Firefly Ecometrics

The Political Chemistry of Oil

Daniel — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:13:46 +0000

Lisa Margonelli delivers a cogent, comprehensible look at our psychological, economic, and political obsession with oil through the lens of the recent gulf spill.

Ever wonder why gas pumps are shaped the way they are?

Will a moratorium on drilling really make a difference?

Can insurance premiums decrease our dependence on foreign oil?

Margonelli tackles these and many other questions in her recent TED Talk:

In the end, she emphasizes the fact that we must ignore the “theater” that occurs after a spill – the congressional hearings, CEO resignations, and “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaigns – and focus on what we can do to reduce our need for energy: confront consumers with the real cost.

via The Big Picture

Leaning American Politics

Daniel — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:05:40 +0000

For the first time in my life, I was excited by a political primary in a state 2,500 miles away from my own home. The race was for a senate nomination in Washington state, and the candidate was Paul Akers, small business man and Lean evangelist who had promised to eliminate the waste in Washington (D.C. this time…)

Akers’ campaign revolved around applying the Lean principles he relies on to successfully manage his business to the bureaucratic nonsense that goes on in our nation’s capital. I for one was intrigued to see if he could pull it off.

But alas, the voters have spoken, and he was not tapped to run in the election. Instead, he’s launched LeanAmerica.org, a website that looks to organize and implement a Lean transformation in government operations at all levels.

According to the website:

Lean America is all about helping government organizations throughout America learn and implement lean thinking; by empowering their workers to continuously improve, eliminate waste, and to add value for all Americans. The enemy is waste! It exists in all of our lives, everyday, in everything we do.

He points to his trip to the local burrito joint as proof that waste is everywhere:

As one who has studied and worked in a state-sponsored university, I speak from experience when I say we have waste in our processes, and Lean thinking has helped us to eliminate it when we apply it in cross functional teams. ‘Nuff said.

I think the idea is exciting, but some have questioned whether government can or will apply Lean thinking if there is no consequence for failure. In other words, when governments waste time or resources, they can appropriate more! Under those circumstances, why would anyone choose to operate more efficiently?

via Gemba Panta Rei

The Unintended Consequence of Offsets

Daniel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:53:09 +0000

Credit: Asplosh

Readers of this blog may recall that I would rather see a plain old tax on greenhouse gas emissions than a cap and trade system, because the former is predictable and easier to administer, while the latter is very unpredictable and subject to what we in the business call “cheating.”

Offsets, Cap, and Trade

You’ll remember that under a cap’n trade system (not to be confused with Cap’n Crunch), the government sets a limit on greenhouse gas emissions, which slowly ratchets down over a number of years. Companies are thus required to decrease their own consumption of fossil fuels and refrigerants to meet the targets. If Company A can’t find economical ways of reducing its own emissions, they can effectively pay Company B to do it for them by purchasing carbon offsets – verified and saleable “credits” that Company B generates by decreasing their emissions.

The idea is that the total amount of emissions goes down across the system, and capital is allocated to the most efficient uses. A similar system worked quite well in the ’80s and ’90s to reduce SOx and NOx emissions from power plants (when’s the last time you heard talk of acid rain?) , and there’s hope it could work again.

But there’s a twist!

SOx and NOx are pretty specifically reserved for the combustion of fossil fuels, and particularly from power plants. What’s more, there were catalytic control strategies that could reduce their formation or remove them from the exhaust gases, they just happened to be expensive. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and refrigerants, on the other hand, are emitted by almost everything, natural and unnatural, so the “trade” portion of the equation gets a little sticky.

We’re no longer talking about apples and apples (or coal boilers and coal boilers) when we’re trading offsets – it’s more like apples and bullfrogs. Now, a ton of carbon from a coal boiler can be offset by a stand of trees, some landfill methane, or the destruction of refrigerants in an industrial process.

Behold: The Rip-Offset

A new study by the German NGO CDMWatch, a group that examines the Clean Development Mechanism offset standard, reveals that the law of unintended consequences is still in effect. It seems that paying chemical companies to destroy the refrigerant HFC-23 causes them to produce MORE of it just so they can receive the offset payments.

Yes, you read that right: they intentionally produce the HFC-23, destroy it, and receive $140,000 per ton for their effort.

In effect, the offset is meaningless – it does not represent a ton of greenhouse gas emissions removed from the atmosphere because if not for the payment, it never would have occurred in the first place. Thus, it does not represent a decrease in overall emissions, and should not be used as a “get out of jail free” card for the company that buys it.

Those of you who understand capitalism recognize that paying someone to do something often encourages them to do more of it, so this should come as no surprise. Unfortunately, it points to a critical flaw in carbon mitigation policy, and raises the ever looming “cockroach question:” “If there’s one problem I can see, how many more can’t I see?”

Indeed, the walls of the CDM may be teeming with filthy, diseased offset roaches attempting to bilk money out of the system. So, I’m left wondering: can the offset requirements of additionality, permanence, etc. be implemented and enforced with confidence and transparency, or is the entire system of carbon offsets untenable in the real world?

What do YOU think?

Via The Huffington Post

Google’s Grazing Goats

Daniel — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:26:26 +0000

You’ve seen the Solar Sheep, now meet Google’s Grazing Goats!

From the googleblog:

Last year, in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint (and keep people on their toes), we turned to an unlikely solution for mowing an overgrown field: goats. More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing.

If you’ve got to have a lawn, why not complete the ecosystem with a grazing animal? It seemed to work well on the western plains for a few hundred millennia, and all without herbicides, fertilizers, or gasoline!

Eko Traffic Light

Ten Green Building Myths

Daniel — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:08:27 +0000

credit: AFC

GreenBuildingAdvisor.com is trying to set the record straight on ten common myths about green building. According to Martin Holladay, the top ten are:

New York City is an environmental nightmare
Walls have to breathe
Renovation is less expensive than new construction
Spray polyurethane foam creates an air barrier
Caulking the exterior of a house reduces air leakage
R-value tests only measure conductive heat flow
Air conditioned homes don’t need a dehumidifier
Efficiency Rating Labels On Appliances Account For All Types of Energy
In-floor radiant heating systems save energy
Green building helps save the environment

I have to admit – I believed a handful of these myths until I read the article. Does this mean I have to go around and remove all the caulking I did outside my house?!

Chapel Hill Chernobyl

Daniel — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:42:25 +0000

One of the challenges of the recent Gulf oil spill is that parts of the story were too large to comprehend. We can grasp the fact that 11 workers died in the original explosion because we all know what 11 people looks like and we have a sense of scale – two people die in a car accident, hundreds in a plane crash, thousands in a year of war.

But what, exactly, do you do with 4.9 million barrels of oil floating on the open water?

It reminds me a bit of the Eddie Izzard routine about mass murderers, and our near-fascination with them when the numbers climb high enough. (Note: some of the language may be NSFW.)

In an attempt to make staggeringly large, but frustratingly nebulous environmental disasters a little easier to grasp, the BBC has developed a website to place the problem a little closer to home. Your home, to be exact.

Just select a category, type in your town or zip code, and see a Google map with the disaster in your area. Here’s the Chernobyl radiation cloud if the meltdown had occurred in Chapel Hill, North Carolina:

Chernobyl at Home

Sorry about that, Colorado. Our bad.

You can see some other options there, including the Pacific Gyre garbage patch, and the recent floods in Pakistan. I have to admit – seeing this flood layered on top of the US did more for my understanding than hearing “the flood has affected 160,000 square kilometers and killed 2,000 people.”

If you’re not in the mood for all of this death and destruction, you can also see how big the moon is compared to your home town (hint: smaller than the Chernobyl Disaster!), see the size of Ancient Rome, or trace the path of the Rio Carnival Samba Parade.

Egg-ulations: the cure may be worse than the disease

Daniel — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:29:13 +0000

credit: Pikaluk

You’ve no doubt heard about the massive recall of over half-a-billion eggs produced at a couple of Iowa “farms.” You’ve also no doubt heard the commentators, politicians, and even farmers calling for better oversight and regulation so we can “prevent this from ever happening again.”

I’m here to tell you, the cure may be worse than the disease.

Salmonella outbreaks are serious business. In an age where you never meet your farmer, let alone your food, we put all of our trust in an unseen system of producers, shippers, and middlemen. We sacrifice transparency for lower prices at the grocery store, often ignoring the very high costs of our migration away from the local family farm.

In an age where the government and corporations “never waste a crisis,” advocates will call for reform – of inspection practices, antibiotic use, and food safety measures. All of these “cures” attack the symptoms, but ignore the diease: the factory farm.

Joel Salatin

If you’ve read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” or watched any talks by the author, you’ll have heard of Joel Salatin. He’s a farmer in Virginia who practices an incredibly elegant and lively sort of farming that enhances, rather than degrades, the Earth and its habitats. He sees the push for new factory-farming regulations as one more way for agribusiness interests to push out the little guy who can ill afford the expensive systems governments mandate.

His book, “Everything I Want to Do is Illegal,” covers his constant battle to stay outside of the factory-farm firing line:

Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices. From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

So before you hop on the “keep our eggs clean” bandwagon, consider for a moment how they got so dirty. Instead of trying to make industrial egg production slightly less bad through regulation, lets open the field to competition from sustainable family farms.

Have you met your farmer or your food?

You’re a racist against green people.

Daniel — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:27:47 +0000

This is hilarious. Happy Friday.

via Pays to Live Green

JMP Users Unite

Daniel — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:31:34 +0000

credit: antara

I’m in charge of planning the next Triangle JMP Users Group for all of you data geeks in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, and I need some presenters to share their work!

For those of you who don’t know, JMP (pronounced “jump”) is a statistics and data visualization program from SAS, based right here in Cary, North Carolina.

JMP is like excel on steroids. It allows you to create anything from simple, interactive charts and graphs to advanced statistical models, and uses a unique combination of point-and-click and scriptable automation. If you ever have to “run a monthly report” for your boss where it takes you four hours to copy and paste and massage a spreadsheet every month, you’ll appreciate what JMP can do.

So whether you’re an avid user and would like to present your work (please!) or just someone who likes numbers and wants to see how people are using data in their everyday lives, join our Google Group or come to UNC Chapel Hill on October 14th, 2010 for our next live meeting.

Previous meetings included topics like:

Data mining
Predicting the success of medical interns in performing skilled tasks
Creating dashboards of your company’s data
Teaching statistics to high school students
Statistical Design of Experiments <– I wish I had learned this stuff when I was in the lab!

Hope to see you there…

Webinar: Green Tech Showcase

Will e-books replace paper?

Daniel — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:14:20 +0000

I spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen every day, and while I certainly do a fair bit of reading from the glowing rectangle on my desk, I prefer paper for things like journal articles or technical documents.

That said, I’m fascinated by the rise of the e-book – products like the Kindle that use a high-contrast electronic ink that is supposedly easier on the eyes. A few questions arise: is an e-reader easier to read, and what is the environmental impact of switching from tree carcasses to plastic, metal, and rare earth elements?

First up, a recent study showed that avid readers can read faster if the text is printed on paper than they can from a Kindle or iPad. In fact, reading from the iPad was a marginal 6.2% slower, while Kindle readers were 10.2% slower. Comprehension was similar for all platforms. Bear in mind that the “study” only had 24 participants and probably comes with some large error bars, but perhaps its directionally correct.

Our next question, that of environmental impact, is a bit more complex. According to this Newsweek infographic, producing one E-reader like the Kindle has the same carbon impact as producing 40-50 books.

You could take that a couple of ways. If you intend to read more than 40-50 books on your e-reader, one could argue that from the carbon perspective, the two formats are a wash. But that doesn’t take into account a number of life cycle issues, such as electricity or batteries to power the device over its lifetime, disposal when the Kindle37 comes out and you want the latest version, air or water pollution from manufacturing, etc. I’d argue that if you are a voracious reader and you intend to keep your e-reader for several years, it makes sense to go the electronic route, especially if you don’t like the bulk and weight of a traditional hardback book.

I, on the other hand, will stick to the library. I probably read one book a month, so there’s no sense in getting a dedicated device. And best of all, my reads are free!

How do you read?

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