Some Social Technologies colleagues and I recently had the good fortune to attend Al Gore's speech in Washington, where he unveiled a new challenge to the US: be free of carbon-based energy in 10 years. His challenge calls for the US not only to be oil independent but also coal-free, relying only on renewable energy. Gore emphasized solar, wind, and geothermal energy as replacements to carbon-based fuels.

Gore also called for a unified national grid, plug-in electric cars, and a carbon emissions tax. He emphasized the need for the US to be the leader, as well as a major innovator, of renewable energy.

Acknowledging his detractors, Gore said, “Of course, there are those who will tell us that this can’t be done. But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the inevitability of its demise. As one OPEC oil minister observed, ‘The Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones.’”

Here at Social Technologies, we are interested in seeing the actual plan that will implement these changes, since the speech was vague in that regard. In my opinion, it is a lofty, yet admirable goal. Dear readers, what do you think?

It’s official. My family has become the latest victim of “green noise,” that cacophony of conflicting environmental messages and concerns lobbed at consumers by marketers, environmental groups, and well-intentioned do-gooders. It’s simply become impossible to decide which eco-friendly choice is the best.

Here’s how it goes for me. I walk into a grocery store with a vague idea of what I need to get. I head to the produce section and meet with my first roadblock: which organics should I buy? The ol’ grocery budget forces me to pick and choose. The organic bananas seem like a steal at 89 cents a pound--but I’ve read that the less expensive conventionally grown bananas have only minimal levels of pesticide residues, and if I’m worried about the environment, don’t I need to consider that the bananas have racked up a considerable carbon footprint after being transported from South America? Hmm…peaches? The peaches are almost in season and at least were grown in the continental US. Easy decision ‘til – good Lord! Who can afford organic peaches?!

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In hopes of getting my garden off to a head start this spring, I recently paid a visit to the lawn and garden center of a local retailer. I immediately noticed a new plant food product manufactured by the company TerraCycle. What drew me to the product in the first place were the containers it was packaged in: repurposed 20oz soda bottles. Since the bottles used were from different brands, there were slight variations in color and shape from product to product, making them stand out in comparison to the homogenous appearance of all the other brands displayed on the shelf.

Hanging from the neck of each bottle was a tag displaying the state the bottle was collected and the first name of the person who collected it, which I thought was an interesting incentive to recycle. The product consisted entirely of organic worm castings, or in laymen’s terms, worm poop, which acts as a natural fertilizer. This plant food seemed to be a textbook example of an environmentally friendly product, so when I returned home I immediately checked TerraCycle’s website to learn more.

The worm castings plant food, TerraCycle’s flagship product, is claimed to be the first product made entirely from waste. The bottles are collected through recycling programs, the spray nozzles are other companies’ leftovers, the worms are fed organic waste, and the final product is shipped in misprinted boxes rejected by other firms. In addition to soda bottles, TerraCycle also collects various discarded yogurt containers, drink pouches, and energy bar wrappers to create products such as bags, pencil holders, eco-binders, and planting pots.

If TerraCycle’s business model is successful we could see more companies utilizing waste as inputs. This suggests a number of business implications:

• Companies could develop new revenue streams by sourcing their trash to others.
• Using waste inputs in the manufacturing process could be an increasingly important component of corporate social responsibility.
• Beyond the personalized name tags used by Terracycle, companies could turn to other methods to personalize recycling and make it more fun. For example, product containers could be labeled with 2G, 3G, etc. to correspond to the number of times they have been reused.

I’d be interested to hear any suggestions our readers have for ways in which companies could use waste to create new products.

Image: lerxst/ boycat (Flickr)

SHANGHAI--I came back from the Lawson’s convenience store near my Shanghai office this afternoon, eager to tuck into a new fresh-chilled rice and mystery-meat lunch offering and wash it all down with a cold Coke. That’s when I noticed something so shocking, so completely revolutionary, that I had to stop what I was doing and take note.

The Coke can, resplendent in red and gold Beijing 2008 Olympics logos, was topped not by a circa-1962 pull tab, as–to the surprise of nearly every Westerner who visits China for the first time–just about all canned soda drinks in China seem to be. Instead, a modern stay tab sensibly served as the key that unlocked my sweet, caffeinated beverage. That’s right, nearly 28 years after the stay tab went into widespread use in the US and Europe, its appearance at my local store, along with 50 or so companions on the shelf, seems to suggest the stay tab is poised to make its way into China on a wide scale.

When it made its appearance in the early 1980s, the stay tab was praised by environmentalists and safety experts alike. Litter from the pull tabs was a persistent problem and many people accidentally cut themselves on their sharp edges.

All due respect to Coca-Cola for finally making the switch, if indeed this change is permanent, but one cannot help but notice the timing – just five months before the Olympic games. Presumably Coca-Cola, a major sponsor of the games, wishes to avoid the remonstrations of the expected 600,000 mostly Western tourists and, possibly of greater concern, members of the international media due to hit the streets of Beijing in July and August. No mention of the change appears on Coca-Cola’s website.

Image: Social Technologies 

When should global citizenry aim for fully-sustainable, zero-environmental-impact business practices, government policies, and consumer behavior?

Right now, says Alex Steffen at WorldChanging.org.

At the moment, he seems to be a lonely voice. Most of the climate change mitigation forecasts I analyze in my work here at S)T base their models on a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to reach some multiple of pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon. The common thinking is that doing anything to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction—even if it’s just a little—is better than doing nothing. With a few exceptions, almost no reports from governments or major policy organizations seriously examine the idea of achieving sustainability on a broad scale.

However, Mr. Steffen makes a compelling point—that only doing “something” may no longer be good enough. If most of the things we do, the way we live, and the things we make are unsustainable, then it’s only reasonable that the aggregate effect of adding more people to the globe every year while only making marginal improvements towards sustainability could simply be that nothing really changes.

And he draws a sobering conclusion about the future: by definition, if something is unsustainable, then it is sure to come to an end. In the long run, that could include us humans.

Image: (c) 2008 JupiterImages Corp. 

In a story reminiscent of the honeybee crisis, biologists say that bat populations may be disappearing, hinting at climate change impacts and damage to ecosystems. In an article for The Online Newshour, Jenny Marder reported on the alarming number of deaths among these insect predators:

“Bats are dying at an alarming rate in the Northeast, and wildlife biologists fear the outbreak could lead to the extinction of the already endangered Indiana bat… Of the roughly 500,000 bats hibernating in the caves affected by the syndrome, Scott Darling, a bat biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, estimates that the fatality rate has exceeded 90 percent. And he fears the toll is rising.”

Many of the dead or dying bats have a white fungus on their noses and bodies, giving rise to speculation that a bacteria or virus may be the culprit. However, not all of these bats have signs of the fungus, and most are extremely emaciated. Many have left their hibernation early, flying around in winter conditions in search of food to avoid starvation.

Though scientists in 10 labs across the United States are attempting to pinpoint the source of this widespread scourge in the bat population, a simple answer has escaped them thus far. While some have suggested that pesticides and toxins may be causing the bat deaths, others have noted that ecological change resulting in warmer weather could be making the bats hibernate much later than usual, long after their supply of insects has vanished for the year. And since the main source of their diet is insects such as mosquitoes, many biologists believe that this year’s insect population may swell to record numbers, meaning that the possibility of West Nile Virus will be even greater. Bats also eat caterpillars and beetles, and any outbreak of these insects could spell trouble for farm crops and fruit orchards.

Once again, we are forced to face the fact that our actions and decisions never have singular outcomes, and often result in  consequences far worse than the original problem we were attempting to fix.

Image: Rob and Stephanie (Flickr)

I'm in San Diego this week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I'll be providing daily updates for ChangeWaves covering the various sessions I'm attending. Here's a recap of some of the stand out sessions and ideas from today:

• Megaphone, a startup specializing in interactive digital signage, started off the morning with an interactive game that people played while waiting for the first series of talks to begin. About 20 people called in to a phone number, then moved a character around on the interactive sign using the 2, 4, 6, and 8 buttons as up, down, left and right arrows. Players could then shoot other players by pressing 5 while moving in the direction of their opponent.
• Saul Griffith was the first presenter of the morning, and his talk was entitled "Energy Literacy." He covered the statistical background of climate change and explored various steps governments and individuals need to take to address the issue. He offered a meticulous analysis of his personal energy consumption relative to global energy consumption through the lens of the "best case scenario" presented by the IPCC and Stern reports.
• Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design gave an intriguing presentation on data visualization as a medium. He showed various data visualization projects like the Oakland Crimespotting maps and MySociety travel time maps. Rodenbeck focused on showing how we can use data visualization to interact with information--in ways previously too difficult for widespread adoption--for both analysis and entertainment.

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Recently, I've been immersed in reams of data on India, while helping to assemble S)T's field guide for our upcoming Futures Expedition to Hyderabad, India. It has been fascinating work, and some of the discoveries have been downright startling, providing stark examples of the challenges India faces as it tries to balance growth with stability and environmental concerns.

I've read about the growing problems surrounding car emissions and air pollution, such as smog so thick that it routinely forces airplanes to divert from major airports. Researching India's infrastructure, I discovered how urban areas often use their major rivers as primary drains--New Delhi alone pours almost 1 billion gallons of raw sewage water into the Yamuna River each day.

While these are major problems, they are not unmanageable: with time and investment, India can clean up its environment and build out its infrastructure.

No, what really worries me, in fact, was one statistic I came across while investigating the effects of urban pollution. According to estimates by doctors at St. John's Medical Center in Bangalore, more than 50% of urban Indian children under the age of 12 have lead poisoning. Lead poisoning can cause severe brain damage and up to a 20% loss of IQ.

India's infrastructure and environmental clean-up issues seem relatively trivial in comparison--that India's development may be literally crippling its rising generations is a much more worrisome possibility.

Image: Joooule [ Programme sensible ] (Flickr)

Though the super-macho deer hunter seems like an unlikely ally for the proponents of organic, community-supported agriculture, this op-ed from the New York Times argues that hunters could do themselves a favor by aligning their interests closely with that of the local food movement:

In New York State alone, roughly half a million hunters harvest around 190,000 deer in the fall deer hunting season — that’s close to eight million pounds of venison. In the traditional vernacular, we’d call that “game meat.” But, in keeping with the times, it might be better to relabel it as free-range, grass-fed, organic, locally produced, locally harvested, sustainable, native, low-stress, low-impact, humanely slaughtered meat.

It will be interesting to see what other kinds of groups that don't readily seem to fit the tradtional notion of environmentalist start to realign their "branding" as green goes mainstream.

Image: Odalaigh (Flickr)

What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?

To begin to answer that question, S)T's Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.

After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies' futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:

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Want to know what product transparency will look like in the future? Check out Patagonia’s website, The Footprint Chronicles. On the site you can learn about the journey of five products and discover the transport, CO2, waste, and energy impacts of each item.

Image: Screenshot of www.patagonia.com/usa/footprint/index.jsp  So…say I’m thinking of buying my brother-in-law a Wool 2 Crew shirt this Christmas. Well, thanks to Patagonia I can integrate some pretty amazing info into my decision process, such as the fact that each shirt:

• travels 16,280 miles from the sheep in New Zealand until the finished product hits the distribution center in Reno, NV
• creates about 47 pounds of CO2 emissions due to manufacturing and transportation
• generates 9 oz. of waste as the fiber is created and the shirt is sewn, which is “2 oz. more than weight of the final garment”
• requires 89 megajoules of energy to create the shirt, “equivalent to powering the average American household for 20 hours”

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Image: TVA.govThe debate over how to combat global warming commonly focuses on technologies and policy interventions designed to cut the global emissions of carbon dioxide. On the fringes of climate change discussions, however, have been proposals to address global warming through “geoengineering” – large scale technological interventions designed to alter climate characteristics. In a recent New York Times op-ed, climate scientist Ken Caldeira touted one approach involving seeding the upper atmosphere with sunlight reflecting sulfates:

What can be done? One idea is to counteract warming by tossing small particles into the stratosphere (above where jets fly). This strategy may sound far-fetched, but it has the potential to cool the earth within months. Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines that erupted in 1991, showed how it works. The eruption resulted in sulfate particles in the stratosphere that reflected the sun’s rays back to space, and as a consequence the earth briefly cooled. If we could pour a five-gallon bucket’s worth of sulfate particles per second into the stratosphere, it might be enough to keep the earth from warming for 50 years. Tossing twice as much up there could protect us into the next century.

Despite having a vested interest in boosting the funding for geoengineering research, Caldeira makes a good point: given the potential severity of anthropogenic global warming, wouldn’t it be prudent to at least have some sort of Plan B? Given the stakes, it seems sensible to pursue some basic research on feasibility and implementation for geoengineering.

Many climate change activists are rather lukewarm about conducting even basic research into the field. In many cases their objections boil down to two points:

1. The future promise of geoengineering is a distraction from the need to enact emissions control policies in the present.
2. Geoengineering is a reflection of the “lets tinker with the ecosystem” hubris that got the planet into this mess in the first place.

As a result, support for exploring geoengineering approaches are likely to experience slow growth in World 1.

Interestingly, World 2 – and specifically China – might develop much stronger enthusiasm for the approach. China has embraced weather modification techniques like cloud seeding on a national scale, and has world’s largest weather modification infrastructure:

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Vertical farms—urban, indoor, multi-story agricultural systems that some envision supplementing or even replacing conventional farms—have been receiving a bit of press recently, such as this CNNMoney.com article.
Farmland of the future? The innovative concept is being promoted by Dr. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, among others.

We reported on Despommier’s idea several years back in our Technology Foresight project, and as I think about it now, they are an interesting twist on another trend we’ve been tracking for a while—the rising interest in “local food” and in reducing the carbon footprint and “food miles” of one’s food. To view our 2005 analysis of Dr. Despommier’s idea, see this research brief.

For more from Dr. Despommier, check out his vertical farming site here.

Image: Photos.com

Charles Haynes (flickr)In his NYT column last Wednesday, Thomas Friedman takes an almost messianic view of global warming. He seems to believe that if we just wait for an energy breakthrough, we will be redeemed from our climate-change sins.

Friedman writes: "Without a transformational technological breakthrough in the energy space, all of the incremental gains we're making will be devoured by the exponential growth" of developing nations. It sounds logical, but a number of well-respected studies and reports I have come across while doing research for our Technology Foresight project directly refute Friedman's assumption.

An analysis published in the McKinsey Quarterly (pdf) and evaluated in TF-2007-22: Costs for Greenhouse Gas Reductions (Technology Foresight subscribers only) found that emissions reductions in the energy and transportation sectors combined will only account for about 32% of needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through the year 2030. Forestry—including the protection of forests and reforestation projects—actually account for more potential carbon abatement than either the manufacturing or energy sectors. As far as the need for a technological breakthrough to achieve these gains, the study notes, "almost three-quarters of the potential to reduce emissions comes from measures that are either independent of technology or rely on mature rather than new technologies."

The most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change come to similar conclusions. In its 2007 report on emissions mitigation (pdf), the IPCC notes that about six gigatons of carbon per year (approximately 22% of needed reductions) could be abated by 2030 through currently available technologies that have a zero cost or negative net cost—things like better energy efficiency in buildings and better vehicle fuel efficiency. The IPCC report also states: "No one sector or technology can address the entire mitigation challenge."

sinosplice (flickr)The U.S. Department of Energy forecasts that emissions from developing countries will surpass those of the developed world around the year 2018. Certainly, this growth will create significant challenges. However, the lesson to take away from these studies is not, as Friedman advocates, that the planet needs a green revolution in just one sector to curb global emissions. Rather, these studies show us that incremental improvements across all sectors are necessary, and that they are achievable, without any kind of transformative breakthroughs in the energy sector. Companies that continue to wait for technology breakthroughs before beginning to "green" their operations could miss out on currently available efficiency improvements and find that by the time a transformational energy technology does develop, they are already well behind the curve.

Rycordell (Flickr)Could the very same emissions trading schemes designed to limit greenhouse gases actually encourage polluters to produce more emissions?

It’s a distinct possibility, according to Sebastian Mallaby’s recent Washington Post article on the subject.

Emissions trading schemes generally work through a credit trading system. Credits are created when certain companies are emitting less than is permitted by carbon caps in their countries. Those credits can then be sold to industries that are producing more than their share of greenhouse gas emissions. The net effect is that total emissions are kept under a certain cap level, while financial incentives are created to encourage industries to emit less so they can become carbon creditors instead of carbon debtors.

As if often the case, however, Chinese companies are not playing by the same rules as the rest of the world. Some Chinese companies are skirting the system to make a profit without reducing their environmental impact. Mallaby writes:

“The mechanism appears to encourage industrial producers to emit extra greenhouse gases so they can capture them and pocket extra subsidies. Chinese emitters make such extraordinary profits from this system that the government has imposed a 65 percent tax on the windfall. In effect, the green budgets of the rich world subsidize the Chinese government.”

In our Technology Foresight project, Social Technologies has covered a variety of forecasts that outline the need for cap and trade systems in both World 1 and World 2 countries to abate greenhouse gas emissions. If market-based schemes are going to be a central component of future climate change policy, better regulation will be necessary to ensure that everyone operating in the market is playing by the rules. More evidence that countries are abusing the cap and trade systems to make a profit by polluting could put the future of these programs, as they are now envisioned, in jeopardy.