the populist Democrats, who sought to rid America of the National Bank, return us to an agrarian economy and strengthen states' rights at the expense of a strong central government. These anti-federal measures sound much more like modern Republican ideas than Democratic ones.

I bring this up because the natural human tendency to categorize and generalize often gets in the way of rational discourse and objective truth. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all slaves to groupthink. I know that I am – I often joke with a close friend of mine that some of the political blogs and websites I read regularly “tell me what to think”. This is closer to the truth than I would like to admit. Of course if we are all honest with ourselves, we understand that political parties exist largely to ease the burden of our individual democratic responsibilities. There are so many issues with so many layers of complexity that it’s impossible for the average citizen to be truly informed enough to make intelligent decisions about them. Instead we belong to parties, which we entrust to legislate in alignment with their members’ broadly shared sense of values. There are good reasons why the founders did not choose to create a direct democracy...

For the most part our system works, and in a very general way the parties do at the very least advocate for policies that match the values of its members. Republican voters, therefore, can reliably expect their elected representatives to push for low taxes and limited government, while Democrats choose politicians who will maintain or strengthen the social safety net, even if it means relatively higher tax rates. These are over-generalizations, but they do tend to hold true. One might even say that the system doesn’t just work – it makes sense!

But there are outlier issues. And I would argue that one such issue is the environment.

I can understand right-wing distaste for green thinking in the 1960's sense. The tree hugging, pot smoking, free loving hippies who in many respects gave birth to environmentalism have cast a long shadow across the decades. Though this is a caricature and they certainly had among them serious, balanced thinkers, their radical and anti-growth brand of environmentalism, I think, is still etched in the mind of more business friendly conservative types, and therefore stands in the way of a mutually beneficial understanding of the real issues.

Most of the “professional environmentalists” that I know and admire have a different view of the movement, one that is entirely compatible with the core ideologies of conservative thought. I believe it can be summarized as follows:

A business can only sustain itself if it keeps account of its resources – most essentially, its money in the bank and its expenses. If it continuously doles out more money than it takes in, it will eventually run out of resources and die. The same is true of the Earth, and with the human race and its natural capital in the form of Earth resources – if we spend more of this natural capital than we have in reserve, we will eventually run out of it and die.

There are of course major differences in how we would account for resources in the environmental sense. Unlike cash, the spending of natural capital doesn’t just deplete reserves of that capital but also affects the ability of natural systems (such as the atmosphere and water bodies) to assimilate the expenditures. The most obvious example of this is fuel use and global warming emissions – in a natural accounting system, not only must we catalog the depletion of the stock of fossil fuels, we also have to take stock of the “fullness” of the reservoir (the atmosphere) we are loading with CO2.

But the general idea is the same – I have x amount of resources, and if I spend it at a certain rate without replenishing it, eventually I will get into trouble. That’s what makes it so striking to me – shocking, really – that we do not have an accounting system for natural resources. It seems to me a totally commonsensical approach to the world, and one much more aligned with “conservative values” than freespending liberal ones.

For the sake of humanity, let’s hope that our rigid and irrational prejudices are shaken loose again, and that a smart accounting for resources comes to be associated more with careful conservatism than freewheeling liberalism. I for one will gladly relinquish my share of the mantle...

The Case for Adaptation

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:08:00 +0000

Guest post by Nathan Chan

We all know the story well. Carbon emissions from human sources have greatly altered the earth’s energy balance, and as a result, global temperature will rise and bring with it a suite of dangers. For the concerned citizen, this scientific reality is a call to action – a call to prevent such ills by cutting our collective emissions (a strategy that is commonly known as climate change mitigation).

That is the common refrain, anyway. But what this chain of logic sometimes skips over is the part where climate change is already a reality, and our choice is not whether or not we will face global warming, but instead how much. Given that some level of climate change is unequivocally upon us, it is imperative that we complement the discussions of mitigation with serious consideration of how to adapt to our changing reality. Whereas mitigation seeks to attack the root cause of climate change, adaptation seeks to prepare us for its consequences.

Hurricane Sandy flooded social media outlets with I-told-you-so’s from friends reminding us that we must reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, cutting carbon will decrease the likelihood and frequency of events like Sandy, but in truth, our most recent mega-storm was a different type of reminder for me. For me, Sandy highlighted the importance of adaptation and resilience, more so than a need for mitigation. Mitigation efforts would reduce the probability of events like Sandy, but when these storms do hit, it is essential that our communities be prepared. This time around, we simply were not.

Brian Stone, Jr., a professor of urban planning, makes the case that the climate community’s focus on global mitigation efforts has diverted attention away from local and regional adaptation. It’s a real shame that adaptation has received short shrift. Mitigation will require truly worldwide cooperation to be effective, and if the annual cycles of excitement, concern, and disappointment surrounding the Conference of Parties (COP) meetings are any indication, we remain years away from agreeing on a binding plan for mitigation.

In the meantime, adaptation efforts should not wait; we can begin preparing for future impacts immediately. Communities, cities, regions, and countries are fully empowered to act in their own best interest when it comes to adaptation. They can build storm surge barriers and restore wetlands; they can update building and infrastructure codes; and they can change the incentives to build in vulnerable areas by adjusting insurance schemes. While the need for international cooperation is a major stumbling block in climate change (mitigation) negotiations, local and regional authorities have full agency over adaptation plans that affect their constituents.

This is not to say that adaptation will be easy. There are a host of challenges when it comes to adaptation, too. For one, we’ll need better science and better assessments of the risks posed by climate change, and we need more fine tuning in our research. As Stone points out, our intensive study of warming at the global level leaves us with a relatively coarse understanding of local impacts.

We’ll also need improved risk-literacy so that we can properly evaluate low-probability, high-impact events as a society and decide accordingly how much we’re willing to spend protecting against them. In the U.S. at least, expenditures to avoid risk are highly inconsistent, likely due to a combination of politics and fundamental misunderstandings of risk. The problem is magnified with climate change, as its associated dangers are unfamiliar and not always salient.

Lastly, any plans for adaptation will demand heavy investment, so they will require commitment from citizens and authorities to finance and implement. We’ll need to make important tradeoffsas a society when deciding the amount of resources to put into adaptation efforts. The Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre is one group that is attempting to highlight tradeoffs in the climate context, and they will be playing climate risk games with COP18 delegates in Doha this winter to help inform policy decisions.

Overall, the path to adaption won’t be an easy one, but the critical point is that adaptation is something that we can do by ourselves, for ourselves. We certainly should not underestimate the importance of mitigation, but effective mitigation efforts will take time. The goal of mitigation is to save lives and improve welfare, but then so too is adaptation’s. As we meander toward a global climate consensus, let’s not forget to pick the low-hanging fruit.

Give Me a Carbon Tax, Please

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:50:00 +0000

We need a global cap on carbon emissions. There is no way around this if we are to avoid the disaster-case scenarios associated with runaway emissions. Hurricane Sandy – as devastating as it was – is just a little taste of what lies in store if we stick to business as usual. To give a sense of why a globally adopted policy approach to carbon emissions is necessary, let’s take stock of where things stand right now and where they will be going without one.

Until recently, climate scientists estimated that to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to stabilize the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) by the year 2050. (It should be noted, though, that more recent assessments have determined that even this is way too high.) But let’s just say that 450 ppm is our goal. We currently stand at around 390 ppm. What this basically means is that, beginning in 2011, global emissions have to decrease by about 1.5% per year. Unfortunately in 2011, carbon emissions increased by about 3.2%.

(Graph adapted from Global Carbon Project)

The black dotted line represents total emissions of CO2 per year. The red arrow is where we are going. The blue arrow is where we need to go. Clearly, we are headed in the entirely wrong direction.

I bring this up in part because my work puts me in frequent contact with executives from corporations that are truly doing a lot to more or less voluntarily lessen their environmental impact. Much of the focus has been on global warming, and this is a good thing. But as the graph shows, it’s not nearly enough. We're not going to get there with voluntary and arbitrary targets. The only way we have a chance to realize the deep changes we need to slow and ultimately reverse the tide of global warming emissions is to have a binding, global agreement on how much everyone is allowed to emit. And the US government’s reluctance to do this has been perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting it done.

But there is some good news -- there may be some momentum gathering here in America that would allow us to play our part:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-carbon-tax/2012/11/10/6c576bfa-29f5-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_story.html

Even with a cap, however, we are still locked in to some rising temperatures and their effects - we’ve already dumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to ensure some amount of global warming. So we need to take a two-pronged approach to the problem: mitigation (efforts to decrease the amount of CO2 emissions and thus limit the amount of warming) and adaptation (efforts to adjust to the inevitable effects of warming, like building sea walls in coastal cities to counter the impact of rising oceans). We’ll be taking a look at both strategies in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, say it loud and say it proud: I want a carbon tax!

More Sandy

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 19:27:00 +0000

Based on feedback I got from some of you, I wanted to clarify a couple of points from my post on Hurricane Sandy. First of all, I did not mean to imply that we can directly link this particular storm to global warming. Nor are scientists even sure whether storms like this will become more common as the earth continues to heat up. What is beyond dispute at this point, however is that:

Global temperatures are rising
Human activity is responsible for a significant portion of this temperature rise
One of the many deleterious effects of the increased temperature is sea level rise
And, one of the many consequences of sea level rise is the increased risk of flooding events like the ones we saw earlier this week

I also wanted to point out that by "solving global warming" I did not mean to imply that we can turn back the clock and quickly return to preindustrial levels of atmospheric CO2. As I will hammer home repeatedly in coming posts, what we need is a global cap on CO2 emissions so that dirty behavior (carbon-polluting) is properly penalized and cleaner behavior (low carbon or carbon removing) - as well as adaptation - is incentivized. Much more to come on this…

Sandy (and welcome to my blog)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott K) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:45:00 +0000

It’s no secret to my closest friends and family that I worry about things. They might say I am a cynic, a pessimist. But I've tried for most of my adult life to take action when I see a problem, rather than just sitting around and complaining about it. Most of the big career decisions I've made have grown out of this mentality. I'm not trying to pretend that I'm selfless, or that I don't seek personal gain. But a huge kernel of my decision-making can be attributed to seeing a larger problem in the world and wanting to do my part to fix it.

(Reuters/Gary He)

New York will bounce back from Hurricane Sandy. So will Boston, and all the other major cities in the Northeast. But none of these places will survive much longer if we don't take drastic action to solve global warming. (This is, of course, not to mention the other countries in Sandy's path, which were also devastated and aren't blessed with America's resources to rebuild.) And while I have made a career out of managing carbon emissions, for whatever reason this grave fact wasn't clear even to me until the storm hit yesterday. Yes, I have to admit it – the work, the public talks, the writing, all of the things I've done professionally related to climate change have had an element of gamesmanship, of wanting to get ahead in the world, of making my own successful career out of the abstract notion of a warming planet.

Well, the game is over. We have all seen first hand how puny and insignificant our built world is. The most magnificent, vibrant, richest city in the history of humankind can be drowned in the blink of an eye. Tens of millions of people can be threatened all at once. Entire regions can be shut down in a matter of hours. And, if these places are lucky enough to get off the mat from the blow, our already fragile economy is forced to divert precious resources to cleaning them up and rebuilding.

I’m tempted to say that this latest storm provides us with a warning, a wake-up call. But that’s really a bunch of bullshit. The warnings and wake-up calls have been coming at us for years. This is the new reality. This is the world that we’ve been handed. And when I say “we”, I’m referring to my generation of twenty and thirty (and soon forty!) somethings. Because I think what’s most shocking to me as I reflect on yesterday’s disaster is that it’s my generation that’s “in control” now. The decisions that we make will determine what’s left for succeeding generations.

What it comes down to is this: we all need to make choices – career, lifestyle, political – that tangibly lead towards a solution to global warming. There is no longer an option to wait a few more years (or days, or months). The very existence of New York City (and Philadelphia, and DC, and...) hangs in the balance. We no longer have to try to imagine what this looks like. Subway stations are drowning. The East Village was swallowed. Dumbo was underwater. All of these things were predicted. Now we have real life showing us what it actually looks like.

I don’t have any easy answers to the question “what do we do now?” In future posts, I hope to examine some of the promising things that are going on that could get us where we need to go. But one thing I’m certain of is that we need a generational shift in priorities. This problem cannot wait while we focus on other things – rather, it has to become integral to those other things. Gernot Wagner has so eloquently shown that global warming can only be solved with macro economics and large-scale political changes (read: a carbon tax, or a global cap on carbon emissions). But it seems to me that the first step in that process is for all of us to get together and focus on the problem with the sense of urgency we now see it requires.