Now Brazil Goes Big on the GNU/Linux Desktop

At the end of last year I wrote about a big Brazilian project to provide 150,000 GNU/Linux notebooks for schools. Now the Brazilian Ministry of Education has topped that by ordering 324,000 "green" workstations running on GNU/Linux (although I can't quite tell whether this is as well as or instead of - anyone know?).

Here's the announcement by the Canadian company Userful, which is providing the very cool technology:

Userful, ThinNetworks, and Positivo today announced that they have been selected to supply 324,000 virtualized desktops to schools in all of Brazil's 5,560 municipalities.

This initiative will provide computer access to millions of children throughout Brazil. It is a historical achievement being: the world’s largest ever virtual desktop deployment; the world’s largest ever desktop Linux deployment; and a new record low-cost for PCs with the PC sharing hardware and software costing less than $50 per seat.

The workstations are "green" because they are virtual desktops consisting of just a screen and a keyboard/mouse, all plugged into a central unit; up to 10 such low-energy setups can run off one PC. The claimed savings are considerable:

Userful's ability to turn 1 computer into 10 independent workstations will save the Brazilian government an estimated $47 million in up-front costs, $9 million in annual power savings and additional savings in ongoing administration and support costs. The computers will use 90% less electricity as compared to a traditional PC-per-workstation solution.

Modern desktop computers sit idle while we check our e-mail, surf the web, or type a document. Userful's PC sharing & virtualization technology leverages this unused computing power to create an environmentally efficient alternative to traditional desktop computing. Up to 10 users can work on a single computer by simply attaching extra monitors, mice and keyboards. "This deployment alone saves more than 140,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, the same as taking 24,000 cars off the road, or planting 35,000 acres of trees”, said Sean Rousseau, Marketing Manager at Userful. Turning 1 computer into 10 reduces computer hardware waste by up to 80%, further decreasing its environmental footprint.

Sounds like a pretty impressive solution, in terms of cost and energy. It's particularly suitable for schools, where large numbers of users need to work at the same time, but not intensively. The size of the deployment should ensure that other countries get to hear about it, and maybe even try it. Are you listening, UK?

Update 1: As you may have noticed, the link above to the press release no longer works; all references have been pulled. I'll try to find out what's going on and update this post.

Update 2: Apparently the original press release had some "errors", currently unspecified. I hope to have the revised press release soon, and I will update the story as necessary. It seems that the gist remains unchanged, which is good.

Update 3: Press release has now reappeared.

Goodbye, Frozen North Pole

And just in time for Christmas:

Perhaps the most visible sign of climate change is the Arctic's shrinking sea ice cover. Concerns are growing that we are reaching a point at which the transition to an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer becomes a rapid one.

...

Even our early climate-change models developed in the late 1970s told us that the Arctic would suffer most from the surface warming that came with adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and that this would be intimately tied to the shrinking of its sea ice cover.

This is called Arctic amplification and when we look at our climate records, that is exactly what we see: the climate warming, with the strongest rises in temperature in the Arctic, and those rises linked to the loss of sea ice cover – just as projected 30 years ago.

In other words, even the crudest climate-change models worked quite well here - something that those who cling to the hope that they are "only" models might like to bear in the mind for the future.... (Via DeSmogBlog.)

Sawing Off the Branch on which We Sit

I am a great believer in trees and the commons they form; it seems to me that going beyond preserving them to extend their coverage across the world could help deal with many of the most pressing problems facing mankind: climate change, desertification, water, etc.

It has always struck me as barmy that the contribution that trees make to the planet has not been better quantified; now it has:

The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.

It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.

The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.

The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change.

Think about that, and then think of the continuing destruction of forests around the world - in the Amazon, in Africa, in Indonesia, in Russia. This really is the literal equivalent of sawing off the branch on which the whole of humanity sits....

Paying the Price

One of the problems with handling the issue of greenhouse gases is getting countries to accep their responsibilities. The difficulty is that there are lots of ways of looking at things. For example, although the developing countries like India and China are clearly soon going to be the main culprits here, they can - with justice - point out that countries in the West have been polluting for longer, and have therefore already contributed far more to global warming. The obvious solution here is to use a time-integrated output, which takes that into account.

But it turns out that things are even more complicated:

Economists now say that one-third of China's carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the atmosphere in order to manufacture exported goods – many of them "advanced" electronics goods destined for developed countries.

That is, in some sense a third of China's current emissions are "ours", and should be added to our already swelling debit.

The good news is that such things can be calculated to come up with fair ways of allocating future cuts; the bad news is that not many countries are going to be mature enough to accept them.

Perhaps the easiest way to handle this would be through economics: if a green tax were applied to every product, there would be strong incentives to reduce their carbon footprint (and environmental impact generally). In this case, China would no longer be producing pollution on the West's behalf unless it could do it as "efficiently" as elsewhere. Unfortunately, that, too, requires a certain maturity on behalf the world's nations to accept such a system. It also probably requires more time to set up than have at our disposal....

OpenSpimes

Open what?

A "spime" (the word -- a contraction of "space" and "time" -- was coined by sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling) is an object that, thanks to GPS and sensors, is aware of where and when it is, and can record and communicate these data. OpenSpimes are designed to allow everyone to record and visualize environmental (or other) data, to store them, publish them, blog them, compare them, mix and mash them up.

The first spime they've designed is a smart application of distributed computing in the service of sustainability. It can measure the CO2 level in parts-per-million in the surrounding air, and through a bluetooth link to a cell phone (or an alternative link to a laptop or other wireless channels) can relay that information back to the OpenSpime servers. There they can be mashed up and aggregated on Google Maps in almost-real-time.

They Call It A "Non-Polluting Gas"...

This Open Letter would have rather more credibility if this phrase

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis.

didn't sound suspiciously close to this one:

As for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out, and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

Because that, as I wrote some time ago, was an egregious bunch of propaganda for the joys of pollution provided by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), "advancing liberty - from the economy to ecology".

And oh, look: by an amazing coincidence the Open Letter talks about - guess what? - yes, that precious economy:

While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity.

Ah, yes, prosperity - so much more important than little things like trees, a healthy, sustainable environmental commons, or survival. No, let's get our priorities right:

Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems

which are, of course, how to make the rich even richer by exploiting the environmental commons as quickly as possible, before the world is burnt to a crisp.

A380 + Red Hat = Double Geek Heaven

Nice, if ecologically dubious:

Singapore Airlines is to install a PC running Red Hat Linux operating system in every seat on its newest A380 superjumbo.

Government Glimmers: Open Source, Open Data

Kudos:

An online calculator that enables people to work out their carbon footprint was launched by Environment Secretary, David Miliband today.

Defra’s Act on CO2 calculator is designed to increase understanding of the link between individual action and climate change, through carbon dioxide emissions. It also raises awareness of the different actions people can take in their everyday lives to help tackle climate change.

Double kudos:

The software that runs the calculator, complete with the Government data, will be made freely available under general public licence. This will enable others wanting to use the software to power their own calculators, using their own branding.

Wow: open source and open data. (Via Open Source Weblog.)

Cool Earth Meltdown

I was going to write about Cool Earth before, but the site went down. This is both good and bad news. Bad, because it suggests a lack of planning on the part of the people behind the site, and good because it was caused by the unexpectedly large influx of people wanting to visit and participate.

That's a particularly good sign because the whole idea is about letting ordinary people make a difference to global warming by helping to keep carbon sequestered in the rainforests. Agreed, this is not as good as actually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but given all the collateral benefits of preserving rainforests, it would be churlish to complain.

Moreover, Cool Earth seems to be recognise that preserving the rainforests is not about surrounding it with barbed wire to keep the baddies out: the local people - the goodies - must not only be taken into account, but actively involved so that they feel it is in their interests to protect rather than exploit by cutting down. Sustainability of this kind is hard to do well, but better than the current alternative.

The other key thing about Cool Earth is that it allows people who chip in to monitor their "bit" of the rainforest using Google Earth (and what a godsend that is in this context). This is absolutely crucial - not so much in terms of checking whether somebody's about to cut it down, since by then it's probably too late, but in allowing donors to feel connected. Without that feedback loop, you don't generate engagement, and the whole thing will just fizzle out.

I've no idea whether Cool Earth will make a difference or turn out to be a total flop. But it's an idea worth supporting (I'm certainly going to sign up for a few trees) - for everyone's sake.

Planting the Bulb of a Good Idea

News that Australia plans to ban incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy efficient fluorescent bulbs led to me this site: Ban the Bulb, whose campaign goals are to

Increase the cost of incandescent light bulbs
Reduce the sales tax (VAT) on CFLs [compact fluorescent lights] from 17.5% to 5%
Ban the sale of incandescents by a specific date
Help the poor to replace their incandescents
Help the poor to save money on their bills
Encourage the responsible recycling of CFLs
Include light bulbs in the EU's Eco Directive
Explain the benefits of greater energy efficiency
Accelerate the uptake of available technologies

Banning incandescent light bulbs it would...Save the UK 3.6 Million tonnes of CO2 per year

This is an idea that has occurred to me (and to millions of others, I suspect), so it's good to see someone doing something about it.

As Matt Prescott, the founder of the campaign, explains:

If we cannot deny ourselves incandescent light bulbs, which would require minimal sacrifice, how are we ever going to do the really difficult things such as cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, buying smaller cars or reducing our use of finite natural resources?

Ending the life of this inefficient and obsolete technology is not enough to prevent damaging climate change; but it is an easy first step, and one the world should not hesitate to take.

This needs to be done now. We can all contribute - I've now replaced about 95% of the bulbs I use, with the others scheduled to disappear soon - but governments must get involved too.

The Coming Victory of Open Access

In this blog, I've emphasised the parallels between open source and open access. We know that as Microsoft has become more and more threatened by the former, it has resorted to more and more desperate attempts to sow FUD. Now comes this tremendous story from Nature that the traditional scientific publishing houses are contemplating doing the same to attack open access:

Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

The "pit bull" is Eric Dezenhall:

his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace.

These are some of the tactics being considered:

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000–500,000.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, you may recall, are the people behind the risible "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life" campaign of misinformation about global warming.

This is a clear sign that we're in the end-game for open access's victory.

A Lightbulb Goes on in My Head

Yes, of course:

A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.

That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.

Relatively easy and painless, too: what are we waiting for? Let there be light.

They Call It Life, We Call It Lies

There's an interesting trend in the naming of institutes these days.

We have things like the Institute for Software Choice, "a global initiative promoting neutral government procurement, standards and public R&D policies for software!" Strange that this organisation didn't exist and push for choice when Microsoft utterly dominated government procurement, and really strange that the Institute's pronouncements all implicitly seem to be calling for more Microsoft products, and less of that horrible open stuff.

Because, you know, when something is truly open, you have no choice, because you could choose anything, which is clearly impossible, since you must choose something, so the whole thing's a contradiction anyway. Whereas with Microsoft's closed software, you are guaranteed to have just one, easy choice: Microsoft. So that's much better.

And then we have the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), "advancing liberty - from the economy to ecology". Well, you can probably guess how they are going to advance ecological liberty: that's right, by promoting the wonders of carbon dioxide.

You see, as this charming, down-to-earth video from the CEI indicates, all this global warming stuff is pure alarmism. The video proves this by showing two reports that global warming is threatening our planet, and then negating them with two others that report ice in the Antarctic and Greenland is thickening, not thinning. So this proves this idea that greenhouse gas is causing global warming is just nonsense.

Except for the tiresome, inconvenient fact that

the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas" concentrations.

This is the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme.

But maybe this is just part of the two for, two against situation that the video showed us: perhaps there are other equally impressive reports that say the opposite. Well, no: all the papers on climate change that could be found in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 were analysed for their views on the role of greenhouse gases on global warming. The result was clear:

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

But the video urges us to ignore all this complicated scientific stuff anyway, and just to go with our hearts; as it puts it, so poetically:

As for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out, and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

What a pity, then, that logging companies are cutting down so many of the trees and rooting up the plants: but I suppose that's all part of the economic liberty that the CEI espouses.

Update 1: A little clarifying background on the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Update 2: Larry Lessig on something related that looks pretty important.