Terra Infirma: Bringing Sustainability to Life

Boss Paints

2009-07-02T14:57:00.003Z

As I mentioned on Monday, I'm in Belgium and visited Boss Paints on Tuesday to interview the boss, Toon Bossuyt. Boss has done many clever things, many of which will feature in my next book, but one is to produce 25% of the electricity supply from solar PV on the roof.

Belgium has gone solar mad - there are incentives for installation and a feed-in tariff to guarantee a decent return. When Boss first put 64 panels on the roof, it was the biggest in Belgium. Now they have 1477, but they've still not retained that accolade. When I've been travelling to and fro by train it is rare not to see one roof in every suburb or village with a sizeable array.

In the picture above, there's a silver coating on the roof which keeps the buildings cool in summer - it also has an albedo effect - reflecting the suns' rays back into space without causing climate change. Clever.

I'm on the road...

2009-06-29T09:06:00.000Z

...well, rails actually. By the time you read this I'll be getting on board Eurostar for a speedy trip to Belgium where I'll be interviewing the MD of a revolutionary paint company for my next book (more details on this to follow) and attending a consultants' workshop. My ability to blog may be compromised as I don't know what the internet facilities will be like and I'm taking the family for a city break to Bruges at the same time.

As well as book #2, there are a number of other exciting developments in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

Obama's big moment

2009-06-26T10:09:00.002Z

Barack Obama is about to put his climate change bill to Congress (the news story in this month's Low Carbon Agenda was a little premature). It has been battered, swollen with compromises and slightly watered down, but given this is the home of Big Oil, big cars and big bellies we are talking about, it would be unreasonable to expect even the saintly Obama to execute a handbrake turn in this mother of all economic supertankers. A key moment, and one which will resonate around the world.

Meanwhile the UK Government is working up a strategy for financing the shift to the low carbon economy for the Copenhagen conference later this year. Details are a bit sketchy so far, but it appears to be based on a form of contraction and convergence. Cynics may suggest that they need to focus on national leadership as well as making international noises. But overall, there is the impression of building momentum for a post-Kyoto settlement and one which will really deliver.

So, if dawn breaks on a brand new low carbon world, will you be ready for it?

What's your budget? Uh...

2009-06-24T08:55:00.004Z

The killer question I ask when helping organisations improve their sustainability is "What's your budget?". The answer is usually a "uh..." accompanied by a slight blush.

Like most organisations you have an environment/sustainability policy. It says you are committed to good things X, Y and Z.

How committed? Where's the money?

To do X, Y and Z someone has to go cap in hand, trying to filch part of someone else's budget. And you're surprised things happen slowly?

Make the commitment. Assign a budget. Yes, in a recession. Put your money where your mouth is.

Are you ready for the CRC?

2009-06-22T08:50:00.003Z

If you are a UK-based large organisation and you haven't checked whether you will come under the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) yet, then you'd better get moving. In this presentation, Jane Dennett-Thorpe of The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) explains some of the latest developments as the consultation on the CRC comes to an end (source: edie).

Which green thinkers do you rate?

2009-06-18T19:45:00.000Z

For a wee side-project I'm doing, I'd be grateful for suggestions of your favourite breakthrough green thinkers - people who have really made a difference in the sustainability field like Rachel Carson (of Silent Spring fame) rather than communicators/campaigners like Al Gore and George Monbiot.

For example, the people who I rate are Amory Lovins (RMI), McDonough & Braungart (MBDC), Jaime Lerner (Curitiba), Prof Tim Jackson (Surrey Uni), Janine 'Biomimicry' Benyus and Bob Frosch (ISIE). Other candidates could be Nicholas Stern, James Lovelock (gaia) and David Pearce (Blueprint for a Green Economy).

Thanks in anticipation of your wisdom!

Free: 101 Carbon-busting Tips

2009-06-16T12:49:00.001Z

Now available from the resources page.

You can't say I don't spoil you...

More free resources

2009-06-16T07:00:00.002Z

I've just added two new free resources on the Resources page:

1. Climate Change FAQs for Executives - a quick guide to the science of climate change.

2. Terra Infirma Brainstorming tool - useful for developing green solutions.

There's more in the pipeline.

Feedback from the Low Carbon Innovation Exchange

2009-06-15T09:17:00.004Z

As promised, some notes from last week's Low Carbon Innovation Network. Numbers were slightly depleted due to the Tube strike which brought central London to a standstill.

I facilitated two sessions:

1. Long-term Environmental Strategy

In this session we had a food wholesaler, a recycling company, an energy monitoring system company and 2 consultants (including myself). It was very clear that companies were getting started by identifying and exploiting 'quick wins', but were struggling to convert this momentum into a long term strategy.

The most interesting point from this was that the maximum time frame that participarts were working to a 2 year timeframe - so anything over this was regarded as "long-term". This was reflected in the tendency for the conversation to drift into operational issues rather than strategy.

2. Empowering Staff to Take Action

We had 3 council officers, 3 from industry and 3 consultants including myself and an organisational psychologist. The latter worried me a bit as I was an engineer talking about her area of expertise, but she agreed with the vast majority of what I put forward.

Many of the participants had done the basics - setting up committees, appointing green champions and running awareness events. We discussed ways of making this fun for people - quizzes, clothes swaps and green away days were some of the examples given.

When I asked whether anyone had witnessed a manager showing leadership in this area there was embarrassed silence until one of the consultants recounted a business she knew where the directors had built an ethical business from scratch, recruiting only people who would be committed to those values and behaving in a low carbon manner always.

No-one had really tried getting their staff to generate solutions (I distributed the Terra Infirma brainstorming tool to help those who wanted to try).

As always I really enjoyed the sessions and I'm always trying to stretch the people who come along out of their comfort zone. But I'm getting frustrated that while participants think they are really making progress, they're not really breaking through to making a real difference to the way they operate.

Ray Anderson, Interface

2009-06-12T07:00:00.000Z

Interface is one of the world's leaders in green business in the rather unsexy field of carpet - they also happen to be the biggest producer of modular carpet in the world. CEO Ray Anderson is not the greatest public speaker in the world, but his message is compelling.

Sneak preview...

2009-06-09T10:53:00.000Z

Coming soon...

Green Energy Investment Overtakes Fossil Fuels

2009-06-08T09:26:00.003Z

In 2008 wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted $140bn (£85bn) compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation (source: Guardian). There was a slight drop in investment at the start of 2009, but this is apparently recovering.

Given this background, it makes the decision by many 'big oil' companies to pull out of renewables an odd one. I'm sticking with my prediction that they will become the vacuum tube manufacturers of the 21st Century - the fossilised energy industry.

Don't forget...

2009-06-05T08:58:00.002Z

...I'll be facilitating those two sessions at the Low Carbon Innovation Network, next Thursday, 11 June at the Olympia, London.

Just to remind you, the sessions are:

1. Long Term Environmental Strategy, 10:00am

2. Empowering staff to take action, 3:30pm

My summaries of previous events can be seen here and here. Of course, I'll be posting a summary of next week's sessions here after the event.

Nudge, nudge!

2009-06-03T07:00:00.002Z

OK, so I'm a 12 months behind the curve, but I've just finished last year's political must-read "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The central thesis of the book is that we humans like having choices rather than being told what to do, but paradoxically we're not that good at making the best choice for ourselves or society if the issue is complex. Thaler and Sunstein introduce the rather clunkily titled concept of "libertarian paternalism" which translates into plain English as "the choice is yours, but if I were you I'd pick that one", the second part of this being the 'nudge' of the title.

The book is long on examples and arguments and a little short on the 'how to' aspect, but I've gathered that the three main types of 'nudges' are:

1. The default choice is chosen carefully to be the 'best' one eg should we have to opt out of organ donation rather than opt in?

2. The 'best' choice is the easiest, cheapest or most obvious one eg lower car tax for less polluting vehicles.

3. Sufficient information is disclosed to help the chooser make a good choice (would the current MPs expenses scandal have happened if they all had been forced to disclose their expenses claims to the electorate?).

On some levels this may appear manipulative, but the authors make a strong argument that the alternatives are to either ban undesirable behaviour (the infamous 'nanny state'), or to abandon people to make suboptimal choices.

Chapter 12 of the book is entitled "Saving the Planet" and examples of eco-nudges include:

1. Cap-and-trade for industrial carbon emissions (not cutting emissions is going to cost you, but the choice of how to cut them is yours).

2. Information provision through disclosure, labelling or feedback eg the US Toxic Release Inventory, domestic smart meters, and cars that tell you if you're overdoing the accelerator.

3. Voluntary schemes and standards for industry (the authors use the US 'Green Light' label as an example).

I can think of many more cases where these have been, or could be applied. The EU's energy label (below) has been brilliantly effective in transforming the white goods market, raising the market of share of the most efficient A-rated models from 0 to 76% in a decade. It's easy to see why this nudge works - you can buy any washing machine you like, but as you're spending the money you might as well go for an A-rated machine rather than a D. Who wants a D? And, if no-one is buying Ds, why would anyone manufacture one? The market is transformed, but the only rule is that showrooms have to display the certificate.

Kerbside recycling shows how communities can nudge themselves - once a certain proportion of a street puts out their separated waste participation suddenly shoots up. In contrast, when UK councils started trying to reduce residual waste collections from weekly to fortnightly by dictat there was uproar in the media and some councils changed political control due to this issue alone. Maybe if councils had introduced it by saying "you can keep your weekly collections, but you have to opt in for this on an annual basis" the uproar would have been subdued and the laggards would have gradually caught up with the mainstream as those neighbours who went with the default option demonstrated that the system is OK. Actually, it strikes me that local authorities could benefit most from the 'nudge' approach - they tend to bear the brunt of media attacks on any change ("Town Hall Bullies/Loonies" etc) and this could deflect most of that initial ire and transform behaviour more gradually.

Having read Nudge, I'm not surprised it caused such a fuss in the political sphere and there is a huge opportunity to use it to transform environmental behaviour both within industry and consumers alike. Highly recommended reading.

"Nice idea, but it will never work"

2009-06-01T05:47:00.002Z

There is a lovely story (probably apocryphal*) of a student taking a design proposal to the head of Cambridge University Engineering Department. The Prof looked at the plans and said

"Nice idea, Whittle, but it will never work."

The student was of course Sir Frank Whittle and the design was for the jet engine.

Whether or not exchange really happened, there is a whole cadre of such eminent thinkers, either retired or in the twilight of their careers, who regularly try to throw similar sticks into the spokes of green/low carbon technology. Letters regularly appear in the press from these chaps, typically saying:

"Before everyone rushes to embrace wind power/the hydrogen economy/electric vehicles/biomass (delete as appropriate), a few simple sums show that to replace all electricity/gasoline vehicles/domestic heating systems would require [something impossible/very expensive]. This headlong rush to do [X] is foolhardy if not downright dangerous".

Those simple sums usually assume that the technology involved is intended to replace its conventional equivalent entirely, without any change to usage patterns, without any evolution in the technology concerned and at current prices. They ignore the immutable laws of technological development - as technologies mature their costs plummet, efficiencies improve, synergies emerge and user behaviour changes to suit. But you have to start at the beginning of that cycle, you can't just parachute into the maturity phase.

The annoying thing for me is that these would-be Cassandras know this better than anyone. I don't know if they're just stuck in their ways, need to feel important and relevant, or whether they just resent the world passing them by. But given all their knowledge and experience, the world would be a better place if they would open their minds and become part of the solution, not part of the problem.

* The Cambridge angle to the story doesn't seem to match up with Whittle's biog, but he did apparently meet such resistance in the RAF.

Mitsubishi i MiEV hits the UK

2009-05-29T07:05:00.000Z

This week I got to drive one of the first two Mitsubishi i MiEV plug-in electric cars in the UK. Like most electric passenger vehicles it is a sharp mover and a sharp stopper too as the regenerative braking kicks in, charging the batteries again.

According to Mitsubishi, its range is 100 miles on a full charge and its carbon emissions are about 30% of a petrol equivalent (presumably using the carbon intensity of Japanese electricity as a guide). A quick charge will take it to 80% of battery capacity in 30 minutes, but a full standard charge takes 7 hours.

This is quite a breakthrough - an electric car that you could imagine being seen (but not heard) in. The range would be a bit limiting for me - I'd like to see an extra 50 miles there as I often do a 80-100 mile round trip to clients on Teesside and I would want a bit of headroom in case of traffic problems etc. Tesla, makers of the impressive electric sports car, are working on a 300 mile saloon, which would be brilliant.

It is clear that electric cars are starting to evolve quickly and it will be very interesting to see how quickly they become a mainstream choice.

Some Ideas to Chu On...

2009-05-27T09:01:00.004Z

While the last year has seen Barack Obama hogging the limelight of US politics, his new Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel prize-winning physicist, has been emerging as a refreshingly honest and practical voice to combat climate change. Unlike most politicos in his position, Chu is more concerned with results than process.

His calls for flat roofs to be painted white (to reflect more solar energy back into space without contributing to climate change), his embracing of ideas such as 'negawatts' - energy you don't use, and his energetic participation in bike-to-work day have really endeared him to me, but green groups are not so sure. He has been attacked for changing his mind on permitting coal fired powerstations and has slashed funding for the hydrogen economy. His focus instead has been on energy efficiency and biofuels.

But his biggest challenge will be to win over his fellow US politicians in Congress - resistance to carbon reductions is fierce and entrenched, with Rep Joe Barton declaring recently "Carbon dioxide is natural - you can't regulate God". Quite.

Good luck to him!

More example projects...

2009-05-26T08:09:00.004Z

We've just updated the projects page on this site to better reflect the kind of work we have been doing in the last 12 months or so.

You'll see we've been deliberately shifting away from 'heads down, long report' type projects to working in collaboration with our clients and their stakeholders to develop more strategic solutions as this is where we believe more value lies for those clients.

This extra value comes from:

Collaboration = stronger ownership of solutions = more successful implementation
Collaboration = more capacity in the client organisation to implement projects = more successful implementation
Collaboration = utilising the intellectual capital (employee's nous!) already there = better solutions
Strategic = longer term solutions = better ROI
Strategic = higher level staff engagement (typically director level) = stronger leadership

If any of this is of any interest to you, then drop me a line.

The key to understanding climate change

2009-05-22T08:13:00.005Z

In my opinion, much of the confusion and public uncertainty over climate change is a lack of understanding of the difference between weather and climate.

Weather consists of the short term patterns of temperature, pressure, winds and precipitation from hour to hour, day to day, year to year.
Climate is defined as the 30 year average of weather patterns.

If you imagine standing at the water's edge on a beach, weather is like the movement of the water backwards and forwards as the waves break and recede, but climate is like the tide - the longer term trend of the water in or out. You can easily see the former, but the latter is harder to notice until your feet get wet.

The reason why the difference between the two is so crucial, is that man made carbon emissions have weak effect on weather. Despite an increased concentration of greenhouse gases, winter will always be colder than its preceding summer, and indeed each year has a reasonable possibility of being cooler than the previous one. If you have a look at the average global temperatures on the graph below (the blue points) and zero in on any 3-4 years, it is hard to see a pattern. In fact on this scale, the biggest influence on the temperature in any one year is the El Nino/La Nina weather system in the Pacific. For example 2008 was a strong La Nina year. La Nina brings temperature down which is why 2008 was the coolest year since 2000.

Climate change deniers and sceptics will be rubbing their hands with glee if they've read the last paragraph, but what they don't understand is that man-made carbon emissions may have a weak effect day to day or even year to year, but it is a persistent effect, slowly ratcheting up average temperatures. This is because carbon emissions, unlike say water vapour, must be taken out of the atmosphere by chemical or biological transformations (eg photosynthesis). 2008 may have been a rather cold year relative to the previous 6, but it is still much warmer than any year before 1998. If you look at the red line (a 5 year rolling average, so still quite short term in the sense of climate) there is a clear upward trend. This trend cannot be explained by natural cycles, but it can be explained by increased carbon emissions.

So if anyone ever says to you "How can there be global warming if we had two weeks snow in February?", your standard reply should be "That's just weather!"

Book Review: Blueprint for a Safer Planet by Nicholas Stern

2009-05-20T06:41:00.001Z

Nicholas Stern's 2006 eponymous report has been credited with taking the climate change debate out of academic and green circles and into the 'real world' of economics (given what has happened to the world economy since, there is some irony in it being seen as more 'real' than the piece of rock we're all sat on). This book builds on that report to present a way forward to "a new era of progress and prosperity" as the tagline of the book would have it. It is clearly written for the benefit of those attending or sending delegations to the crucial Copenhagen COP15 conference later this year which will attempt to form a post-Kyoto international climate change agreement.

Stern's main point is that climate change is market failure on a grand scale. By fixing the market - putting a realistic price on the value of carbon and providing an effective trading mechanism - the economy can decarbonise itself, protect forests and go some way to dealing with global inequalities. It is the first point which is most controversial. Stern argues that to discount future costs of climate change is unethical despite it being common practice for most forms of investment (discounting accounts for the fact that if I offered you £10 today or £11 next year, you'd probably take the tenner right now). This is a question I naively asked 10 years ago on an academic environmental economics forum. I sat back while several eminent contributors started slinging increasingly puerile insults at each other across the ether, and unsurprisingly Stern got quite a bit of stick for this aspect of his original report. Personally, I'm with him on this - if we're going to take the intergenerational equality aspect of sustainable development seriously, then we can't discount the negative impacts that later generations are going to face.

My only criticism of the book is its readability. The sentences are long and have multiple subclauses, the paragraphs are rarely enlivened by either bullet points or metaphors and there is a lack of recap or summary at key places to help the reader. The chapter on ethics and discounting is particularly poor on this front which is a shame as this is where the reader needs to concentrate most. While this may not be a problem for the two-brained bureaucrats it is aimed at, it turned what should have been a very informative read into a real chore. I've since read Vince Cable's excellent book on the current economic situation ("The Storm") in a fraction of the time and retained much more of the content.

So, overall, this is an exceedingly important contribution to tackling climate change and it should be on the reading list for everyone involved in COP15. It's just a shame it wasn't more accessible for the rest of us.

More low carbon workshops with yours truly

2009-05-18T07:30:00.001Z

Once again I'll be facilitating two sessions at the Low Carbon Innovation Network, this time on 11 June at the Olympia, London.

The sessions are:

1. Long Term Environmental Strategy, 10:00am

2. Empowering staff to take action, 3:30pm

These events are really good and I always learn loads during the sessions. If you want some info about previous events, see here and here. Highly recommended.

Would I join a club which would have me?

2009-05-13T07:54:00.003Z

I've just received an invitation to become a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) on account of my "influential work in the field of environmental performance and sustainable development."

My first reaction was "they must be desperate", my second was that one of my colleagues had nominated me (one of our associates, Karen Johnson is already a Fellow), but it seems that, no, it is a genuine honour. I'm both proud and humbled!

Never Google "Climate Change"...

2009-05-12T05:20:00.003Z

I've been refreshing my climate change slides for a couple of forthcoming workshops - one with NHS directors and the other for staff from a leading international engineering firm. And it's taking me deep into the murky world of the blogosphere.

The scientific consensus on climate change is clear. The scientific community is somewhere between 97 and 99% certain that man-made carbon emissions are responsible for a significant change in climate and, if this continues, the impacts on the earth will be huge. The political world is waking up to this consensus, and with the US, Australian and Chinese leaderships really leaping on board, there is a great chance of a significant international agreement in Copenhagen later this year.

But in a huge number of blogs and comments on forums and newspaper articles, these scientists, politicians and green activists are labelled "warmists", "alarmists" and "socialists" who are trying to curtail free enterprise and raise taxes (the greens retaliate with the loaded term "denier"). Therefore the scientific consensus must be a conspiracy with research funding only going to those who toe this political line (ignoring the fact that the scientific world has been struggling to get politicians to take note of climate change for decades).

So why are all these people convinced that there is a great swindle going on? Well...

1. Climate change really does threaten a lot of vested interests. From the fossil fuel executive to the couple who like their city-breaks to the man proudly polishing his SUV every Sunday, somebody is telling them they can't do what they want to do.

2. The science is complex once you get past the basics, leading to apparent anomalies which can be seen as a case against - I know people who are convinced it isn't happening because we had a two-week cold snap in the UK this winter, when there was a heat wave in the other hemisphere at the same time.

3. There is no quality control in most of cyberspace and no barrier to entry (many of the "deniers" lack even a degree level qualification in a related topic). Discredited 'facts' keep bouncing back from repeated rebuttal, conspiracy theories thrive and falsified data and graphs magically appear.

So, the moral of the story is: listen to the experts - those who have published peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject - and never, ever google "climate change".

A new start for district heating?

2009-05-08T10:41:00.004Z

According to the ENDS report, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has commissioned a report on district heating in the UK, which accounts for just 2% of heat demand. It recommends the government intervene as district heating is “the preferred option for achieving carbon reduction in built up areas”. If a scheme was powered by waste heat from a power station, it would save carbon dioxide at a cost of £50 per tonne. This compares to over £150/t for solar thermal units and over £500/t for ground source heat pumps.

This is music to my ears. If you've been reading this blog for long you'll know it's a hobby horse of mine.

In this country we simply let two thirds of the fossil fuel energy we put into our electricity generation system fly up into the sky (or out into the sea). So much of this could be used to heat homes, public buildings, offices and factories at zero additional carbon and there is loads of it. 60% of Denmark's heat load is delivered through district heating.

We did a project in 2007 mapping potential heat users around a proposed power station in the North of England and found a good network of public buildings around which to base a commercially viable system. There are a number of CHP based district heating schemes like the establish one in Southampton and the new one in Birmingham. So there are green shoots in this area and Government investment would be very welcome.

Swine & Sustainability

2009-05-05T07:59:00.004Z

OK, now it appears safe to do so, let's have a look at the probable origins of swine flu. We take a natural system - the pig - and industrialise it - breeding for maximum production and rearing them in huge numbers in unnatural conditions. Such a system maximises the opportunities for disease to flourish, so we dose them in antibiotics, but the bugs have the same desire to survive that we all do, so they mutate and adapt. The industrial system can only be made more productive by exporting it to countries where costs are lower, standards are lower and, for the same reasons, the local health infrastructure cannot cope with the results of the recipe for pandemic we have created. And guess what we get?

We appear to have been lucky this time - this flu spreads quickly but apparently doesn't have the proteins necessary to cause widespread death, but I get the impression that this is down to luck rather more than anything else.

All our environmental problems come from the same root cause - we are happy to exploit the natural resources around us (land, oxygen, animals, plants, fossil fuels, minerals etc, etc) without worrying about the sustainability of supply of those goods and services ie how they fit into the planet's natural cycles. One of the godfathers of the permaculture/organic farming movement, Masanobu Fukuoka, famously said:

"If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork."

This disregard for the physical realities of the piece of rock we inhabit can lead to slow(ish) degradation like climate change and sudden disasters like pandemics. It is down to human nature that we fear the latter much more than the former, even though the impacts are often fleeting.

But both tell us we have to learn to respect the natural limits of the planet we live on - this is what we call sustainabilty. That will take ingenuity, innovation and some restraint. But we can, and must, do it.