Despite regulatory gridlock on climate, IT competitors unite, demonstrate GHG cuts

July 27th, 2010 by ktuerff No comments »

Picture 5New Study: IT Sector Cut Annual CO2 Emissions by 32 Million Metric Tons

Global industry coalition adds networking sector to its energy efficiency mission

A new study released today shows that the IT sector has reduced annual CO2 emissions associated with IT equipment by more than 32 million metric tons worldwide since 2007.

The results are part of a benchmark study conducted by Natural Logic to assess the progress of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative’s (CSCI) goal of reducing annual CO2 emissions from the IT sector by 54 million metric tons by June 2011. The initiative, formed in 2007, is an international coalition led by CSC, Dell, Google Inc., HP, Intel, Microsoft, and the World Wildlife Fund to reduce the environmental impact of new and emerging IT equipment through energy efficiency.

This new research shows that annual CO2 emissions from IT equipment have decreased by 32 million to 36 million metric tons worldwide since 2007. This amount is equivalent to taking nine coal-fired power plants offline and is equal to more than $2 billion in annual energy savings. Additionally, the research shows that the IT sector is on target to achieve Climate Savers Computing Initiative’s reduction goal by the end of its 2010 fiscal year in June 2011.

These results can be attributed in part to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative’s coordinated efforts to accelerate the adoption of computer power management; new efficiency standards for computing technologies; and the development, deployment, and adoption of higher-efficiency computing equipment.

“When CSCI was established in 2007, desktop computers wasted 50 percent of the power coming from the wall,” says Lorie Wigle, general manager of the Eco-Technology Program Office for Intel Corporation and president of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. “Today, through the collective efforts of our organization, hardware manufacturers, large IT buyers, and other key partners, the IT sector has cut that waste by at least 25 percent for new systems.”

The study covered the first three program years of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2010. Data was compiled by examining CSCI member company progress on power-management adoption and market data, including shipment and installed-base information, PSU efficiency levels, number of units sold worldwide, operating systems in use, market research, and estimates from industry analysts.

“The Climate Savers Computing Initiative has made significant strides in reducing the impact of computing on our environment,” says Steve Ryan, program manager for the ENERGY STAR Low-Carbon IT Campaign at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “This research demonstrates progress, but we know that still more can be done by increasing the adoption of power management and energy efficient computing equipment in the U.S. and worldwide.”

What’s Next: Focus Will Include Networking Equipment

Going forward, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative will leverage the expertise and leadership of its founding board of directors with that of new board members, Cisco, Emerson Network Power, and Juniper Networks, as the organization expands its focus to include commercial and home networking systems and devices.

“As the number of networked devices continues to rise, the energy demands on networks and networking equipment will increase in step. With this growth, there is significant energy and cost savings potential,” said Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar at Google Inc. and Climate Savers Computing board member. “The Climate Savers Computing Initiative recognizes that in order to achieve end-to-end computing energy efficiency, we must address the energy used by connected devices and their interaction with the network.”

The organization will begin by setting new energy efficiency criteria for networking technologies. These new criteria will be developed by working with Cisco, Emerson Network Power, and Juniper Networks and through alliances with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others.

As part of this expansion, commercial and residential routers and switches, commercial WLAN, and security and access devices will be incorporated into the organization’s environmental mission, with the goal of reducing annual CO2 emissions by an additional 38 million metric tons by 2015. This is the equivalent of $5 billion in annual energy cost savings.

According to research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the energy used by commercial and residential buildings’ networking systems and devices will increase by roughly 6 percent annually without a focused effort to improve their energy efficiency. “We hope to reverse this trend, and we think we can,” said Wigle. “Our research shows that, with the adoption of conservation and efficiency measures on networking equipment, a commercial or residential building’s energy use can be reduced by more than 10 percent.”

The demand for energy efficient computing is rising among corporations in the U.S. and globally, according to industry analysts.

“We’re seeing a notable trend in CIO priorities globally that will play a role in market adoption of more efficient networking technology,” said Andy Lawrence, an analyst with the 451 Group. “Corporations worldwide are working to reduce their environmental impact, and at the same time trying to cut operating costs. Energy efficient computing can do both, and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative’s ability to apply the principles of power management to networking has the potential to have a big payoff for the environment.”

Board members of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative include Cisco, CSC, Dell, Emerson Network Power, Google Inc., HP, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, and the World Wildlife Fund. Sponsors include 1E, Acer Inc., CompTIA, Faronics, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Ltd., Lenovo, NEC Corporation, Sony Electronics, Sparxent Verismic Software, Symantec, and Verdiem Corporation.

About Climate Savers Computing Initiative

Climate Savers Computing Initiative is a global consortium dedicated to reducing the energy consumption of end-to-end computing. Since 2007, more than 645 members, including large commercial enterprises and technology industry stakeholders, have joined the initiative, and thousands of individuals have pledged their support. The initiative is dedicated to reducing the energy consumption of the IT sector through three focus areas: increasing the energy efficiency of computing equipment, increasing the adoption and deployment of power management, and shifting user behavior to smart computing practices. The initiative is led by Cisco, CSC, Dell, Emerson Network Power, Google Inc., HP, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, and the World Wildlife Fund. Sponsors include 1E, Acer Inc., CompTIA, Faronics, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Ltd., Lenovo, NEC Corporation, Sony Electronics, Sparxent Verismic Software, Symantec, and Verdiem Corporation.

For more information and to pledge your support, visit www.climatesaverscomputing.org.

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Posted in climate mitigation

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The Third Grieving

July 9th, 2010 by aseale No comments »

by Avrel Seale

The first shameful waste associated with the BP oil spill was the waste of 11 human lives. No matter how big the story of the BP spill gets, when the history of this event is written, the lede always should remain the loss of human life at its fiery start. That is a loss that cannot be measured against any other, that can never be quantified. Those brothers, husbands, fathers, and friends were Jason Anderson, 35, Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, Donald Clark, 34, Stephen Curtis, 39, Gordon Jones, 28, Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, Karl Klepping, 38, Blair Manuel, 56, Dewey Revette, 48, Shane Roshto, 22, and Adam Weise, 24.

The second shame is the one with which we are most familiar, the twin tragedies of the oil’s effect on the environment — oil-coated pelicans, gulls, sea turtles — and the attendant economic catastrophe along the coast affecting fishermen, oystermen, crabbers, and their support industries like ice manufacturing, distributing, and tourism with all its trickle-down effects. It was heartening to see the speed with which people grasped the threat to humans and wildlife relative to eras past, and that cost is being grieved admirably (if never adequately). This second shame has now fed back into that first one; the number of human lives lost to the spill climbed to 12 when fishing charter captain William Allen-Kruse apparently took his own life in June, despondent at the state of his livelihood.

But there is another, third, pang of grief we should feel when we look at the disaster in the Gulf. Without any diminishing of sorrows 1 or 2, I grieve for the waste of the oil itself.

In a story in which we’re understandably used to thinking of the oil as the villain, it might be strange to spend a moment grieving for it. But when I see the live video feed from the bottom of the ocean with thousands upon thousands of barrels gushing toward wherever, I have two simultaneous thoughts: 1) “What a horrible thing for the Gulf, its wildlife, and its people,” and 2) “What a waste of oil.”

Why? Because modern civilization needs oil in a million different ways. One of the best arguments against relying on oil for fuel is that we need it for so many other things, products and materials we won’t outgrow the need for, even when we mercifully transition to renewable fuel sources. When we really accept this truth, it seems like a ridiculous waste to burn such a precious commodity. And you don’t have to travel very far from the car’s gas tank to see where we will continue to need it.

We need it for tires. We need it for belts in the engine. We need it for the molded plastic of the dashboard and other contours of the interior. There’s no question that we’re currently in a period of gross overreliance on plastic, itself one of the gravest environmental problems we face, especially in the ocean. But it’s impossible to imagine a functioning modern world with no plastic, and it takes oil to make that plastic. Oil in the form of plastic is everywhere you look, from your credit cards to your cell phone to the PVC plumbing in your home that helped you shower, flush the toilet, and make coffee this morning.

We need oil as a lubricant for any machine with moving parts. In addition to transportation, our manufacturing sector would literally grind to a halt without it.

We use it to make wax used in the packaging of many different kinds of products, like frozen foods. We need it for tar paper on our roofs. And long after electric cars have replaced gas-guzzlers, we’ll still need asphalt — with its oil — to resurface the roads on which those electric cars will travel.

Without oil for all those other things in life — tires, credit cards, cell phones, tar paper, asphalt, lip balm, trash bags, candles — we’re in huge trouble. So let’s get serious about renewable energy and stop burning oil in engines and heaters as if it were going to last forever.

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Posted in Technology transfer

Combusted.

June 2nd, 2010 by aseale 1 comment »

by Avrel Seale

Every now and again, events align like planets in conjunction and seem to try to tell us something. Perhaps April 2010 will be remembered as one such time. That month, within 15 days, two disasters occurred that have much to say about our current world order of energy.

On April 5, a West Virginia coalmine exploded killing 29 workers. The Upper Big Branch Mine disaster was the worst in the United States since 1970, when 38 miners were killed in Hyden, Ky. Massey Energy’s mine, primed by coal dust and methane, exploded about 1,000 feet underground.

A mere two weeks later, on April 20, an exploratory drilling rig south of New Orleans exploded after a blowout and sank, killing 11 workers and causing the largest oil spill in U.S. history, now in its 44th day and coming ashore in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and which is within 10 miles of the Florida Panhandle. BP, Transocean Ltd, and Halliburton, the oil producer, rig operator, and blowout preventer manufacturer, respectively, are lawyering up in the biggest way in preparation for investigations from at least seven congressional committees and untold class-action lawsuits from the public and private sectors.

Besides having dominated the headlines through the late spring of 2010, what these events also have in common, of course, is that both were accidental explosions in the pursuit of fossil fuel. As fossil fuel is sought after precisely for its explosive nature — its flammability — fatal explosions should come as no surprise.

While safety-mindedness across society has increased over the centuries, the very nature of these materials puts their miners and refiners at enormous risk. Many have forgotten that it was just March 2005 when BP’s Texas City refinery exploded killing 15, injuring 180, and forcing thousands of area residents to remain in their homes. And that 2005 disaster was but a faint echo of the apocalypse that put Texas City on the map, or, more appropriately, damn near took it off — a series of fires and explosions in 1947 that killed 580 people.

Even if there were not 100 other good reasons to switch from fossil fuel to renewable forms of energy — the carbon they put into the atmosphere, the scar they put on the land — the danger alone would be sufficient justification.

By contrast, one really has to reach to imagine a comparable catastrophe in the pursuit of wind, solar, or tidal energy: a windmill falls over. A wave turbine comes loose and smashes into a seawall. A solar panel blows off a roof and hits someone on the head. Not good, but kid stuff by comparison. Working with electrical power will always command respect, but when we’re merely converting kinetic or photovoltaic energy into electricity, whatever accidents may occur are both highly localized and simply on an order comparable to any construction project.

Of the renewables, wind energy has been scrutinized the most for its environmental impact, probably as a result of its success and growth. And there have been a fair number of incidents where turbine blades crash to the ground from shoddy engineering or manufacturing. The other enviro-knock on wind is that turbines kill birds and bats. And while this is a problem worthy of mitigation, we should know that for every 10,000 bird deaths, fewer than one is caused by a windmill, while cats account for  1,000, and buildings with their windows account for 5,500. Yet the outrage is reserved for the turbines. Every human endeavor has consequences and trade-offs. But when we look at the big picture, the choice between filthy, insidious, explosive, and climate-threatening fossil fuel and renewable energy, with whatever tweaks it might require, isn’t even close.

And there’s even more to love about non-fossil energy than its relative safety. As a car owner, I will not mourn the loss of the combustion engine, with its thousand moving parts and its requirement of constant and careful cooling to manage the friction of those parts as well as the controlled series of explosions that makes the engine run. Imagine not having to think about an engine overheating ever again? And when transportation makes a wholesale move from combustion engines to electric, imagine the quiet — cars and trucks on highways whizzing past with only the hiss of their tires audible, and not the collective roar of their combustion engines.

Picture Los Angeles, Mexico City, Beijing, or your city with a blue sky. Electric transportation, even if drawing on a fossil-powered grid, still moves pollution away from dense populations. If we can switch from combustion transportation to electric and then convert our electricity generation to renewable sources, then we’ll know the future has arrived.

Even with climate change aside, we have all the reasons we could possibly need to justify a switch from fossil to renewable energy: human safety, environmental protection both from the mining process and the burning process, quality of life.

In a statement today, Sen. John Kerry, the torchbearer of a climate change bill in the Senate, noted how the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is fueling the president’s desire for change: “This is the fourth time in just 12 days that the president has made it crystal clear that he’s not waiting — he’s working with us to get our bill passed this year. As he’s been saying, the catastrophe in the Gulf shows without a doubt that we need to end our oil addiction, and the Senate has to be on record this year doing something to finally tackle the challenge — no watered down, feel good measures that only postpone the day of reckoning; we’re making it happen now.”

Now, indeed. Why don’t we let April 2010 stand as the red-letter date when, as a society, we really started to see the folly of our ways?

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Posted in Climate adaptation

Climategate was a PR disaster, but didn’t change the facts

May 7th, 2010 by aseale No comments »

You know when you hear the “gate” suffix, somebody’s in deep.

So it was when the suspiciously timed “climategate” made headlines in November of last year, just ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen.

As a refresher, Climategate had two main features: the first was the discovery that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (2007) included specious claims that certain Himalayan glaciers were receding. The second, more famous component concerned e-mails that were stolen from climatologists at East Anglia University.

A panel of climate law specialists at The University of Texas recently looked at both issues during a colloquium, and the consensus was that — as bad as both had been for the reputation of science itself, nothing has changed about the fundamentals of climate change: It’s real, we’re causing it, and we ought to be scared.

That the flawed Himalayan study came to light was seen as proof that the IPCC system is transparent and therefore works. To a panelist, the IPCC was seen as the victim of its own success. The IPCC, which is 22 years old and is now working on its fifth assessment, states that its work is “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” The only criticism the panel came in for was that it was, if anything, too conservative, being a group that only proceeded after consensus.

The issues surrounding the stolen e-mail threads are both more controversial and more complicated. While the e-mails — which unadvisedly used the terms “trick” and “hide the decline” — have found few defenders and even were called “awful” by one of their authors, the panelists seemed amazed that large segments of the public now believe that climate change policy could be driven by a shadowy cabal, let alone that it is.

The British House of Commons conducted an extensive investigation and hearing and concluded at the end of March that “the scientific reputation of Professor (Phil) Jones (the unit’s director) and CRU remains intact” and that the e-mails and claims raised in the controversy did not challenge the scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.” Also, the House’s committee had found no evidence that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.

The biggest criticism the scientists took from the House of Commons investigation was for perpetuating a culture of hoarding data. The whole reason for the e-mail exchange was a demand by a climate skeptic that he be given the Climate Research Unit’s raw data. The question of who should control data is one few lay people give much thought to.

Camille Parmesan, on faculty in The University of Texas Section of Integrative Biology, as a rule gives the nod to the researcher who gathered the data in the first place. While the right of others to examine data is basic to the scientific method, others do not, she said, have the right to the raw data. That data, which is usually gathered at a huge expense to the original researchers’ time and energy, can be the basis for multiple publications and therefore lay a career path.

Making all of the raw data instantly available to anyone who wants it means that the original gatherer of the data could be scooped, her future work preempted by other scientists. The effect of this, says Parmesan, clearly would be to disincent researchers from gathering data in the first place. The loser would be science itself.

That said, Parmesan added that there’s a continuum of sharing everything, sharing something, and sharing nothing, and that the British scientific community long has been at the extreme of data secrecy.

Climate change skeptics were giddy at the release of the East Anglia e-mails, and columnists hailed the scandal as the “final nail in the coffin” for this laughable movement that claimed humans were changing Earth’s atmosphere.

As for scientists and advocates of change like us, never have more people hoped and wished that their own conclusions were wrong.

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Posted in COP 15, climate research

Is the future of climate change policy global or local? Yes.

May 4th, 2010 by aseale No comments »

by Avrel Seale

It’s tempting to say that progress on carbon regulation is “glacial,” but considering how fast many glaciers are melting, that cliché doesn’t even work any more.

Last December’s U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen might have been doomed early by the hype. But whatever the reason, the underwhelming results have many of those who care about the issue wondering if these huge annual meetings with their draft declarations and street-theater protests are really the way to a solution.

Recently, panelists at the “Climate Change Law and Policy after Copenhagen” colloquium at The University of Texas made the cases for and against the continued emphasis on a United Nations approach.

David Hunter of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (the event’s cosponsor) argued that, though the Copenhagen Accord was but 12 paragraphs (long, dense paragraphs, it should be noted), and although it remains nonbinding or, in the oxymoron of the day, “soft law,” it was still measurable, reportable, and therefore valuable. Hunter especially called out progress on REDD and said that line of negotiation should be resurrected in Cancún.

But even Hunter, a fan of the U.N. framework, admits that Copenhagen at times felt like little more than “dueling press releases.” “The U.N. process took it on the chin a little,” he said.

Josh Busby of The University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs wasn’t as charitable. He called Copenhagen “a moment that freed us” from the U.N. framework. Busby said that he would be happy to see “the spectacle” of a 40,000-participant meeting “wither on the vine,” and made the case for smaller meetings with more flexible instruments. This is already happening, he noted, with meetings such as the G20 and the Major Economies Forum putting carbon on their agendas. Green Detectives Valerie Davis and Kevin Tuerff attest that there were nowhere near 40,000 participants in Bali or Poznan, and they don’t expect to see those numbers in Cancún either.

Hunter pushed back, saying that if we lost UNFCCC, and moved to negotiations with only the biggest actors at the table, “we’ll lose the moral authority of the island nations,” i.e. the small countries that will be first to succumb to the effects of climate change when a rising ocean swallows them up. (In related news, an island in the Bay of Bengal that had been disputed territory for years by India and Bangladesh is now completely underwater. Ten other islands in the area are on the verge, and officials estimate that if sea levels rise one meter by 2050, as projected by some climate models, 18 percent of Bangladesh’s coastal area will be submerged, displacing 20 million people.)

While David Hunter argues that the U.N. conferences create momentum for top-down change, he admits that the complexity of the issue is dumbfounding. The whole UNFCCC idea was modeled on the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 international treaty to protect the ozone layer. It successfully phased out CFCs. But replicating that success with something as basic as carbon dioxide, which affects every economy and therefore every person on earth, is different than dealing with a compound in aerosol sprays. Some have concluded it’s just too complicated for a Montreal-style process.

While the international process might seem like it’s all-or-nothing, there’s plenty that can be done and is being done at the national and sub-national levels, efforts like the European cap-and-trade system, the Western Climate Initiative in the American West, individual state efforts, and programs to reduce our carbon footprint city by city and house by house. It all, irrefutably, adds up.

The carbon-regulation debate on Capitol Hill seems to be a contest of who has the lowest expectations. It’s a soap opera that changes by the hour, with this issue, like most others, regularly held hostage by utterly unrelated issues. In the latest episode, a hopeful collaboration between senators Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman began to unravel last week when Graham, the lone Republican, withdrew his support, purportedly over pending congressional action on immigration, another issue on which he is likely to be a party outlier.

In the absence of congressional action, there is still the executive branch, and on April 1, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced a new national program that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve fuel economy for new cars and trucks sold in the United States from 2012 through 2016. EPA finalized the first-ever national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards under the Clean Air Act, and NHTSA finalized Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act.

The urgency of the situation forces us to think beyond geography and, of course, beyond regulation, too. Lee Scott, longtime CEO and now chairman of Wal-Mart, has been credited with sparking a cultural revolution at the retail juggernaut that resulted most recently in a voluntary commitment to slash 20 million metric tons of carbon emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015. When you’re talking about Wal-Mart, which is a de facto national economy unto itself, that voluntary goal surely has a greater impact than the regulatory triumphs of many smaller nations combined.

So should climate change be addressed from the top down, as with the U.N., or from the bottom up? The answer is, if climate change is as dire as scientists say, we’d be both crazy and criminally negligent not to attack it from both directions. We don’t have time for either/or arguments. Climate change action must be both/and. And we’ll need a little luck, even at that.

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Posted in COP 15, Cap and trade, Deforestation (REDD), Green Detectives, UNFCCC

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The Green Raj : Coal alone can’t power India’s big economic push

April 29th, 2010 by aseale No comments »

by Avrel Seale

One of the big worries about climate change is that, as the massive emerging economies of China and India race to attain the West’s standard of living, they’ll recapitulate all of the West’s dirtiest industrial stages, and in doing so, doom the planet by the sheer size of their populations.

But news out of India gives us hope that, ironically, the scale of their ambition might just have a salvation built in.

More than half of India’s 1.1 billion citizens don’t have electricity. (I’ll let that sink in for a minute.) At the same time, India has a stated goal of growing its economy by 9 percent a year to 2025, according to Smrithi Talwar, an Indian member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature who spoke recently at the “Climate Change Law and Policy after Copenhagen” colloquium at The University of Texas. For those of you without your slide rule handy, that means growing the economy of the world’s second-most populous country by 364 percent in the next 15 years. And that will use a lot of energy. But there’s one problem: at that rate of growth, coal runs out before 2025. And even if it didn’t, you wouldn’t want to live in a country that burned that much.

With those numbers in mind, India is investing big-time in nuclear and solar energy to bridge the gap. Specifically, India’s National Solar Mission plans to invest $2.2 billion to get the subcontinent from near-zero solar power today to 20 gigawatts in 2020. (A gigawatt is enough to power 5,000 homes for a year.)

This technological leapfrogging has parallels. In the past decade, millions in China who had never owned telephones simply skipped the land-line stage of phone service and went from no phone to a cell phone, obviating the need to build out the land- and labor-intensive telephone infrastructure that has evolved in the West over the past century.

This suggests that similar shortcuts are possible in developing economies, like going straight from donkey carts to methane-powered or even electric cars instead of tracing the footsteps of first-world economies through traditional (and dirty) combustion engines. If India can go from campfires directly to solar arrays, it gives hope that indigenous people around the world might be able to skip the coal age — filthy, dangerous, and land-scarring.

Necessity is the mother of invention. So let’s hope that, when it comes to energy and climate change, the invention is as great as the need.

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Posted in Testing

Jack and Jill, or Chicken Little?

April 14th, 2010 by vdavis No comments »

An energy industry gets called out for greenwashing, a food company gets zapped for misleading fat-content claims on its packaging, but a government agency investigated for hyping environmental problems?

DECC-climate-change-ad-007

That’s what’s been swirling in the U.K. since the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launched its nursery-rhyme-themed campaign last October, featuring, of all people, Jack and Jill and the Three Men in a Tub.

Reports by the Guardian say the $9.2 million campaign, by ad agency AMV BBDO, generated nearly 1,000 complaints to the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), claiming everything from “scaremongering” to inaccurate climate change science to propaganda. In March, the ASA ruled that some of the language in the DECC’s print ads featuring ominous weather patterns “should have been phrased more tentatively,” but that the images of flood and drought were not exaggerated. That far from killed the “Act on C02” campaign — including this broadcast PSA, and the DECC is not rolling over.

This brings to mind two of EnviroMedia’s five Greenwashing Index criteria, set by University of Oregon advertising faculty, asking consumers to scrutinize words and images in ads before buying into green claims from big business. In the U.K., these same criteria are used by a media watchdog organization to scrutinize a government public service campaign for blowing environmental issues out of proportion.

Who is the ASA, and why doesn’t the United States have a similar organization? The ASA is “the U.K.’s independent regulator of advertising across all media, including TV, internet, sales promotions and direct marketing.” It’s funded by fees levied on advertisers by advertisers, meaning the U.K.’s ad industry is regulating itself. Here in the United States, advertising is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The same FTC that has spent the past two years deliberating whether to update (not enforce, just update) its 18-year-old “Green Guides,” which haven’t been updated for 12 years now. The same Green Guides whose update, said the American Advertising Federation (AAF), the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers, “would have  a chilling effect on an advertiser’s ability to communicate important and valuable information to consumers.” C’mon now. EnviroMedia has been paying dues to our local AAF affiliate for more than a decade now. We can do better. We’re talking about an update of Green Guides no one even enforces.

climate_1596973f

Back to the Act on CO2 campaign. In my opinion, Jack and Jill, and you Three Men in a Tub, you might have a little “Chicken Little” going on. Extreme wet, dry, cold and hot are characteristics of climate change, which scientists say is caused by excessive CO2 emissions. Is the sky falling? No. Is the Earth’s overall temperature rising? Are glaciers melting? Yes, say the scientists. But if EnviroMedia were to be fortunate enough to help with a government-funded public service campaign to get as many citizens as possible to emit less C02, we probably wouldn’t start with ads featuring lovable children’s characters in danger of dying from thirst or drowning. The only thing obvious about climate change is that it’s controversial, so why fuel the fire by starting with a campaign featuring extreme consequences?

Just about anyone will agree wasting a limited natural resource is not a good thing – whether it’s water, coal, or oil. Our research has shown that the more people know about the natural source of their drinking water or the fuel that makes their lights go on, the more willing they are to be more efficient, or conserve.  And we’ve seen measurable results in water conservation and renewable energy campaigns that directly connect the water tap or light switch to the consumption of limited natural resources. Couple that knowledge of natural resources with some simple – not extreme – tips for efficiency, and you can see better community buy-in and results – despite the political beliefs of your target audiences or related controversies.

Nursery-rhymes aside, bravo to the UK’s DECC for its overall Act on C02 program, and for reinforcing the IPCCs conclusions that climate change is connected to human activity. At least they’ve captured the attention of U.K. consumers and the world. Its campaign reminds me of this Environmental Defense Fund PSA I saw a couple of years ago. It follows a similar (scare) tactic, but seems more compelling and urgent than Jack and Jill — and is not coming from the government. (And yes, it was produced with the help of the Ad Council, a wonderful organization established long ago by the American advertising industry.)

I also applaud the ASA and U.K.’s advertising industry for its self-regulation, especially in the areas of environmental and health claims. Now, don’t ask me about these other ASA crack-downs on advertising condoms during the breakfast hour, or frightening children with scary ad spoofs of The Shining.

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Posted in Advertising, UNFCCC

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Bonn ‘intersessional’ meeting: two more tries for progress before Cancún

April 12th, 2010 by aseale No comments »

After giving the progress in Copenhagen something like a C-, we now wait and watch as the actors in the climate negotiation drama open the next act on a familiar stage, Bonn, Germany, where the Conference of Parties has met multiple times before and where the outgoing chair of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, hangs his hat. The three-day meeting is an attempt to lay groundwork for COP16 in Cancun this December.

So far, the meetings have focused not on outcomes but process. On Saturday, one of two the Ad hoc Working Groups (catchily named AWC-LCA 9) met to discuss the chair’s draft conclusions on organization and methods of work in 2010. Discussions focused on whether to mandate that the chair develop a new draft negotiating text for the AWG-LCA’s next meeting in June and whether to base it on the AWG-LCA’s report to COP 15 or reflect work done in Copenhagen more broadly.

As for the mood of the meeting, early reports focused on inflammatory comments made by left-led Latin American and Caribbean nations. The AFP news service reported that Venezuelan delegate Claudia Salerno, said, ”The total failure of the meeting in Copenhagen … was simply because the principles of the United Nations were not respected, nor were international rules.” She continued that the “neo-colonialist exercise” seemed set to be revived, according to reporter Richard Ingham.

“The parties are still talking past each other,” said Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund after the opening session. “If that continues, we may see more energy going into parallel processes,” she said, referring to informal meetings of smaller groups outside the U.N. framework.

At the conclusion of the talks, the countries agreed to focus in 2010 on aggregate and individual emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 and to continue working on “other issues”; and to hold two sessions between in June and November. 2010. Right now it seems doubtful that two more meetings of the same will bring dramatic changes before Cancún .

GREEN DETECTIVES VIDEO: History of the UNFCCC

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Posted in Testing

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17 years later, US sets first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards

April 2nd, 2010 by ktuerff 1 comment »

By Kevin Tuerff

My personal history with vehicle emissions standards and air quality goes back 17 years. That’s how long it’s taken to move the auto industry significantly forward to reduce pollution from gas-powered engines. More on this later.


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With the Easter holiday weekend, you may have missed this big news from the Obama administration. From the US Environmental Protection Agency announcement: “Responding to one of the first major directives of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today jointly established historic new federal rules that set the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards and will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules could potentially save the average buyer of a 2016 model year car $3,000 over the life of the vehicle and, nationally, will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the lives of the vehicles covered.”

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said, “leaner car standards will mean 950,000,000 tons of carbon pollution cut from our skies. They will mean as much as $3,000 dollars in savings for drivers of 2016 model clean cars. And they will mean $2.3 billion dollars that can stay at home in our economy rather than buying oil from overseas.

Why is this big news? Cars, SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks are responsible for almost 60 percent of all U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gas GHG emissions. And it’s the first set of national emissions standards to address the climate issue. All done without an act of Congress.

Back in 1993, I worked for state Senator Rodney Ellis (& now Rep. Strama) on Texas legislation that would do what the President & EPA finally did today: adopt the California Air Resources Board’s vehicle emission standards that reduce air pollution. California was already requiring automakers to build a small percentage of their vehicles with new fuels and technologies, including electric catalytic converters that reduce engine emissions.  The industry complied in California, but vehemently fought expansion of cleaner cars legislation to other states, including Texas. You see, if the two largest states in the US both had these requirements, it would have only made sense to make vehicles with the same technology for the entire country.

I personally witnessed the Texas auto and oil lobbyists kill the bill.  We tried to rally environmental groups, hold news conferences and hold hearings to pass the Texas Low Emissions Vehicles Act. But the Texas Automobile Dealers Association lobbyist cried, “It’s impossible to mandate these new standards, Detroit doesn’t have the technology.” (Did I mention that I’ve driven an ultra low-emission vehicle (ULEV) from Honda for the last eight years?) and “It will force the price of cars to increase for consumers by at least $3,000.” As Gov. Ann Richards used to say, “That’s Hawgwarsh.” The actual cost of the new technology was said to be around an extra $400. Who wouldn’t pay that much extra on top of their $20-40,000 sticker price if it meant cleaner air? The new rules announced this week by DOT and EPA are estimated to increase the price of new cars by $1,000. If we had only acted in 1993, auto dealers!

35mpg-nbc

Thirty-five is the new magic number. That’s the number of miles per gallon that new cars should be running on when they hit the lot in 2016. Some of today’s vehicles are still on the roads getting less than 15 mpg. Those drivers should take that 35 number to the bank.


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For God’s sake

March 11th, 2010 by aseale No comments »

By Avrel Seale

Anyone who still believes that religious people and environmentalists must be on opposite sides of green issues like climate change needs to get out more, perhaps to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple.

You could find plenty of examples of religious folk through history acting in ways we wouldn’t consider green. But stewardship of creation has been part of theological and intellectual dialogue in the West at least since St. Francis of Assisi some 800 years ago started saying things like, “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” And, “Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us,
 and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.” (Canticle of the Sun, A.D. 1224)

There is a large and influential population that embraces both religion and science and grasps the obvious: that if you believe the world was created by God, then it probably would be a good idea to take care of it (or at least not actively ruin it). A 2004 Pew study found that by a two-to-one margin (55 percent to 27 percent) religious respondents backed strong regulations to protect the environment. “Backing for the environment cuts across virtually every religious group, from white Evangelicals to Jews, and has remained strong through the last few presidential election cycles,” Pew reported.

Moreover, another Pew study in 2007 showed that an overwhelming majority of religious people polled (79 percent) believes there is solid evidence that the average temperature of the Earth has been increasing over the past few decades. “Sizable majorities of each of the largest religious groups agree: 77 percent of Catholics; 79 percent of white mainline Protestants; and 70 percent of white evangelicals.”

Back in April, we wrote about how religious leaders in the United States are stepping up to the climate change challenge.

Now the United Nations is tapping the persuasive power of religion. Some 200 leaders representing the world’s major religions gathered Nov. 3, 2009, at Windsor Castle to launch a series of action plans on the environment. They were joined by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Prince Philip. “I have long believed that when governments and civil society work toward a common goal, transformational change is possible,” said Ban. “Faiths and religions are a central part of that equation. Indeed, the world’s faith communities occupy a unique position in discussions on the fate of our planet and the accelerating impacts of climate change.”

The three-day event was sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), which Prince Philip founded in 1995.

Thirty-one leaders — representing the Baha’i Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, and Sikhism — presented seven-year plans designed to promote “generational change” in attitudes toward the environment in the face of global warming, water shortages, deforestation, and other threats.

The Muslim plan establishes Muslim Associations for Climate Change Action (MACCA) and calls for an Islamic environmental labeling system, a “Green Hajj” so that within 10 years the traditional Islamic pilgrimage will be recognized as environmentally friendly, and the construction of a model “green mosque” to showcase best practices in heating, light, and design.

The Sikh plan urges all Sikh temples, gurdwaras, to recycle, compost, use green energy, use eco-stoves, start rainwater harvesting, and purchase reusable plates and cups.

Baha’is will use an existing system of regional training institutes to encourage “acts of service related to environmental sustainability” within their worldwide community. “Baha’is believe that religious belief and spirituality lie at the foundation of human motivation and behavior,” said Tahirih Naylor, a Baha’i representative to the United Nations. “We believe that efforts to change harmful human behavior – such as those actions that contribute to global warming or environmental degradation – can be greatly facilitated by processes that lead to a better understanding of our own relationship to God, and of humanity’s relationship with nature.”

“Climate change is complex, and dealing with it requires us to change at many levels,” said Olav Kjorven, assistant secretary general of the United Nations and director of the Bureau of Development Policy at the U.N. Development Program. “It requires a change of ethos. Religions have an unparalleled ability to reach out to people at the grassroots and to touch hearts and minds.” What’s more, he called religious institutions “the third-largest actors in international markets,” adding that just promoting environmentally friendly purchasing decisions by those institutions would have a huge impact across the world.

Tony Juniper, special adviser to the Prince of Wales’ Rainforests Project and former executive director of the Friends of the Earth, likewise emphasized the important role that religions can play. “Purely scientific rationalism cannot change our fundamental understanding of who we are and how we should live. Religion and science must work together to bring about a fundamental transformation in our relationship to the world. This kind of change needs a spiritual foundation,” he said.

After returning from the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Green Detectives Valerie Davis and Kevin Tuerff both talked about how organized religion was a missing link in the negotiations for a global climate treaty. Watch this blog for more on this issue.

No matter what you believe or whether you believe, everyone who feels environmental action is important should be greatly heartened by these reports. Can I get an Amen?

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