From the Guardian

I’m using the Trafigura / Ivory Coast / press gagging travesty of human decency as a case story tomorrow. It’s shocking how little attention this is getting in the main stream media. Here are my notes, I’ll add some opinion tomorrow.

The Guardian broke this in the UK so lots of links are from there.

Video
First off check out this video featuring Real Victims ® http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/sep/18/trafigura-ivory-coast-probo-koala

Ok, now for some background.

The Guardian publish this background on September 16th. Some highlights:

Trafigura trader James McNicol wrote from the firm’s Oxford Street office block: “This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars … Each cargo should make 7m!!”

The plan was to buy a tanker load of dirty fuel, clean it on board, sell the good stuff and then Get rid of the slops.

Trafigura’s London head of gasoline trading, Leon Christophilopoulos, suggested a desperate remedy: a floating refinery: “I don’t know how we dispose of the slops and I don’t imply we would dump them, but for sure, there must be some way to pay someone to take them.”

The Probo Koala, was anchored off Gibraltar. Between April and June, it took three cargoes, each of 28,000 tonnes of contaminated gasoline [and cleaned them]. The Probo Koala’s spare tanks soon filled up with waste containing freshly created sulphur compounds.

The waste was shipped to Amsterdam where nobody would take it. So it set sail for the Ivory Coast. (Note: the Basel Ban, as well as the Bamako Convention, contains strict rules against the export of waste from developed to developing countries and according to Greenpeace clearly applies to this case.)

What followed was an environmental and human catastrophe.

The waste ended up being tipped all around Abidjan. It would have contained such unstable substances as mercaptans, mercaptides, sodium sulphide and dialkyl disulphides. Those living and working nearby risked burns, nausea, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death from contact with such compounds.

Thousands fell ill, the story broke locally and ultimately a case was taken against Trafigura:

As 31,000 Africans, many desperately poor, joined in an unprecedented group action for compensation organised by London lawyer Martyn Day, Trafigura tried repeatedly to give the impression that its ship had only pumped out ordinary slops from tank-cleaning: a completely different type of activity.

Trafigura settled with a £30m deal. That’s just under £1,000 per person involved.

The Guardian carry some details of the settlement here:

The settlement will cost Trafigura slightly more than 10% of its reported $440m (£270m) profits last year, and comes on top of the £100m the company had already previously paid the Ivorian government for a clean-up, also without conceding legal liability.

Hey, it’s like, 2009!

One of the big questions here is why is this only getting decent media coverage in the last month. The answer of course is lawyers.

This from the Financial Times:

The case cast an unaccustomed and uncomfortable light on a company that had until then enjoyed a low-profile existence as one of the world’s leading traders in commodities, including oil.

Trafigura has made heavy use of libel lawyers – including two defamation lawsuits and at least one court injunction – to combat coverage of the case, in which it continues to deny liability.

The company and Leigh Day & Co, lawyers for the Ivorians, reached their financial deal to settle allegations that the waste dumping had caused flu-like symptoms in people who were close to the site.

CSR: Letter to the Editor

Is this kind of City-media-lawyer-we’ve-got-bigger-dicks-than-you shit even legal? We’re going to find out, Conservative Peter Bottomley thinks not.

According to (who else but) the Guardian, he told MPs he was reporting Carter-Ruck, to the Law Society, saying that no lawyers should be able to inhibit the reporting of parliament.

“I will be seeking their advice on whether it is proper for any lawyer to purport or intend to inhibit the reporting of parliament,” Bottomley told the Guardian.

“It is the job of the press to make aware to all what is known by a few. Any court action which inhibits that should be approved at a very high level, with full justifications, and in normal circumstances, should not be made in secret.”

And just to reassure us all, GB has called the case “unfortunate”. Yeah thanks Gordon. Just like how it’s going to be “unfortunate” you’ll be an ex-prime minister next June.

In terms of media discourse, the breaking of the court ordered gag is interesting. I’m not sure it’s altogether Earth shattering though. Here’s what Guardian supremo Alan Rusbridger has to say. Go read it yourself. I’ve got other things to worry about.

So the media were bound by the laws of the land and those that would abuse them. What about NGOs. As far back as September 2006 Greenpeace were all over this.. Here’s an interesting para from that press release:

One question is whether the wastes were entirely generated via on board operations. In a statement to the press the charterer Trafigura states that the caustic nature of the waste was from use of caustic soda as a detergent for tank washings. However given the rarity of using caustic soda to wash tanks that carry refined petroleum products, it is not unreasonable to consider that the waste could come from land based sources.

After the Ivory Coast government and Trafigura reached a deal on cleanup costs, but importantly not on compensation for victims or even an admittance of culpability, Greenpeace came back with more.

“One cannot do justice without knowing the facts in their entirety. At this stage, it would have been more appropriate to secure a provisional settlement with an advance payment, rather than one that closes the books definitively, especially when the full extent of liabilities have not yet been determined,” said Jasper Teulings, Senior Legal Counsel, Greenpeace International.

Although this settlement has no bearing on the legal rights of the victims of this disaster, it is feared that the victims will now receive little, if any, support from their government in pursuing justice.

“This Faustian deal may provide the Cote D’Ivoire the much-needed funds to deal with the clean-up, but it is by no means fair. Trade in hazardous waste is a serious crime under international law (2), and by agreeing to this deal, the President has signed away his country’s right to bring a criminal corporation to justice,” said Helen Perivier, Toxics Campaigner, Greenpeace International, “The ease with which international environmental laws are broken and questionable deals exchanged for real justice, painfully highlights yet again, that the international community creates laws but simply lacks the political will to implement and enforce them.”

And Greenpeace is continuing the fight to convict Trafigura of a crime. Something that has not happened anywhere yet. This from Reuters.

Trafigura for their part have a series of related press releases on their site. Headlines such as
“High Court confirms that Probo Koala ‘slops’ cannot have caused deaths, miscarriages, or other serious or long-term injuries”
and
“SETTLEMENT VINDICATES TRAFIGURA”
aim to tell their side of the story. No doubt Carter-Ruck will have signed those release off after careful inspection.

The ship

In a move straight from Radar, here’s four links from the past week or so. Keepfakingit says yes to the best.

A Liberal Defence of Money by William Davies in The Liberal. Davies throws some high-value grenades back in the direction of Chris Anderson and the Free brigade.

The COP15 Train is being organized by the Campaign against Climate Change to get you to Denmark for some mid-talks debate. All aboard from St. Pancras International Friday 11th December.

Penn Station, New York. The way it used to be. It cost too much to clean the windows…

NEF, The New Economics Foundation. The independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being. The aim, to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues.

I learned to knit last weekend at the Electric Picnic festival in the Irish midlands. The wool used was made from tents discarded at the end of the festival the year before. Check it out:

Or view the set here on Flickr.

Big shout out to Re-Dress and Cultivate who made it happen.

Not sure what A-List artists and pro-wrestling has to do with bears. Here’s what the WWF website says:

For over three decades, our army of sturdy panda collecting boxes stood outside shops and offices around the UK, but were all recalled in 2007.

Rather than recycling the lot, we got together with specialist curators Artwise and challenged top British artists to reincarnate them as innovative and memorable artworks, to communicate the importance of our work in a truly inspirational way.

“Back to nature” is not a trip to the country-side. It’s a total realignment of humanity’s place in the encyclopedia. That realignment, or rather that correction of a categorization that should never have happened in the first place is one of the core treatises of the Dark Mountain Manifesto. And within the manifesto is as strong a call to action for writers, musicians and artists of all hues, to embrace a new thinking of our place in the world as Keepfakingit has seen for an awful long time.

The Manifesto is the work of Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth. My involvement in the project is slight. I answered a crowd-sourcing call for funding over Twitter and donated a small amount towards the publication of the first edition. The attraction at the off was simple. Here’s a project that seeks to address climate change through a wholly fresh literary/artistic prism. At least that’s what the pitch said, and that was good enough for me and my PayPal account.

The meat and potatoes of the slim hand-stitched 18 page tome as I see them:

Thesis 1.
Civilization is built on little more than beliefs. As beliefs fail, so too does civilization.

Thesis 2.
We are not apart from nature, from the world around us.

Climate change is the ultimate clash of civilization versus nature. Things won’t be fine. We’re not even sure if we want it to be fine.

Thesis 3.
What if we looked down? We believe it’s time to look down.

Thesis 4.
Artists are the only ones who can uncouple mankind’s ego from the blinkered view that separates us from nature.

Thesis 5.
Ecocide demands a response.

So Hine and Kingsnorth clearly aren’t overly concerned with telling us to change the lightbulbs or put a brick in the loo. In fact they don’t give a shit about that sort of middle-class-doing-my-bit-to-waylay-my-guilt approach and I’ll warrant the organic field-reared Spring lamb on offer down at Waitrose isn’t top of their shopping list either.

And why should they be. The time for small actions is over. This Manifesto is about the big stuff. The fragility of our social fabric and how that fabric, due to the wear and tear being inflicted upon in by climate change is about to rip right in half.

Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad are both quoted on the way to the assertion that

Our civilisation is built on little more than the belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

And it is in the belief that mankind is apart from nature that the problem starts.

The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won.

So it is nature that will suffer the ravages of climate change. But as luck would have it we (humanity) are outside of that nature. Yes Katrina and her bad tempered companions will occasionally give us a good going over but we’ll come up with solutions, “solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius.”

In the Guardian last week George Monbiot debated Kingsnorth on the merits of this viewpoint. It’s a debate that every climate change activist should read, one which should, if only for a moment, make all of us who consider ourselves part of this movement question what it is we’re trying to prevent. Is it nature’s destruction, the destruction of our own civilisation or something else entirely? And isn’t even the term “nature’s destruction” rather missing the point if we are after all joined at the hip.

During the debate Monbiot accuses Kingsnorth of actively longing for the other Eden, the post-fabric-ripped Mad Max visage. After having re-read the Manifesto it is more apparent that Kingsnorth does indeed seem to come out in favour of the nuclear option. But what of it? As a society, a civilization, surely we must once in a while look in the mirror in an effort to see of what sort of stuff we’re made. And if we don’t like what we see what is wrong with having the balls to put another vision on the table.

And this is a crucial point. Those ascending the Dark Mountain would have us believe we’re scared even to do that, to imagine. In their words scared to “look down”. And scared the economists, the priests of mono-theism and the politicians should be because this reflection offers them only an end to their way of thinking, doing and controlling.

So to the Manifesto’s ultimate cry. Our “leaders” won’t allow us to look at ourselves with a clear gaze. They won’t allow us examine ourselves and build that metaphysical bridge back to nature, the logical response to a diagnosis that is writ large by the Manifesto.
But ecocide demands a response they proclaim.

That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilization itself? What gallery mounts an exhibitions equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

[Checklisted as Uncivilised artists before their time are Robinson Jeffers, John Berger, Alan Garner, Wendell Berry, WS Merwin, Mary Oliver and of course, Cormac McCarthy]

This is the call for Uncivilised Art. Art that offers a non-human perspective. Being literary types Hine and Kingsnorth’s concern is writing in particular. They insist that this Uncivilised writing

comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation, but from somewhere on its wilder fringes… from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.

Ah, so these guys are hippies in disguise, looking for this century’s Watership Down, or Call of the Wild. That’s the cynical conclusion, one which is fended off immediately:

It is not environmental writing, for there is too much of that already… it is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people…and it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.
The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing.

You can bring an artist to the Dark Mountain…

One doesn’t have to travel all the way down Kingsnorth’s Damascene highway of civilisation to appreciate the value of at least daring to look at the map. If we are to fight the almost unwinnable fight against the ravages of climate change we had better know what we want the win to look like. And it is the job of our artist to start painting what that looks like.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto may be be considered a preparatory sketch in this regard. If so, only one question remains, do our artists have the imagination to use it?

I’m involved in organizing a screening of Age of Stupid next Saturday 22nd August. 8pm.

Here’s the official blurb:

The Age of Stupid is the new four-year epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? MORE

If you can come please do, it’s free in, we’ll have a cheap bar and the movie itself shouldn’t be missed.

It’s taking place on the roof of The Printworks, Ashwin St, Dalston (E8 3DL) and it will look something like this:

Nicholas Stern in his introduction to ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet‘ outlines as succinctly as I’ve seen it just why Copenhagen this December is the most important international conference so far this century.

The Copenhagen deal must be more ambitious [than Kyoto], more international and much stronger. We must agree not only on our ambitions but on the details of action; the timetable is very tight. It will not be easy, but success is vital to the future of the planet.

If we do succeed, we will have created the potential not only to provide a serious response to the problem of climate change, but also to unleash an era of internationalism which could make the world much better at dealing with some of the other important international issues of our time, above all the fight against poverty. If we fail, the confidence and trust necessary to create and sustain an international agreement may be destroyed and the confidence of investors and markets, crucial for the real decisions that will make the necessary changes, will be undermined. Furthermore, addressing many of the obstacles to development, such as water availability, agricultural production, malaria and Aids, will become much harder and more costly. We have to see the issues of economic development and of climate change as parts of a whole.

I’m going to be at the Reboot Britain conference in London on Monday.

Here’s the blurb:

It’s Time to Reboot Britain
An extraordinary one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them.

We face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

Here’s my personalized schedule

Back to the Supply Chain Gang. I reread this Carbon Trust mini-white paper (Carbon footprints in the supply chain) this morning with a view to picking out the Open possibilities, as the term relates to supply chains.

Rather than a polluter pays approach the paper advocates an holistic view on the entire supply chain for two test cases, the Trinity Mirror produced Daily Mirror and three products Walkers Crisps produces. Let’s get some muck behind our ears and look at the spuds.

Walkers was encouraged to “own” the entire supply chain from start to finish. Broken into three stages this chain incorporates:

• Raw material
• Distribution, manufacturing and retailing steps
• Product use and disposal

Crucially using this methodology Walkers is to take responsibility for the carbon in parts of the supply chain that it traditionally doesn’t own, e.g. the production of the actual potatoes.

So:

For each of the products, the full product life-cycle was analyzed, considering emissions from fuel use in raw material production and distribution through manufacturing and product distribution to disposal and recycling…
Suppliers and other supply chain partners were engaged to provide energy data…
The data gathered was used to build a mass balance map of the flows of materials and energy through the supply chain and to build a footprint of the life-cycle emissions for each product. These results were then used to identify opportunities to reduce emissions by changing process flows and by changing the way the supply chain is structured.

The report goes on to list lots of expected insights. In the case of Walkers it presents this rather interesting finding:

A key opportunity relates to the water content of the potatoes. The overall supply chain can save up to 9,200 tonnes of CO2 and £1.2m per annum by changing the way that potatoes are traded; Walkers can reduce the emissions from the potato frying stage by up to 10%.
…By changing the way potatoes are purchased, savings can be made by both parties.

Here’s how:

The Problem for Farmers

• Spuds purchased by weight
• Spuds are stored in artificially humidified warehousing
• This increases water content (thus their weight and saleprice)
• Humidifiers use lots of energy. Energy = CO2

The Problem for Walkers

• Spuds are fried to drive off moisture once sliced
• Extra moisture in spuds increases frying time. Ergo more CO2 used in cooking

You’re seeing where this is going right.

The Solution

• Price spuds by water content. Reward farmers for extra dry spuds
• No commercial incentive for humidifying spuds means < CO2
• < water means < frying means < CO2 = WINWIN

Okay, so that’s a nice little standalone study. Join up the supply chains and look for efficiencies. Easy to do in this case, not so easy once we get exponentially bigger supply chains.
Imagine the pack of salt + vinegar crisps is part of a ready meal. The ready meal is served on a plane. And the flight is part of a package holiday to Lanzarote. How we begin to put all that together so that Thomas Cook can add everything together to find efficiencies. Something it probably hasn’t even countenanced doing yet.

We open up the chain. We expose the information to whoever can use it, or add to it. What next? Can we build a reward economy around creating new efficiencies? Can we introduce a self-learning algorithm to capture these efficiencies and migrate them to similar systems/chains? From a software engineering perspective the answer is undoubtedly yes. How about social engineering?

It strikes me that if some of this were to be done we’d be faced with a problem analogous to those Wikipedia and Flickr have answered so successfully. In Wikipedia’s case it’s giving ownership and trust to its team of non-paid admins, without which it couldn’t function. In Flickr’s case it’s allowing you, I or anybody add descriptive tags, metadata, to each and every photo.

So at last a planet saving use for the social surplus. But how do we engage. Why would a member of Clay Shirky’s gin-soaked masses want to “tag” an Open Supply Chain rather than edit a Wikipedia article or sort a Flicker archive? Figure that one out and we may have a business model here. So answers on a (creative commons attributed) postcard please.

Here’s a thought on the power of Google PowerMeter.
So far Google have partnered with eight utilities worldwide to provide end to end assistance in creating smart grids.

This gives Google an in to the electric grid and all appliances that sail on it.
Utilizing each appliance’s cyclic power signature Google can in theory tell who is using what appliance and in what state of repair each appliance is.

So imagine your toaster coil is wearing down. You don’t know it. Google does.
Google also knows your IP, your browsing habits, and when you’re likely to turn you laptop on for some smart grid research.

BAMMO!
Search Google for some smart grid action and there you have it, a brand new Kitchen Aid toasting device before you knew you even needed it.

Of course there are a whole slew of privacy issues here that Google aren’t silly enough to jump into, but you had better believe that PowerMeter doesn’t just mean Smart Grids, it means Sneaky, Nosey Grids too.

Over the past months Smart Meters and what I like to think of as the Semantic Smart Grid has been getting more and more press. A Twitter conversation this week has put me over the edge, it’s time to bring some thoughts together.

Electricity is, as most of us think of it, an abstraction. We’re thought to think of it as we would a flow of water. It’s got current, waves, flow, power. Really though, unless you’re unlucky enough to be electrocuted it’s pretty intangible.

The modern electricity grid is much like the contemporary newspaper industry. Fucked. It’s in big trouble unless it acts fast. It’s running on a century old business model of central manufacture of resource (electricity/news in power stations/newsrooms). It’s transmitting/broadcasting the product down one way pipes and crucially is neither listening to its consumers/audience nor is it aware of the conversation/usage its audience is engaged in.

*****
Interestingly it was not always so for Big Power. As Thomas Edison and the early electricity entrepreneurs electrified the big cities of East Coast USA there were power stations all over town. Maybe it’s time we looked again at this model, I’ve thought for some time that the best future use for the disused Battersea power station in London would be as a local, sustainable power station. But that’s a thought for another post.
*****

Smart Metering

Metering and visualization of energy consumption is vital.
We can’t manage change what we can’t measure. In this case what we want to change downwards is power consumption

Home energy visualization kits have been knocking around for the past few years and up until know have been largely the preserve of hackers . To introduce another analogy here let’s compare this activity to the use of Usenet in the early 90′s. Lots of smart people collaborating on important issues, but not getting widespread traction.

Balaji Natarajan on Earth2Tech conveniently continues the analogy in regard to management and communications tools for energy:

Simple HTML pages publicized the concept of the Internet to the common user back in the mid-1990s. A tool like this that offers a rich user experience can help in connecting the customer to the concept of the smart grid

Smart Meters will connect end-users to the Smart Grid in the way Mosaic and Netscape connected us to the internet. Again from Natarajan:

Extend the functionality of the smart grid into a variety of always-on lifestyle interfaces, including meters, panels, garages, vehicles, recharging stations and mobile devices. The Internet really took off within universities (and then everywhere else) because of the concept of the “browser.” From that point on, Internet access wasn’t tied to an IBM supercomputer or a Windows proprietary desktop. With that shift, the tantalizing possibilities of open access invited strong investment, and we continue to reap more benefits of such a model more than two decades later.

Bingo!

The Smart Grid

Which is one of the reasons these guys are jumping into the space

In their own words, Google’s launch partners

span the globe and are large and small utilities, rural and urban, privately held and municipally run and include one of the largest meter manufacturers. They all have one thing in common – a desire to serve their customers by providing access to detailed information that helps customers save energy and money.

The reality is that most global customers don’t have a lot of choice as to where they get their electricity, so the real benefactors here are the utility companies and of course Google, who just love collecting and organizing our data. And there are lots of reasons why Google would want this data.

Smart Grid + Demand Response

From WorldChanging.com:

Today our grids aren’t nimble enough to take advantage of renewables at large scale because of the intermittency problem, which requires huge amounts of electricity storage that is just not economically feasible today. Smart grids, however, help solve this problem in two ways.

First, by turning the grid into an internet, where it is read-write rather than a broadcast medium, we can take an excess of power being generated in one place (due to high winds or a sunny day) and route it a few hundred miles away where there’s more demand (due to night coming on, or cooler weather), then send power in the other direction an hour later when conditions have changed.

Secondly, as Amory Lovins has also mentioned, combining smart grids with large-scale adoption of electric vehicles would allow the EV’s [electric vehicles] to act as the massive storage capacity for the grid.

What a great idea. Using our cars as mobile batteries to help carry energy though the day. Then bring in Demand Response. From the same WorldChanging article:

[Tom Raftery] also mentioned demand response systems, which will be a huge new business market in the coming decades, with or without smart grids. Apparently the higher-resolution power meters these days are so good that you can tell the make and model of the appliances in a home just from their cyclic power signatures. You can even see when your fridge needs repair, by how it uses electricity differently. This raises privacy concerns, but also allows for intelligent upgrades of equipment for consumers. Connecting smart meters in your home (or factory or office) with smart grids, what if your power meter could poll all power generators to find out prices and carbon footprints for all generators online at the moment, and decide in real time what the cheapest and greenest power is to buy? (And remember that the greenest and cheapest will usually be the same.) Software-wise it’s not a hard problem; it’s like eBay with some scripting. But it requires a complete overhaul of the grid infrastructure to enable it. Raftery estimates that smart grids could save 2 gigatons of CO2 per year, so clearly this infrastructure is worth the investment.

Let’s go back to Google.

In theory, by connecting or even controlling the world’s smart grids Google could find itself in receipt of information on every. single. electrical. appliance. on . Earth. That’s some serious data. Will our fridges start displaying Google provided adwords for milk as our stocks run low? That would be some truly smart metering.

But right now, here’s an example of how we can bring all of this together.

Putting Smart Metering, Smart Grids and Demand Response all together you get something like this:
A trial in North Carolina integrating meters, smart grids and alternative energy sources.

The utility wants to use communication networks and software to power down certain energy-hogging actions during peak times (air conditioners) but at the same time keep customers happy and comfortable.

[The Trial] will include a utility-grade solar photovoltaic system attached to a substation, and a battery for energy storage (zinc bromide). The companies’ software will not only have to manage the energy data from the home devices but will examine how to use energy storage and solar to add more clean power but keep the grid load stable. While utilities and lawmakers are paying an increasing amount of attention to adding energy storage to the power grid as a way to address the variable availability of renewables (the sun shines and the wind blows only at certain times of the day), the Charlotte trial is groundbreaking in that it is examining how that can be managed alongside demand response.

Here’s an example of smart metering interfacing directly with appliances. See if you can spot the minor greenwash for GE. I mean, dude, you want to cut that electrics bill, get a smaller fridge.

We’re at an interesting juncture where I suspect many big utilities are waiting to see how Google’s initial work in this area progresses. We’re seeing increased consumer interest in opening up the electricity supply chain and as importantly wanting to supply energy, via small turbines and solar panels, back to the grid itself.

Whether consumers, Big Power, or the likes of Google or SAP fit neatly into roles (I’m thinking carrots, sticks and donkeys) remains to be seen. What is clear is that energy usage must come down and the proportion of renewables we use has to go up. Here’s the techonologies by which we can manage those transitions at a consumer and supplier level.

One area I haven’t had time to get into in detail here is the concept of a social semantic smart grid. Layering machine readable human information on top of the grid and using that to drive smart decisions. The grid as semantic web…

I may have said this before but that’s never stopped me. It’s time to stop abstracting our resource usage. Check this out.

From NicolasNova.

I spent Saturday at the first (and I hope) annual Africa Gathering conference, an orgy of ICT4D organized by the guys behind Geekyoto and held in Birkbeck College, London.

First up with a BIG statement was Tim Unwin, UNESCO ICT4D chair. His message was loud and clear.

It’s time to stop doing pilot projects and start doing things that are substantive and substantial.

Shades of Tim O’Reilly’s call for us to work on stuff that matters and I couldn’t agree more

The $100 laptop

ICT4D PhD candidate David Hollow had some insights into how the initial rollouts of $100 laptops in five Ethiopian schools. Using qualitative and quantitative research he painted a picture of laptops being enthusiastically received by students but ultimately alienating both teachers and parents. Students are learning how to use their new computers far quicker than their teachers and in many cases both teachers and parents have concluded that the laptops are good for nothing but games

There was a clear message that there simply isn’t enough meaningful content on these laptops. Until there are more textbooks and lesson modules uploaded as standard the laptops are going to continue to be used as glorified digital cameras and MP3 players. In other words it’s not enough to get these laptops into the field. They have to be supported with localized software and content. And it’s vital that parents and teachers are ahead of the training curve. So stick that in your USB drive Negroponte.

SMS on the Frontline

Frontline SMS setup. Super simple.

Ken Banks presented one of the standout presentations, how his SMS management tool, Frontline SMS has been utilized across the content. Frontline creates an SMS messaging hub by allowing a standard phone to be connected to a standard PC using a standard cable.  Why has he been so successful? Because Ken’s given the users the very basics and let them roll with it. He’s trusted them to follow some instructions, souce the gear, but the airtime even though this means the barriers to entry are slightly higher. When users do get everything working they feel massive ownership and become his best evangelists.

It takes big NGOs and government organizations months to build and deploy tech for similar usage, Frontline SMS allows end users such as field doctors and local media organizations bypass the tape and get on with connecting to their audience. And crucially it bypasses local authority structures, very important when monitoring Zimbabwaen elections for example.

Ultimately Ken makes a great point on the direction of technology in Africa. He’s distributing a small software package and letting people run it for themselves.

Mobiles in Africa: The Movie

Martin Konzett of ict4d.at presented this trailer of his current project. The full documentary is released next month. Great to see some humour in the mix.

Old School Networks: ColaLife

The most bizarrely innovative  story of the day was that of Simon Berry, the man behind ColaLife. This is a case of using social media tools here in the UK and around the world to push a cause in Africa. So far so standard, but it’s the cause itself that’s super-impressed me. Simon’s idea is real simple:

1. Lots of kids in Africa die from dehydration related illness.
2. Many can be saved if only hydration salts and medcines could be got to them.
3. Let’s use the existing distribution channels of Coke deliverers to spread the good stuff.

Here’s the video:

Could it be that using old-school distribution channels we’ll create new human collaborative networks? This simple idea has huge scaling potential and it’s something that companies like Coca-Cola should be jumping aboard way before Simon and ColaLife force them. We can apply this to all sorts of distribution channels and supply chains all around the world and the great thing is that the concept works without any hi-tech rocket science. Once the guys in the distribution centres are on board we have a winner.

And the rest…

A couple of interesting points from whiteafrican and Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman. In Africa it’s very hard for people to bounce ideas off each other. Here we do this with tools like Twitter, IRC, Facebook etc. Yet the speed of communication and thus the time it takes to disseminate ideas in Africa remains slower.

That said clearliy technologies, particularly of the open variety have leveled the global barrier to entry for developers everywhere. Technology allows Africans to overcome life’s inefficiencies,  whether that’s government, food or health.

And if there’s one technology holy grail right now is an open mobile payment structure that isn’t tied to any operator or even any country. Achieve this and then the playing field really does level off in a big way. If you’re to believe Erik and the majority of the attendees of AfricaGathering the phone operators have no incentive and are bringing no urgency to this issue. Having a worked with the European and US arms of many of these operators this comes as no surprise.

Finally,  just to show the day wasn’t all serious save-the-world ernestness, Juergen Eichholz gave a quick presentation on Afrigadget and the even better and funnier Afrifail.com. Check them out for some great upcycling action.

“

AfriFAIL [photo (c) flickr.com/photos/jennerm

-Edit

Here are some more blog pieces on the day which I’ve just lifted from Alasdair Munn’s piece on the day. Cheers Alasdair.

• My Take on AfricaGathering in London - Juergen Eichholz
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 1 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 2 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 3 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 4 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: panel discussion
• Karola Riegler’s Flickr Photoset on AfricaGathering

This just in via Matt Jones‘ Twitter Stream. Mixed zoned land greening Philadelphia. Brilliant. And brilliantly executed by Front Studio and bldgblog.blogspot.com.

Farmadelphia Skyline

[Image: Front Studio. Philadelphia's "urban voids interwoven with agricultural patchwork" via bldgblog.blogspot.com ].

[Images: Front Studio.  Chickens hang out amidst lettuce via bldgblog.blogspot.com].

Long time readers will know I have a thing for Philly. So this makes so much sense.

One non-flippant  note on this. I’ve heard two very serious people talk about land use in the last 30 hours. The first was James Lovelock at yesterday’s Nature debate. Lovelock made very clear his view that improving land use was the single biggest thing we could do right now to tackle climate change.

The second was Alex Steffen during the course of his address to ETech earlier today:

Design and density is the single best investment we can make re sustainability. It dematerializes trips.

Image: some rights reserved by Dom Dada

Nature magazine continued their Darwin season of talks in London tonight with a panel discussion entitled What Price Biodiverstity?.

The top caliber speakers were Professor James Lovelock, independent scientist, author of “Revenge of Gaia”. Michael Meacher, MP (Labour) & former Minister of State for the Environment and Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University. Not a joker amongst them. I’d also add the the quality of questioning from the floor was second to none, quite refreshing at these sorts of things where one can usually expect some variety of rogue element to attempt a hijacking of proceedings.

I only found out only this morning about the talk via @zzgavin on Twitter, and have time but for some brief notes here before getting on with the rest of my evening. The entire discussion took place in the context of one larger and one (debatable) less significant event. Climate change and the recession. But doesn’t (shouldn’t?) every conversation right now take place in that light.

So in no particular order:

Tiskell on the state of the biodiversity conversation: Talking about climate change is [relatively] easy, about biodiversity is much harder. We don’t even have the value system to measure it and the common man on the street simply can’t understand it. They won’t understand what we are losing until there is a cataclismic biodiversity event.

There was general agreement that the global conversation on protecting biodiversity was at least five years behind that of climate change. An example of this, in the UK we have the Stern Report on Climate Change and even a Climate Change Office. We have nothing similar to start combating the threat to biodiversity.

Meacher on our current value systems: These current systems have led to a belief that “only nature that can be made profitable should be preserved”. That’s the dangerous result of putting economic value on biodiversity

Lovelock on carbon trading schemes: Totally disastrous. As a result of carbon trading, less efficient coal stations in east Germany are producing MORE co2. These permits have been either given away of sold too cheap. Why didn’t we charge polluters, not give them credits. Carrots instead of sticks.

Tickell on industry: [they] wants to do the right thing and they will if they are given clear limits in which to operate in. Heads of industry aren’t oblivious, they know there are serious problems in the world but they want to know where they stand. [Political] leadership has to show the way here and TRUST that they can do it and we wasn’t this change.

Tickell on biodiversity in agriculture: Agriculture shouldn’t be a market activity. The market is set up to measure short term gain. It does that but does not record the long term damage industrial agriculture in particular does to land resource. Agreculture should be a community activity, enriching all around it.

Meacher on the subject of biodiversity value: even if we can come up with a bio-diversity index instead of GDP to give us a quantitive measurement of human activity, how do we make this measurement operative. How do we make companies change their business plans to fit this. How do we tie it into government budgets.

He mentioned in fact a sustainability index he had presided over in the Department of the Environment that never got anywhere because nobody had any . Meacher verged between accute peceimism and optimism at times, which struck me as sounding odd coming from a career politician. He was convincing when explaining his belief that we are now on the brink of a new world economic, environmental and cultural order.

Lovelock being the oldest and at times sounding the wisest got to round off the evening. He did so clearly, directly and without hesitation when asked if it were possible for a biodiverse Earth to survive.

Time, he said, is the biggest barrier to halting biodiversity decline and climate change. We are so far down the path that the goals of 2040 and 2050 that our institutions have set will be far too little too late.

The super-cool people behind last year’s Geekyoto event in London are planning a tech/Africa/development conference April 25th. I’m going. Here’s why, though my reasoning is slightly inverted. The tech I get, I want to work on how we apply it to issues in developing regions. From Edward Scotcher:

I’ve had a few people get in touch over the last few days asking if they should come to Africa Gathering or not – mainly because Africa Gathering’s basis is a tech/Africa event and potential attendees may not be focusing on technology. My attitude is quite simple – technology is part of out lives whether we like it or not and we are only growing more reliant on it. Whatever your organisation does, remember that the reasons this event is a ‘gathering’ is that it’s a chance for everyone to come and meet each other. Small businesses and charities need to be connected to technologists and entrepreneurs to help them build effective services and geeks needs ideas and inspiration in order to help push the boundaries of innovation. We all have something to offer each other – we just don’t know it yet.

and

Aid has always puzzled me, because many people are sitting around in ‘the west’ coming up with ideas to help people in developing countries. I commend them, but do we ask the guys in the countries that are receiving that aid what they want? What they need? I think we’d be better to ask them, and then use our skills and experience to help them work towards solutions to their problems – the only issue is: are we willing to help without wanting fame or fortune?

Africa Gathering will be a collection of those people. People who have been and asked what people in developing countries need. People who have used their time and energy trying something out, to see if it’d work using new technology or working with new concepts using technology. After all, collaboration is just educating each other – and education is the key to actually being able to do something useful that makes a difference.

Still a few tickets left. Come.

I could have put this into the last post but I felt it was worth giving it some breathing space. Bud Ward, the well known climate change communicator, has put together a short book on closing the gap between science and media.

Here’s the table of contents:

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Revisiting ‘A Discernible Human Influence,’ Benjamin D. Santer

2. BACKGROUND AND NATURE OF THE WORKSHOPS
Science to Media: Catch-Up to, But Don’t Get Ahead of, the Science, Anthony Broccoli

3. SCIENCE FOR JOURNALISTS
Scientific Education of Climate Science Writers through Pedagogical Use of Artful Sound Bites, Jerry Mahlman

4. JOURNALISM FOR SCIENTISTS
‘Mediarology’ – The Role of Climate Scientists in Debunking Climate Change Myths, Stephen H. Schneider
Hot Words, Andrew C. Revkin

5. WHAT JOURNALISTS CAN DO
The Local Story on Climate Change is a Critical One, Bruce Lieberman
Why We Don’t Get It, Peter Dykstra
Climate Scientists and Climate ‘Skeptics’: Deciding Whom to Trust, Richard C. J. Somerville

6. WHAT SCIENTISTS CAN DO
Airing Someone’s Video? Probably Airing Their Soundbites, Too? Not So Fast, Jeff Burnside
Science in a Postoperative Newsroom, Jeffery DelViscio

7. WHAT INSTITUTIONS CAN DO
What are Children Being Taught in School about Anthropogenic Climate Change? Kim Kastens and Margaret Turrin
Credentialing for Reporters Covering Complex Issues? Jim Detjen
Shared Values of Science and Journalism: Opportunities for Improvement, Anthony D. Socci

8. NEWS EXECUTIVES MEET WITH SCIENTISTS

CJR.org does a better job of reviewing this pamphlet than I ever will so check it the review and then go download the entire pamphlet from the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting.

from the NY Times

Two related pieces in the Columbia Journalism Review over the past week on energy, climate change and the press’s role in covering the issue. And in my mind it is one issue, not two. This is a great example of what makes CJR such a great resource.
They have the ability to step back and look at the media landscape as it pertains many subjects in politics and finance asking the questions of journalists and bloggers that we don’t ask ourselves enough.

Curtis Brainard pulls apart pieces from the Pew Research Center, the NY Times, the LA Times and PBS. His thesis, that it may now makes sense for journalists to pull back from making planet saving proclamations in support of climate change action and instead frame the discourse around helping keep the pennies in the pocket of Joe the Plumber and other downstream media consumers.
Brainard pulls through some useful looking data from Revkin in the NY Times illustrating this. The fact of the matter is that people have bigger financial worries all of a sudden. In Brainard’s words:

A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center found that addressing the nation’s energy problems ranks sixth among a list of twenty voter concerns, with sixty percent of those polled agreeing that it should be a “top priority” for government. On the other hand, concern for protecting the environment and dealing with global warming has declined precipitously in the last few years, with those issues ranking seventeenth and dead last, respectively. The takeaway message for journalists is that those “stewardship” frames will not be sufficient in terms of galvanizing support for clean energy. In the pursuit of public engagement, the press would be better advised to link sustainability issues to economic growth and “green” jobs.

There’s plenty of other good shout-outs in the piece but here’s the real take-away:

The economics of sustainability is clearly a frame that is of particular interest to readers and audiences these days. Nova spends relatively little time discussing the impacts of global warming, which are presented only as contextual background. Though there remain many points of climate science that the media can and should explore, this seems a positive development because it implies that the press has accepted the basic threat of warming and is now prepared to address the cost and feasibility of various solutions

So far so good (perhaps). Brainard returns to a similar theme a few days later on CJR.org. Now here’s the really interesting part from my perspective.

One of the things that history will remember about the coverage of climate change is that, not unlike the Iraq War, the press itself became an important part of the story, largely due to faulty reporting at its outset….But, as CJR contributing editor Cristine Russell pointed out in a recent feature story, the fine points of science and technology must now be communicated to the political and business reporters who have been assigned to the coverage of climate solutions.

There’s no arguing that our business reporters need to know these points inside out. In fact, more importantly, the men and women inside the Treasury making the decisions these reporters report on need to know the facts. But all that doesn’t hide a big question that arises from the above thesis. Should be we be allowing the business pages abstract the world’s climate change problems into a more palatable, or certainly more applicable, problem for our media consumers. In other words should we concentrate on a set of self-centered reasons and try change human behaviour by appealing to people’s financial interests?

Many would argue that the end justifies the means, and in the case of climate change the situation is so dire and so urgent that we can dismiss only a very few options. But the media  has a role to tell it like it is. To inform us that our actions and in action are having a direct and catastrophic impact on the world. If an Obama stimulus promotes green jobs and clean tech all the better, but let’s keep the climate change horse running in front of the economic cart.

Missed this on Friday. Tom Raftery at Greenmonk posted this overview talk by Doug Neal (Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum – Executive Programme and is responsible for research into Innovating through Technology). Doug was talking at the 2008 it@cork Green IT conference.

Tom covers the big points on Greenmonk so I’m going to mention just one area that’s super-interesting for me. At 18 minutes Doug talks about leveraging social pressure, some would call would call it CO2-guilt, through social networks. It’s not a hugely original idea, but, in this case one we can pump an awful lot of creativity into. I’m not talking about the Dopplrs of the world, great though they in particular are. But rather burrowing into people’s social graphs on their already existing networks and laying the problem/solution right there right then.

I know The Carbon Account tried this with their Facebook App. Who else is in this space? What can we do to push it on? Too late in the night for answers right now I’m afraid.

-edit-

Really what we’re talking about here is connecting the social graph to the grid. With smarts. Who’s doing it? Who’s up for it?

As you’ll see if you take a look over on TrashBlanc.com right now I was up early this morning visiting what I believe is London’s only annual Potato Fair. I was with four longtime patrons of the event who provided plenty of advice, but the most important piece was “get there early”. They weren’t wrong, by 10.30am I was in a bustling school féte scene straight out of the Archers.

I could write for hours about the great varieties on display, from the bog standard Golden Wonder to the brilliantly named Skerry Blue and my own personal favourite the Sharpe’s Express, but it was the sheer fact that this was taking place in the middle of London that impressed me most. George Monbiot wrote a lighthearted piece recently about his love forapple varieties. Well and good I thought at the time. But attending something like the Potato Fair and seeing the variety of potatoes alone we have in our soil is simply amazing. And it’s also terribly depressing. 95% of these varieties will never hit the shops. Tesco, Lidl and Aldi have no interest in small lots with smaller margins and the vast majority of the population don’t know what they’re missing. Shame.

Here are some photos from my Flickr account.

As you can see the TrashBlanc team are back in action. Likewise big international food crises have kicked navel gazing Irish finance reporters off the front pages of Ireland’s finest journals. It may be fun and games in the TB kitchen but right now a half billion Euro pork industry is going down the shithole in Ireland. And the industry in question has only itself to blame.

The irishtimes.com has a good chronology of events here.

The basic problem: bad chemicals that have found their way into some feed that has come through an agri/bio recycler. The feed of course is centralized and has distributed the contaminated contents to farms throughout Ireland. Any good journalist would ask what else is in the feed? What is being recycled? But maybe the public isn’t quite ready to hear how their sausages are bred and fed right now. Though one can only ask if not now, then when?

It’s time the entire European Union started questioning a system that can turn one incident at one feed/recycling/rendering plant into a continent wide hunt for contaminated Irish Pork.

When one link in the production chain can effect every other downstream link in an entire industry, there’s deep deep problems.

Even if we ignore the gross environmental and sustainability issues at play here, there’s a simple economic argument. Farmers and agri-business throughout the EU and the US are massively subsidized through grants, tax breaks and artificially inflated food prices. This subsidization is directly responsible for the upkeep of agricultural poverty cycles in developing countries. And even with all that in play our farmers have still managed to waste those grants on a system that has utterly failed.

The economies of scale that big-farming claim necessitate centralized feeding and distribution have been been proved utterly false once again. The big supermarkets, Tesco, Carrefour and Asda/Walmart are equally guilty. But it’s our finance and agriculture ministers who we elect us to save us from ourselves and ourthirst for low prices. It’s time they started doing just that.

Tom Raftery at GreenMonk talks about the new (US) EPA programme, SmartWay, which is aimed at bigging up companies who cut down on product transport emissions. I particularly like one phrase:

You are only as Green as your supply chain after all!

Exactly. And for those who have been through and now do organic and clean energy as standard, supply chain cleanliness is a logical next step. Telling the world about it is even more logical.

This has pretty wide applications. Food, from fresh produce to produced supermarket meals. Clothes, including production conditions and textile sources . All aspects of technology production, energy consumption and distribution.

I’m picturing a scenario where I open my nicely new matt-finished iPhone box. Inside it has some fancy Apple packaging that includes the line “Designed by Apple in California.” And then “Produced and distributed on behalf of Apple at http://tinyAppleURL/34512″

Click the URL and get a full breakdown of labour, materials and distribution for YOUR individual iPhone.

Is this possible? Of course it is.

I carry in my pocket two mobile devices every day. Both have GPS and cellular triangulation just in case I go kill someone and the feds need to hunt me down. I’ve got an Oyster card that uses some sort of RFID magic to open the doors of Transport for London for me on the days I’m not on a bike. So the tracking technology is already in my pocket and probably yours. Crucially it’s also already on the scanning codes that big logistic enterprises use. Tie this in with a network of energy, textile, labour and component databases and we start to paint a pretty vivid picture of the history of pretty much any goods sold in the West. So the logistic technology is there to start tracking. Tie all the above into a carbon reporting database and we start getting a true picture of the actual cost of your new iPhone.

That’s the theory anyway. Is there anybody working on this right now? And what are the implications for companies that do this? Are there really that many profit making or even seeking corporations who will be willing to put their necks on such a transparent line?

Last word to Tom Raftery:

Chain image (c) from Heaven’s Gate (John)

The Wall Street Journal asks who’s responsible for the fall in price of crude oil over the past few days: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/falling-oil-whodunnit/

Thomas Friedman in the NYT (clearly just back from strawberry picking in the Nordics) asks is it better for oil to remain high: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html?em

Tom Raftery has been saying for months that oil is better off over $200 per barrel: http://greenmonk.net/the-sooner-oil-hits-200-per-barrel-the-better/

And back to the WSJ which claims at off-shore drilling is really a complete non-issue despite the above: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/rigged-why-does-offshore-drilling-dominate-the-debate/

Image courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/welshy/

Shell made £2,000,000 profit per hour last quarter.

Some points from GreenBang:

• First, Shell maintains it is committed to investing in renewable energy and clean technology and the company does spend $500m a year on alternative energy resources. But let’s put that into a bit of perspective – that’s about five days’ profit based on today’s results.
• Next is the fact these latest profits were boosted by Shell’s Canadian oil sands business. The high price of oil now makes this controversial form of oil extraction financially viable for the big oil companies (not just Shell), but it is more energy and carbon intensive than traditional extraction.
• Finally let’s not forget Shell recently sold its stake in the Array London wind power project – the world’s largest offshore wind farm project, although Shell maintains that decision was not a reflection on its commitment to alternative energy and points to its involvement in many similar projects around the world.

More on the Guardian

That’s 30,000,000 people. Nearly half the population of the UK. Not exactly a few poor farmers kicked off their land by unthinking palm growers.

Earth2Tech reported this yesterday. The number is staggering. And further on in piece they highlight another heinous issue related to biofuels that is going largely unreported. The CO2 impact of the palm oil plantations.

The report goes beyond the humanitarian consequences and puts numbers to the environmental boondoggle that is the current biofuel economy. Oxfam estimates that land-use changes largely from the palm oil plantations that have popped up around the world’s equator, are emitting a huge amount of CO2, and it will take 46 years of projected 2020-level biofuel use to make up a “carbon debt.”

So it’s time to tell UK transport minister, Opus Dei practitioner and ardent biofules supporter, Ruth Kelly, exactly what you think of the UK’s continued support of this energy source. Information on how to do this is here.