Chilling Freedom of Speech on Polar Bears

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

Like them, I am speechless.

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.

Coming Your Way: Geoethics

Given the current state of the planetary commons, I fear we are going to be needing these sooner than expected.

What a Waste of Energy

The official Curmudgeon of Computing, Nick Carr, stirred up a little excitement recently by pointing out that Second Life, for all its virtuality, really does use quite a lot of electricity. But before we start grabbing the digital pitchforks and descending upon Linden Lab for being such an ecological extravagant bunch, it's probably best to put things in context.

That's exactly what this post from KnowProSE.com does. It points out that the problem is not really Second Life's, it's the Internet's - ours, in other words. And it's certainly a big problem.

But it seems to me that the solution is less finding all the energy, than reducing the amount used by computers. It's a bit like cars: it's not really hard making them more fuel efficient, but until there are incentives to do so, you carry on using the old, inefficient technologies. We need to re-engineer our thinking, not just out technologies.

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.

King Coal Rides Again

The greed and cynicism of some is simply beyond words:

Whatever the cost to the ecosystem, it could be an immensely profitable bet. Company executives say the plants will provide cheap electricity for Texas, make lots of money for shareholders, conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce the pollutants that make smog.

"Whatever the cost to the ecosystem": that's us, people.

How Green Was My PC?

Not very, it seems.

This report contrasts the amount of electricity consumed, and carbon dioxide generated, by two approaches to school computing: one based on conventional PCs, the other on thin clients running open source. The difference is startling:

The Green Model therefore represents a 89% saving in the cost of electricity and a 78% reduction carbon dioxide emissions when compared to the Conventional Model.

And it's going to get worse:

The stated aim of many authorities is to have one computer per child. In addition the exponential growth of the interactive whiteboard in all education sectors is set to achieve one in every classroom.

Bearing in mind that an interactive board runs from a conventional PC with a 600w projector and that there are over 50,000 primary schools in the UK we can predict a ten fold increase in power consumption with concomitant carbon increases over the next five years.

Serious stuff that merits thought and action, quickly.

Towards a Trillion Trees

I'm a big fan of trees, especially for helping to address the world's environmental problems. So this sounds like a jolly good wheeze:

The Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai launched a campaign today to plant a billion trees next year - 32 every second - to highlight the need to tackle global warming.

Mind you, in the light of the fact that

Over the past decade 130m hectares of trees have been destroyed, according to the UN. Reforesting such an area would require 140bn trees to be planted.

I think we should be more ambitious: how about a trillion trees? Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Five Stars for the Stern Report

WorldChanging has a splendid review of the Stern Report, giving it an unequivocable thumbs-up. It also pulls out a subtle but important facet: the report's ethics.

Actually, it's important to underscore that the ethics in this report are mostly not arcane -- even though those arcane aspects reflect, I think, a tectonic shift in economics that the Stern Review is helping to solidify. Climate change is forcing economists to think differently. In fact, I think climate change will one day be credited with having knocked some sense into the discipline of economics.

As I've noted many times on this blog, this kind of change is needed in order to understand and appreciate justly all the commons, not just that of the world's atmostphere.

Stern but Fair

The conclusions of the Stern Review will not come as any surprise to readers of this blog:

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change is a serious global threat, and it demands an urgent global response.

This Review has assessed a wide range of evidence on the impacts of climate change and on the economic costs, and has used a number of different techniques to assess costs and risks. From all of these perspectives, the evidence gathered by the Review leads to a simple conclusion: the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting.

But as I commented before about a similar case, what makes this report so important is that it coming from the establishment, not from groups who would be expected to make statements like that above. It is also meticulous in detailing the situation. Kudos to the UK Government for commissioning it - and for making it freely available.

Despite its portentous message, I find its appearance - and of an increasing number of similar reports - strangely heartening: I can't help feeling that we are close to not one but two tipping points.

The first is catastrophic, when the earth's environmental system is so far out of kilter that it changes dramatically; the second is rather more positive - the moment when enough people get what is going on, and start doing something effective to avert or at least mitigate the effects of the first tipping point.

Maybe I'm just an incurable optimist, but I was particularly pleased to read this point:

The loss of natural forests around the world contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector. Curbing deforestation is a highly cost-effective way to reduce emissions; largescale international pilot programmes to explore the best ways to do this could get underway very quickly.

Halting deforestation seems a way not only to slow down global warming, but to address many other issues like species loss and even poverty. I say let's do it. Please?

Will Lack of Open Access Wipe Out the World?

A few months ago, I asked whether lack of open access to avian 'flu data might hinder our ability to head off a pandemic; now it looks like lack of open access could lead to the destruction of civilisation as we know it. If that sounds a little far fetched, consider the facts.

The US is the largest single polluter in terms of carbon dioxide: according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, "In 1997, the United States emitted about one-fifth of total global greenhouse gases."

The EPA plays a key role in determining the US's environmental actions: "the Agency works to assess environmental conditions and to identify, understand, and solve current and future environmental problems; integrate the work of scientific partners such as nations, private sector organizations, academia and other agencies; and provide leadership in addressing emerging environmental issues and in advancing the science and technology of risk assessment and risk management."

To "assess environmental conditions and to identify, understand, and solve current and future environmental problems; integrate the work of scientific partners such as nations, private sector organizations, academia and other agencies" clearly requires information. Much of that information comes from scientific journals published around the world. Unfortunately, the EPA is in the process of cutting back on journal subscriptions:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is sharply reducing the number of technical journals and environmental publications to which its employees will have online access, according to agency e-mails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). This loss of online access compounds the effect of agency library closures, meaning that affected employees may not have access to either a hard copy or an electronic version of publications.

...

In addition to technical journals, EPA is also canceling its subscriptions to widely-read environmental news reports, such as Greenwire, The Clean Air Report and The Superfund Report, which summarize and synthesize breaking events and trends inside industry, government and academia. Greenwire, for example, recorded more than 125,000 hits from EPA staff last year.

As a result of these cuts, agency scientists and other technical specialists will no longer have ready access to materials that keep them abreast of developments within their fields. Moreover, enforcement staff, investigators and other professionals will have a harder time tracking new developments affecting their cases and projects.

So, we have the organisation whose job is to help determine the actions of the world's worst polluter cut off from much of the most recent and relevant research, in part because much of it is not open access.

No OA, no tomorrow, no comment. (Via Open Access News.)

And Talking of Global Catastrophe...

The latest cheery reading from Friends of the Earth puts a price-tag of around £11 trillion (that's £11,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering) on the economic damage caused by runaway climate change, by the year 2100. An estimate, and probably an under-estimate.

And yet, we hear, the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol is "too high" for the US economy:

For America, complying with those mandates would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers.

Right, a "negative economic impact": what, like to the tune of a few trillion pounds? I don't think so....

Ensuring We Act on Global Warming - by Insuring

I mentioned previously that it's a sure sign that things are moving if rich and respectable people like accountants start warning about global warming; and so when the insurance companies start doing it too, we must really be getting somewhere.

Moreover, it is precisely these people - not all us right-on greenies - that will ultimately make Mr and Mrs on the Clapham Omnibus do something: not because they necessarily care, but because it will cost them far too much not to.

Distributed Energy Generation

This looks eminently sensible from just about every angle:

Energy suppliers should make it easier for people to generate power for their own homes, the gas and electricity regulator, Ofgem, said today.

Why has it taken so long for the idea of distributed power generation to get going?

Paying the Price

Nice piece in The Independent about a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the cost of capping greenhouse emissions:

The cost of curbing the soaring emissions of harmful gases that are blamed for causing global warming has been estimated at $1 trillion by a major study of the cost of climate change.

The volume of emissions of the gases that cause global warming will double by 2050 unless rich countries agree to take significant policy steps to cut energy use, it shows.

The report, byPricewaterhouseCoopers, lays bare the potential damage to the environment of the industrial revolution in China and India. It puts a price of $1 trillion (£526bn) on the cost of sorting out the problem spread over the next generation. The bill is equivalent to a year's output of the economy of Canada, and less than half of the total stock of debt that has been built up by Britain's households. But it is less than the cost in terms of environmental catastrophe and loss of life that scientists fear will happen as temperatures and sea levels rise. "It is implicit from our findings that a trillion dollars certainly is a cost worth incurring," said John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC and author of the report.

As the surprisingly intelligent thread on Digg points out, these figures are amazingly doable. For example, one trillion dollars is only three times the current spending on the war in Iraq. Similarly, it is only 40 times the cost of one small global-warming induced weather disaster, that caused by Katrina. There are going to be rather more than 40 Katrinas if things carry on as they are.

What's most heartening about this report is that a terribly respectable outfit like PricewaterhouseCoopers is taking the exercise seriously. This is what we in the trade call a Good Sign: it means those in power are starting to realise that it will actually be cheaper to prevent rather than cure. And once the rich get behind moves to preserve this particular commons, we are almost there.

Open Energy Technology

Here's another example of open source being invoked in the context of helping to solve environmental problems:

Non-patentable shared "open energy technology" has the potential to have a profound impact on the reduction of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, in the same way that open source software has changed computers and the Internet.

There's an interesting twist, in that it also suggests

Possibly the most ideal person to do it would be South African billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, who is currently taking on Microsoft's domination of the operating system market through the development of the open source operating system, Ubuntu Linux.

The reason being that Shuttleworth is a local boy for the publication in question. A nice idea, despite the nepotism.

Fighting Global Warming With Our Forks

One of things I love is understanding how things fit together. Here's an interesting little, ah, tidbit:

What many people do not know, however, is that the production of meat also significantly increases global warming. Cow farms produce millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane per year, the two major greenhouse gases that together account for more than 90 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions, substantially contributing to "global scorching."

And not only that, but:

Additionally, rainforests are being cut down at an extremely rapid rate to both pasture cows and grow soybeans to feed cows. The clear-cutting of trees in the rainforest -- an incredibly bio-diverse area with 90 percent of all species on Earth -- not only creates more greenhouse gases through the process of destruction, but also reduces the amazing benefits that those trees provide.

So, basically, with every mouthful of meat, we are destroying not one, but two commons: the atmosphere and the rainforests. Time to pass the tofu, methinks....

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.