Cow’s Blog

June 25th, 2008

photo: azrainman

Computing equipment (PCs, computer equipment and data centres) were responsible for 830 million tonnes of CO2 in 2007. That’s 2% of all human CO2 emissions putting IT on a par with aviation. By 2020, many expect IT emissions to increase to 1.4 billion tonnes, with most of that due to corporate data centres.

Sounds bad, right? Not so. An article in the Economist this week discusses the enabling effect of IT.

A study found that by 2020, IT would reduce CO2 emissions in other industries by 7.8 billion tonnes and hence contribute to tackling climate change rather than helping it along. For example, IT enables video conferencing which has a low CO2 footprint compared to air travel which it may replace. Computers can also be used to improve efficiency in all kinds of ways: for example planning a quicker and shorter route for a delivery driver. Obviously that leads to a drop in CO2 emissions in transport.

It’s certainly an interesting article which is worth checking out but I suppose we can live with the knowledge that computers aren’t part of the problem, they are part of the solution.

• Environment
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May 26th, 2008

photo: Topyti

The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet report (full report as PDF) is an interesting read. Page 19 of the report contains an interesting observation. The graph plots Human Development Index against Ecological Footprint.

The Human Development Index is the UN’s measure for standard of living and development. “Human Development Index (HDI) is an index combining normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide.” The threshold for acceptable human development is defined as a HDI of 0.8.

The Ecological Footprint measures the use of natural resources and effects on the ecosystem.

It compares human consumption of natural resources with planet Earth’s ecological capacity to regenerate them. It is an estimate of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate (if possible) the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste, given prevailing technology and current understanding.

An ecological footprint of 1 means that if everybody in the world made use of resources in the same way as the citizens in this country, the Earth could just sustain it. An ecological footprint of 2 means two planet Earths would be needed to sustain this lifestyle if everybody in the world lived like this. Of course, if the ecological footprint is more than one planet Earth, this lifestyle is not sustainable.

photo: Drown

As you’d expect, the two are correlated. The higher the standard of living, the greater the ecological footprint.

It’s interesting to note that the only country which is sustainably developed is Cuba. If everybody on Earth was to adopt the Cuban lifestyle, everybody would have an acceptable standard of living and we would be operating at 80% of our planet’s ecological capacity.

What this suggests is that if everybody in the world adopted the lifestyle of US citizens, we would need more than 5 planet Earths to sustain it. The USA is obviously appropriating well more than it’s fair share of natural resources.

Of course, I’m not seriously suggesting we all adopt Cuban laws and lifestyles but I think it’s a good way of visualising how sustainable the lifestyles of different countries are. Perhaps there are a few ideas we could adopt from Cuba though.

• Economics , Environment , Politics
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May 25th, 2008

photo: Randy Son Of Robert

The Economist has a really good leader this week about Computers and the environment. It is estimated that data centres consumed 0.6% of the world’s electricity in 2000 increasing to 1% by 2005. Data centres are responsible for more CO2 emissions than Argentina or the Netherlands and it is estimated that the carbon footprint of cloud computing will be greater than that of aviation in 10 years.

The corollary of more computing in the sky is more and bigger data centres on earth. These are warehouses packed with humming electronic gear, and in particular thousands of servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data. The biggest facilities are the size of half a dozen football pitches and house as many as 80,000 servers (see article). They are huge energy hogs: in America alone, according to the country’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), data centres already account for 1.5% of electricity consumption.

photo: nattu

There was an interesting analysis at the end of 2006 about the energy consumption of Second Life avatars. Second Life ran 4,000 servers at full power 24/7 and there was an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars in Second Life at one time. The annualised power consumption was estimated to be 1,752 kWh. This compares to a worldwide average of 2,436 kWh per year. This means the energy consumption of a second life avatar is roughly the same as a real person. Of course, in developed countries most people consume nearly 8,000 kWh so our digital equivalents are much less power hungry, but it’s still a significant figure. Food for thought perhaps.

• Environment , Internet
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May 15th, 2008

photo: 708718

Congestion and pollution are two “external costs to society” which are associated with driving. When you take your car out of the garage and take a trip down to the local supermarket or pick up the kids from school, you are imposing costs on other people: exhaust fumes which others must breathe and you take up space on the road contributing to traffic jams.

To correct for social costs, governments use taxes to make sure the individual pays for the costs they impose on society or to “internalise the external costs”. There are three taxes which are used to try and discourage driving:

• VAT on Buying a Car
• Road Tax
• Fuel Tax

People hate taxes. People remark that death and taxes are the only two certain things in life and I think that fuel tax is one of the most hated (in the UK, fuel tax is 64p for every litre). The government argue that this fuel tax is to correct for “external costs” but I will argue that the fuel taxes is unfair and are targeting the wrong people.

The Costs of Driving

photo: Pro-Zak

Urban motorists impose greater external costs on society. City roads are full to their capacity and that means traffic jams everywhere. An extra car on the road is only going to make it worse. Congestion wastes everybody’s time. Secondly, population density is so much higher in cities meaning that the exhaust fumes produced will affect a lot more people. And not to mention noise pollution…

In contrast, rural roads are much quieter and less congested. Because there is so much spare capacity on the roads, an extra car on a rural road isn’t really going to add to congestion or effect anybody else. And although exhaust fumes are still emitted and noise pollution is still produced, it effects a lot less people: there are less people for it to affect.

So the external costs imposed by drivers in cities are greater than the external costs imposed by drivers in the country.

The effects of taxes

photo: kevindooley

When you buy a car, you pay value added tax on the vehicle. To keep the car on the road, you must also pay road tax. Both of these taxes will discourage people to own a car because they increase the cost of owning one. But once you own a car and it’s licensed to drive on the road, these taxes will play no part in your decision about whether to use the car to drive to work or not: whether you use it or not you’ve already paid the tax. And whether you live in the city or the country you pay the same amount of VAT and road tax.

The other tax is fuel tax. This affects people’s decision on whether to drive to work or school. If it costs £2 to drive to work you might choose to do it every day but if it cost £8 you’d probably only drive if it was raining or for some reason the trains weren’t operating.

As I’ve mentioned, the external costs of urban driving are greater. So a fair tax which “internalises external costs” should penalise urban drivers more. But the taxes on urban driving are actually lower than taxes on rural driving. Places in the city are situated much closer to each another and so less fuel is needed to drive between them. As the amount of tax paid is directly linked to the amount of petrol used, this means urban motorists are paying less tax than rural motorists. This is unfair.

Is it essential to drive?

photo: fabbio

Another factor that economists must consider is “how necessary is it to drive?”

In the city, there are a huge range of alternatives to driving. In London, there is a flat rate 90p charge on all bus journeys, where ever in London you go. Buses are also very frequent: you shouldn’t have to wait any more than 10 minutes. I’ve found that I rarely have to wait more than a few minutes.

When I’m in the country, it often costs £3 for a single bus journey and the bus only comes once an hour or sometimes even every 2 hours. And there is about a 20 minute window for the time that the bus arrives.

In the city, everything is also much closer to each another. That makes cycling or walking a much more viable option.

So in the country there is often no choice except from to drive because everything is so far away from each another and there are no viable public transport options. In these areas, motorists must pay extortionate amount of taxes. Meanwhile urban city drivers, with the luxury of viable alternatives such as the bus, escape with lower amounts of tax. I think this is the fundamental unfairness of fuel tax.

Solving the problem

photo: billjacobus1

The problem is that fuel tax penalises the wrong people. The solution is to tax urban drivers more to account for the greater amount of “external costs” they impose by driving.

In London we also have the congestion charge zone (£8 to enter Central London per day) and the low emission zone (£200 per day for heavy polluting vehicles to enter London). I think this somewhat solves the issue but it’s only restricted to London.

A few years ago the Labour government floated plans for a national road charging scheme.

Motorists will receive regular bills, possibly monthly, charged at variable rates by time and geography: rural country lanes would likely be charged at the bottom of the range, around 2p a mile, with inner city rush hour roads attracting the top £1.30 rate. The government hopes motorists will change their driving habits - by staggering journeys, sharing cars or switching to public transport - to the extent that there could be a 50% cut in congestion.

From a point of view of an economist, I feel that this is the perfect solution to the problem. It would reduce congestion which would lead to time savings for everybody and stop country motorists from being unfairly penalised.

In 2007, 1.7 million people signed a petition against the national road charging scheme. The idea seems to have fallen from the agenda. Because of the inherent unfairness in fuel taxation, I hope the government will reconsider a national road charging scheme.

• Economics , Environment , Politics , UK
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April 26th, 2008

It’s often very hard to visualise carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 is invisible, not only that, the CO2 is released around power stations rather than in our own homes. I was doing a little bit of research for a presentation I’m giving next week and came across the following video from the Victorian Government in Australia. I think it’s a fantastic way to visualise CO2 emissions in an advert.

Each balloon represents 50g of greenhouse gas. You can work out your household CO2 emissions but a typical household might emit about 6 tonnes of CO2. Thats 1.2million of those black balloons.

• Environment
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April 22nd, 2008

It’s Earth Day today. This is a day to raise awareness about the environment and issues such as climate change and resource depletion. But I’d like to raise something which is often overlooked though, to do with the economics of climate change. But can we really cut our energy usage by switching to more efficient appliances?

Let’s take energy-saving light bulbs as an example. An standard 100W incandescent light bulb is exceptionally inefficient - it produces about 95% heat, only 5% of that energy is turned into visible and useful light. However, new energy-saving fluorescent light sources can produce the same amount of light for just 20W.

OK, so there are considerations such as the amount of energy which used in manufacturing new fluorescent light bulbs for us to use or the costs of installing additional insulation to reduce heat loss because less heat is now produced by light bulbs. Although they are very valid points, they’re not the issues I wish to explore.

On the face of it, if we all switched from 100W incandescents to 20W fluorescents, there would be a 80% drop in the energy consumption! Hey, presto! But that isn’t the whole story. Because economics tells us that when the price of something falls, consumption increases. In other words, because our lighting systems now consume less energy and cost less to run, people will demand more lighting systems.

Take a look at this graph from the presentation “Energy Services and Energy History: Lighting and Transport in the UK” (slide 11).

The cost of lighting (and efficiency) has been falling steadily since 1300, yet it is obvious that we are using much more lighting now as costs have been falling. Since 1900, the efficiency of lighting improved 50 times. Meanwhile, the amount of lighting used has increased by 155 times. So despite all the huge efficiency improvements over the last 100 years, we’re still using 3x as much as energy as we were before.

What I hope this has demonstrated is that improving energy efficiency won’t necessarily decrease energy usage. But would switching to more energy-efficient bulbs cut energy usage in our developed world today? Perhaps. For me, the cost of leaving the light bulb on is so small that I barely even think about it. So a light bulb which costs less to leave on probably won’t cause me to leave the light on for any longer then I currently do. But in some countries, if the price of leaving the light bulb on is now a fifth, I could envisage households which might decide that rather than just having one light bulb in the lounge on, they could now install a light bulb in every room in the house. This increased usage of lighting would negate any of the benefits of improved energy efficiency.

It might all seem a bit pointless talking about light bulbs, but I chose it as an example because it’s easy to explain and there’s a lot of good data. But this same theory can apply to all kinds of other things.

Let’s say that a new generation of cars has twice the fuel efficiency. This means the cost of running the car is half what it was before. More people will therefore decide to use cars, and perhaps to use cars on those short journeys they wouldn’t have before. Also in the less economically developed countries, this could make running a car a viable proposition for many people.

My conclusion is that we can’t rely on improvements in efficiency to reduce our energy usage. It simply won’t work. In fact, it could even lead to increased energy usage and make things worse. That’s not to say we shouldn’t create efficient light bulbs and cars but they’re not going to save the environment. We need more proactive ways of dealing with our use of fossil fuels.

• Economics , Environment , Science
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April 10th, 2008

There’s an article in this week’s New Scientist (12th April 2008, p17) by William Laurance from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute entitled “Expect the unexpected” which I thought was really interesting. He talks about some of the unexpected ways in which we’re damaging the planet.

Take biofuels. Many countries, including the USA, have promoted biofuels as alternatives to using fossil fuels. Why? Because when you grow corn, the plant will “breathe in” carbon dioxide. When you put it into your car and burn it, it’ll release an equal amount of CO2. So biofuels are supposed to be carbon neutral and won’t contribute to climate change.

In order to encourage people to use biofuels, governments have subsidised them. In essence, they tell farmers that they’ll give them an additional amount of money for every gallon of biofuel they produce, on top of the amount of money they sell it for. This encourages farmers to produce biofuel because they can earn more money from it: basic economics.

So what’s been the effect of this? Well, US farmers have switched from growing soya to growing corn. This made soya more scarce and drove up the price of soya across the world. The higher soya prices then acts as an incentive to others to produce soya; you can now make more money by selling soya.

That’s lead to deforestation in the Amazon in order to clear the way for soya production. And the deforestation has lead to forest fires.

In the Amazon, the trees help to generate their own rainfall. Why? Rain falls and the dense vegetation quickly recycles the moisture, returning it to the atmosphere so it’ll rain again. As deforestation continues, less water vapour is recycled. That means less rain in the future: a feedback loop.

Anyway, I won’t repeat the entire contents of the article as Laurance gives many other examples of unexpected consequences of rising demand for wooden furniture, logging and fishing.

It does really make you think about how everything in the world can be linked together in so many ways and all impact upon each another. In some of my own physics research, I found that an increase in global temperature would lead to a greater occurrence of lightning. Effects of lightning? Forest fires may be created and nitric oxides are produced. A significant number of forest fires could reduce CO2 absorption. Nitric oxides are fertilisers: could this lead to better forest growth? Nitric oxides also lead to the production of ozone in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas. More greenhouse gases = further global warming. Did anybody expect that?

The fact is there are just so many different interlinked processes going on in the world around us. It reminds me slightly of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis:

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek earth goddess, this hypothesis postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that promotes life overall.

It’s a controversial theory. Says Lovelock on climate change:

He says the global climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, is simply an attempt to appease a self-regulating Earth system.

Professor Lovelock thinks the Earth’s attempts to restore its equilibrium may eliminate civilisation and most humans.

He wants a rapid end to the destruction of natural habitats, which he says are key to planetary climate and chemistry.

• Economics , Environment , Science
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April 6th, 2008

Recently I’ve given a series of presentations to students in my local school community regarding climate change. These presentations were to roughly 1,000 students aged between 12 and 16. Our project consisted of calculating a transport carbon footprint for the school, identifying ways of reducing the school’s carbon footprint and convincing students and teachers to do their bit.

As part of this, I had a segment where I had to briefly present the effects and dangers of climate change. This presented quite a few dilemmas. It’s very easy to go onto Google and to find computer generated images which could shock people. For example, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament during a big flood:

But I felt that doing so would achieve no purpose but to scare people. It’s also counter productive; when you watch a presentation which takes climate change on such a slippery slope to such ridiculous and shocking effects, your natural thought would be that the presenter is a tree-hugging nutcase. Obviously if that happened we would have failed in the primary purpose of the presentation: convincing people that they need to do their bit.

Polar Bears 

I deliberated for quite a while on this picture of polar bears stranded on ice. This photo is itself often used as evidence of climate change. But do a little more research and you find out that it could simply be due to the Arctic ice naturally melting every summer. And some people point to evidence that polar bear populations seem to be on the up again.

I felt it was a misrepresentation to imply that the photo was evidence of global warming because it’s impossible to know the exact background behind the photos. But it did allow us to mention a lot of the scientific evidence for climate change: temperatures in the Canadian Arctic have risen by 4C in the last 50 years. 500 cubic miles of ice have been lost from Alaska ice melt in the last 50 years. And polar bear populations have dropped by 25% in the last 20 years: not only that, their physique has declined.

To try and balance out this implication, we added a picture of a polar bear on a deckchair as a way to inject a little humour but also to try and reduce the implied statement that the photo of polar bears stranded on ice could be linked back to climate change caused by humans.

The UK Floods of 2007 

The other main dilemma was whether and how we should present the UK Floods of 2007. The reason why this was an especially potent event to present was because the area in which I live was at the heart of the region which was most strongly affected by the floods. More or less everybody has their own story of the floods.

Here was the problem: scientists and meteorologists suggested that the floods happened because the jet stream being further south then it should have. Some scientists claimed that the floods had a link to climate change. I didn’t feel it was fair to present that: there are simply so many different factors involved in weather systems. Everybody has heard of chaos theory: how a butterfly flapping it’s wings could cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. The weatherman can barely predict the weather for next week, let alone for tomorrow. So to present the UK floods as evidence for climate change would have been a perversion of the scientific evidence. Indeed, a week after giving the presentation, scientists then said the floods were not caused by climate change.

The way I decided to present it was that the floods of summer 2007 showed an example of something that would happen more regularly with climate change. Scientists have a weight of evidence that climate change would lead to more extreme weather. Of course; higher temperatures means more snowmelt which could lead to downstream flooding.

It is always going to be quite difficult to present climate change. I’ve given an example of how some people claimed that the UK floods of 2007 were caused by climate change. When further research was then released which said that the floods were not caused by climate change, the sceptics feel vindicated and take it as evidence against climate change. To state what you do not have reasonable scientific evidence for is, therefore, counter productive to your cause. But at the same time, it’s possible to be so ridiculously sceptical that you won’t have an argument that will convince anybody. And that’s the dilemma of presenting climate change.

• Environment
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April 5th, 2008

The Daily Mail (London, UK) today published an article by former British chancellor Nigel Lawson on global warming. Mr Lawson looks back at past planetary scares which were unfounded: a fear of a population explosion and global starvation in the 60s, a new ice age in the 70s and suggests that global warming is the modern day equivalent.
In what must be a Richard Dawkins inspired piece, he then goes on to call global warming a quasi-religion equivalent in Europe’s secular society:

But there is something much more fundamental at work. I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold.

Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism, of which the global warming issue is the most striking example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.

It is certainly a very interesting article which is well worth a read. I myself get quite annoyed at companies who jump on the green bandwagon as a form of marketing. Take those adverts for washing powder that you see on TV. They tell you that you should buy concentrate because it’ll take loads of lorries off the road and because you can wash at 30 degrees, implying that by switching to their product you’ll save the world. What a load of environmental bullshit.

I think it’s certainly true that people are exploiting the cause of global warming for their own political, commercial and protectionist purposes. (One lobby suggests that we should all buy locally produced British food, it saves on food miles. Now I’m all for supporting British farmers but if you buy British strawberries, they’ll have been grown in greenhouses. This produces more CO2 than the act of shipping it from somewhere like Spain.)

But the many ways in which climate change is being exploited for vested interests doesn’t invalidate it’s existence.

I admit that I used to be a little bit of a climate sceptic. So over the last year I took the opportunity to find out more: I did a lot of my own research watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and other scientific material as well as some more sceptical articles. I also spoke to researchers at University College, London. I’ve also worked alongside some scientists who are themselves looking at long term changes to the Earth’s climate.

It’s true to say that scientists cannot prove that climate change is real and that it’s definitely a threat. There is still some doubt because as scientists we should remain sceptical. But because it can’t be proved doesn’t mean the most logical viewpoint is to assume that it isn’t true. The weight of evidence is that climate change is happening and that it’s a real threat. Similarly, I can’t disprove there is a tiny little teapot orbiting around the Earth because there’s no way of looking at every single point around the Earth at once. That doesn’t mean there’s a 50:50 chance that there is a flying teapot orbiting around the Earth. So to say that scientists can’t prove climate change is a misrepresentation. The weight of scientific evidence says that there is, and that we should do something about it.

I’ve recently given a few speeches regarding climate change. I’ll probably comment on this in detail at a later date but it is quite difficult trying to accurately get the message of climate change across with scientific scepticism whilst still showing people how important a problem is and what the deadly consequences could be.

• Environment
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March 29th, 2008

Tonight is Earth Hour - an opportunity to send out a big message about our commitment to cutting our energy usage and safeguarding the future of our planet. Earth Hour is asking you to turn off your lights and non-essential electrical appliances at 8pm (your local time) tonight.

The first Earth Hour was held in Sydney, Australia between 7:30 pm and 8:30 pm on 31 March 2007. The 2007 Earth Hour is estimated to have cut Sydney’s mains electricity consumption by between 2.1% and 10.2% for that hour, with as many as 2.2 million people taking part.

You’ll all have noticed that Google has turned the lights out on their homepage today!

Of course: this won’t really cut energy usage or help the climate. Because the power stations will still be running and producing the same amount of energy. But this is an opportunity to send out a really strong message to others and to our neighbours and to raise awareness of climate change issues. So I’ll be participating in Earth Hour from 8pm to 9pm tonight and I call on readers to join in!

• Environment
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