Wow. Just out of a Prof Dieter Helm lecture at LSE. “Climate Change Policy, and why has so little been achieved”. To paraphrase Ted Theodore Logan, Dude laid down the smacketh in a most bodacious way. I didn’t see Nick Stern in the audience. He must have had advance warning of what was coming. Helm started with a growing tribute to his Lordship, how could he not, he was on enemy territory after all. But after calling him the most important economist in the UK right now, alongside Mervyn King, he proceeded to calmly, and very eloquently dismember Nick’s very own Stern Report.
This was no Hallowe’en slasher. Helm is more expert a surgeon. He took aim only at crucial organs and arteries. He chose his spots and cut with the finest of Japanese steel.

For the second time in a week I listed as a speaker told his audience that we are now in the post-science phase of dealing with climate change. The science they have argued is good. Beyond repute in fact. Helm made the point that practically every university on the planet is currently contributing to climate change discourse, and there is remarkable consensus. We’ve passed 350ppm CO2 and are approaching 400 and 500. We all know what comes next. His point here was that the ‘we’ includes our politicians. A politician who now rejects the science of climate change finds himself on the lunatic fringe.

“So why the fuck has there been NO major policy advances in the past 20 years” Helm didn’t say. But that’s what he meant. If we can answer that question maybe we can start to chart a policy course through Copenhagen and beyond.

This begs the question from the Oxford prof, “what bits of economics are painful to policy process”. He spent the rest of the lecture laying some of these out.

–
Now for a word from standard economic orthodoxy.

GDP, given a growth rate of 3% per annum, will be 4x today’s GDP by 2100.
=> We’ll all be 4x “wealthier”
=> 2100 consumption will be 4x today’s consumption
Coal as a % of our energy source goes something like
25% today
28%
30% 2100
Ee-KKKKKK-er!!!!!!

And now back to our scheduled programming.
–

Paraphrasing Prof Helm:
PEAK HYDRO CARBONS IS A BULLSHIT PROPOSITION
We’re not running out of coal. Gas is ok. Oil will continue to be found, as the Arctic melts this gets even easier. Certainly we’re good for at least a century.

Ok, let’s fly through some more points.

Economists mix up manmade vs. natural capital.
There’s a one:one replacement value put on them
Sure there might be no more swallows flying north for the summer, but hey, I’ve got my iPod.

There’s a political truism. Tell your electorate a policy can be achieved cheaply. Fail. When the electorate realise the ruse you’re in trouble Mr. Politician. This is about to happen. Example: the argument that mitigation can be achieved for ~1% GDP.

The utility of tomorrow.
Is the utility of a person in 2100 equal to that of a person living today?
Sure about that?
How about people in 3100?

Fuck that. How about people today?
Does, for a politician/economist, a person in their own constituency have the same utility as some dude hanging in Jo’berg?

Stern argues yes to the above and uses those assumptions in his Economic Review. Bad Economist says Helm. You’re changing the game. While nobody would argue with the virtue of the model, around here, “shit ain’t like that. It’s all fucked up” (Ice-T). Modern society simply does not value us as equal. So why should modern economics.

Onwards. All our leaders are quoting the 1% GDP cost of climate change mitigation. Guys. GET REAL. It cannot be done for that low low price. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Get me?

[Sidenote here for the RHUL massive: Sustainable development is still playing this GDP/Policy game. It's not the rules of the game that need to change. It's the game itself.]

Helm at this juncture takes us on a history lesson, and in the process flattens the Kyoto framework. Framework?!?, what he meant to say was house of cards. An EU joint in the biggest of ways. The whole deal was setup to make the EU look good, and the “cuts” already achieved by Euroland are a mere sleight of hand. This analysis merely backs up postings made right here on Keepfakingit.com earlier this month.

Helm doesn’t leave it at that though. He contends that by signing up to Kyoto, the EU may have made matters worse than doing anything at all! The logic being that by offshoring CO2 to the dev world via dubious CDM deals, more hot air has actually been created than would have been in existence if, for example, all our coal was still made in Wales. As opposed to making it in China, where coal fired electricity is of a higher CO2 intensity, and it then has to be shipped all the way back to Llandudno for that great new PPP housing deal. To make a point here, and he was up front in saying he has no numbers to back it up, Helm puts it out there that G.W. Bush may have done more good than harm by keeping the US of A out of Kyoto. Big statement.

So where is Helm going with this? Well he’s about to flatten the EU ETS calling it a lobbyists dream and rent capture and rent seeking of the highest, or is that lowest order. The volatile prices produced are good for the traders (here that Clark?) but bad for long term investors as there is no long view on carbon price produced. The simple fact is the incentive to cheat here is Massive.

After offloading on his audience about ETS, 2020-20-20 is never going to get the time of day. And it doesn’t. Easy target for an economics prof though so no points there.

So finally to where we all want to get to. Copenhagen. Zero optimism here. Bottom line forecast:
US do nothing on 1990 levels
EU keep on keeping on. That is dress up dubious cuts as real progress.
India gets 4x emissions permissions.
China sets its stall out for 40% US, 40% EU and 1% GDP acquisition from each of the EU and the US. Think they’re going to get it? No. But that’s not really the point.

The only solution’s another revolution
I’m not sure how much of the above makes sense out of context but my notes look good to me. In summary, here’s what went down:

If Helm were at the helm…

• COAL is the BIG ISSUE – Need to start cutting it NOW.
• Energy demand is going up with GDP. This has to stop.
• We need Nukes and we need CCS and we need them now.
• Sorry guys, 1% GDP is not going to take our problems all away.
• Biodiversity is bigger than climate change. We might solve climate change, but by then 50% of all species on the planet will be KIA.
• Why the fuck are politicians BORROWING money to support unsustainable GDP growth. Stop N.O.W.
• Carbon taxes, all EU countries will have them within five years.
• And while they’re at it they’ll be taxing carbon on the borders too. Take that China-import-export market.

Now, if you’re still interested, go read the good professor’s book.

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.

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?