“Every little helps” according to Tesco’s and the nice lady rattling her Sally Army collection box.
Unfortunately, in terms of our Ecology and Environment, that’s just not true. To change the post-industrial trends in fossil fuel dependency and carbon emissions, massive shifts in technology and society are required.
Militant Eco-warriors view that our efforts so far smack of tokenism: consumers assuage their guilt by switching to hessian shopping bags and eco washing up liquid; Government’s energy policy, foiled by the planning process, approve only tiny wind farms which make negligible impact on our energy generation mix; Business’ carbon offsetting measures smack of cynical “greenwashing”.
But Its easy to understand why people are unsure how to act. Generally the public have a poor understanding of the science behind “carbon emissions” and their contribution to global warming. Though scientists finally reached consensus that human actions were contributing to climate change in the IPCC 2007 report, there is still much contradictory and confusing information on our impact on global warming – and whilst we are bombarded with Green Marketing messages it is difficult for us to truly understand the links between our lifestyles and their environmental effect.
The Technology Trumpet would suggest that the key to understanding our environmental impact is for everyone to understand their personal energy use. Since James Watt perfected the steam engine, the energy consumed by all our activity, travel and consumption has steadily increased. Whilst this started in the burning of coal to steam engines, our ever-increasing lifestyle energy demands for energy for travel, heat, manufacture and electricity still come from fossil sources.
Today in the UK our daily energy consumption is around 200 kiloWatt hours – the equivalent of 200 40Watt bulbs switched on all day, every day, for every person in the country.
Unfortunately the hangover from all this energy consumption is a warmer planet – the accumulated “greenhouse gases” from burning hydrocarbons mean that infra-red “heat energy” from the surface of the Earth is absorbed and warms the atmosphere rather than harmlessly passing into space.
Back with the Eco-warriors, most popular initiatives to restore kilter to the complex systems which threaten to warm the Earth’s atmosphere by a few degrees by 2100 are tiny compared to growing “light bulb” count. Every little helps, but not at a scale to check the rate at which global energy use is increasing. Taking steps which drastically reduce the consumption of individuals, businesses and society in general is required to check the process which by general agreement of the scientific community, now seems to be underway.
Unfortunately for our comfortable Western lifestyles, bigger initiatives, which eliminate a significant fraction of our “personal light bulbs” are required. Here in the UK the lions share of our light bulbs are from Travel, Heat, and consumer “stuff” that takes a lot of energy to make or use. We stand the best chance of switching off our personal light bulbs by addressing these three areas.
Broadly speaking we can address this in several ways – use energy from renewable sources which don’t emit carbon, reduce energy requirements through technological innovation (like better insulating our houses), or mandate changes in our energy intensive lifestyles.
The problem is scale and timing – the changes required in any of the above must be drastic throughout the first half of this century to make a substantive difference before the century ends.
The Scottish Government had a go at this recently when it proposed that 95% of passenger cars should be electrically powered by 2020 in Scotland. This proposal, aimed at achieving an audacious 42% reduction in Scotland’s carbon emissions over the same period, were rubbished as hopelessly unrealistic by pressure groups from the business and consumer community. But this is the scale of change required to make a real difference.
Whilst democracy remains a popular system of government, our politicians, understanding of human nature, prefer to soften the hard lifestyle change messages to maximise their chances of election.It can be tricky to convince the population to support implementation of changes at the scale required as shown by last years rejection of the large Lewis Wind farm.
Prof David MacKay’s “Sustainable energy without the hot air” is a seminal work which quantifies the changes needed in the way the UK generates and uses energy. His conclusions are sobering, showing that onshore wind farms the size of Wales and massive offshore tidal barrages in Pentland and Solway would be required for the reality to meet the rhetoric.
So in summary, we may all fry unless we drastically change our ways – and soon.
Meanwhile, despite the bunkum of the industries’ Green marketing, it could yet be we Information Technologists who end up saving the planet!
That’s because the World needs us to help them effectively measure energy use. Because few individuals and businesses effectively measure, they fail to understand and effectively address energy use and costs.
Though we all mump and moan about the rising cost of our energy bills, few actually have any idea of their breakdown. Like the careful driver who feathers the throttle when driving a car with a trip computer measuring instantaneous fuel consumption, we need instant feedback to modify our behaviour. Whilst the gas and ‘leccy meter stay in the cupboard under the stairs, we miss the feedback.
The Utility industry is addressing this only slowly - In Germany Yello Strom are undergoing widespread deployment of Smart Electricity Meters, and closer to home Scottish Hydro have tentatively rolled out these devices which instantly feed back the cost of our actions, so that we don’t fill the kettle quite so full, hang up the washing versus switching on the tumble dryer and understand the value of better insulating our homes.
Whilst the utilities dawdle, a new class of software which address personal energy management has appeared – Google with PowerMeter are aggressively targeting smart meter infrastructure, whilst Microsoft, with their Hohm tool announced in late June, uses expert systems based on location, utility company, home size, etc. to predict energy use in advance of smart meter rollout.
The holy grail for these applications is to integrate with energy measurement and demand mitigation devices (thermostats, electric vehicle charging systems, etc) around the home and industry, to manage and mitigate overall energy use. It is early days, but this could become one of the great IT industry innovation battlefields like the desktop OS, the Browser, or the Search Engine.
Another area where the IT industry can make a huge impact on personal energy use is in travel avoidance. Air and surface travel account for over 40% of our personal energy use (80 of those 40Watt bulbs). The financial and environmental impact of technologies for teleworking and virtual meetings are well documented at the micro level. At the global scale, an ambitious study recently published by the WWF t concluded that the impact of Telework aggressively implemented would have a dramatic effect on World carbon emissions. It claims that by 2050 overall global transportation emissions could drop to between a quarter and a third of their current levels.
This is perhaps an optimistic view – again it is difficult to compel people and businesses to adopt the changes required. Ironically it may be the first global flu pandemic for 40 years which tips the balance. If 100,000 new daily cases of H1N1 swine flu are appearing by late August as predicted by the UK government then Teleworking technologies could help stem the spread of the virus, as well as saving the world one watt at a time.
