Archive for category carbon
“Rabbits FTW” – The Mark Cuban Stimulus Package Needs Meat
Posted by admin in carbon, entrepreneurs on 23Feb09
Most of my (non-work-related) thinking these days circles around how we, as a species, a culture, or a geographical collection of human flesh, can make a smooth recovery from our petroleum addiction. I read a fair bit on the subject, from the “Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook”
As is often the case with the large, complex issues facing humanity, most of our effort is (dare I say it?) wasted on trying to fix the wrong things. Like changing our lightbulbs. Even changing our cars is, most of the time, the wrong thing. Why? Read the rest of this entry »
Ruby on Rails causes Global Warming
Posted by admin in carbon, entrepreneurs on 31Oct08
I use a laptop. Which means, as I peck away at my keyboard in the waning hours of the evening, I can smell the slow charring of my wool pants (mixed with the redolent odor of singed leg hair) as the tiny fan embedded in my computer tries desperately to keep this multi-thousand-dollar device, from melting into a pile of slag.
As a self-taught engineer, I tend to notice the glaringly-obvious – perhaps more than many of my well-educated peers. And there’s one obvious lesson in this – if solid state electronics are getting HOT, they’re wasting using a fair amount of power.
In a nuclear reactor somewhere out there, an atom died for the pixels on my screen. Another few drops of precious oil, or a few tons more gasified coal, were spilt for those extra minutes of Microsoft Word (or perhaps “Grand Theft Auto 4″).
Moore’s Law has shown us how the steady change of computing SPEED (doubling), and COST (halving), has reliably powered our advancing Information Age. Yet nothing in Moore’s Law has halted the seemingly inexorable increase in ENERGY requirements, of these most devious of machines.
This is not a problem that we’ve address head on – in our subsidized energy economy, there has been no real motivation to do so. In fact, as our dependency on computing infrastructure has deepened, we’ve made it WORSE. Here’s how it works: Read the rest of this entry »
Live Blogging – Northern Voice / Moosecamp 08 – TransitCAMP
Dustin Sachs is giving us the rundown on transitCAMP, and the challenges of “open source government.”
“Google has the transit data, but we don’t.”
No Canadian cities have made this data publicly accessible.
Some folks have scraped the site for the data themselves. (If they publish it, they’ll prob. get sued, though).
Someone in the back of the room knows the guy at BC Transit who helped release the data to Google – says it’s just in text files.
Question from the room: “What’s the problem with just Google having it? Does the public really NEED it?”
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Tags: nv08, moosecamp, transitcamp, opensource government
How-To Change Your Life: 11 Steps to Carbon Neutral
No, it’s not about your lightbulbs. It’s in your head.
A lot of the emphasis in my childhood was on being responsible for yourself – not simply in the sense of providing for your own needs, but actually taking responsibility for who you are, and how you behave. The obvious corollary was learning how to change. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not impossible. Nor is it magical, mysterious, or something involving $300 /hr therapists. But it does take work – and a bit of know-how.
My father explained it to me quite succinctly, when I was around 17 and I decided that I needed to start putting my laundry away, rather than leaving it in a stack on the dresser (which quickly became a heap on the floor.)
- Build up some momentum by changing a few simple, easy things. This can get you into a habit of winning at change. (For instance, every time I wanted to do this I would switch to brushing my teeth with my left hand. It’s easy to remember, and a great daily sticking point).
- Then WAIT to start on your change until you’re ready to WIN. It’s more important to do it right once, than it is to do it right now.
- Find something that you can do every day, even if you’re changing how you react to an annual event (like thanksgiving with the inlaws). It will give you a chance to invest additional energy and attention on your decision.
- If you get through the first week without missing a day, you’ve got a beachhead. Making it through the first month gets you most of the way there. After that, it’s all about the rest of your life. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Win the War – Personifying the “Enemy” of Carbon Output
I’ve been reading “Confessions of an Economic Hitman
The sad fact is, we’re hardwired to deal with emergencies. We’re biologically programmed to run from tigers. But when it comes to slow-moving, inexorably advancing walls of ice (like heart disease, greenhouse gases or even obesity), we’re basically useless.
Why? Because they don’t have a face. Read the rest of this entry »
Thought-experiment: Bicycle-powered Heat Pump?
My furnace is just about shot.
It’s a 70s-era oil furnace that came with the house. It smells funny, it sucks oil down like a breast-fed three-year-old, and it’s burning a serious hole in my pocket.
Since I’ve got to do something about it, I figured I’d go one step better than a simple upgrade, and put in a heat pump. Heat pumps are one of the coolest things invented in the last few centuries. (My own personal standard of coolness is the bicycle, which I consider to be the closest man has come so far to a perfect machine, with the exception of the friction brakes. All braking should be energy recapture.)
When I realized that a heat pump is effectively 200-300% efficient (compared to production of heat), I started to wonder if it could be made even more environmentally friendly by doing away with the electrical motor entirely. A little research uncovered gas-engine-powered heat pumps, but I wanted to go even farther – bicycle power.
The most popular consumer-grade bicycle generator outputs around 200 watts of electricity. If I assume that the generator efficiency is around 60% (based on data on wikipedia), and we use direct-drive of the compressor, then effective power output of the cyclist is about 330 watts.
If I was REALLY hard-core, I can imagine bicycling 2 hours, every day, for a total power generation of:
330 watts * 2 hours * 365 days = 240 kWh per year.
A two-ton heat pump from Goodman (the SSZ16, for those of you following along from home) draws 1.7 kW at 47 degrees F (the typical measurement point). If, theoretically, a one-ton unit drew only half that (it doesn’t), and we took some advantage (not much) from avoiding the electric motor and using direct drive from the bicycle, we *might* be able, with two cyclists, to run a heat pump in real time.
Wow. For a near-perfect machine, that’s a lot of wasted power.
In an upcoming post, I’ll be looking into ways we can establish a mental framework for evaluating our energy usage, and other aspects of our “inconvenience“.
Inconvenience – Life Racing to Zero Impact
The Concept:
Take the basic ideas (problem description) from “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Create a regional contest (bounty) for teams with the lowest global impact (average per person on the team) over 6 months. Global Impact is measured and documented as:
- Carbon output
- Non-renewables consumed
- Average distance food travels (aka carbon output in transport)
- Social impact (Average wage in USD of all workers in the supply chain of all goods and services consumed)
Obviously need a good baseline and some rough approximations.
Contests are regional in scope (e.g., Inconvenience Vancouver Island, Inconvenience Chicago, etc).
Teams can seek local or international corporate sponsors as appropriate to their plan (BC Hydro for a team looking mostly at electrical reduction, etc.)
Teams are responsible for documenting their score (photographic evidence of bicycle transport, power bills, etc.)
Make a reality TV show around it.
Host a massive awards ceremony with Celebrity MCs.
Kick it off with a rock concert, bring the teams up on stage in between acts.
If we can figure out a way to generate a handicap for each region (based on climate, available options, etc.) then we could play regional champions against each other.
THE NAME:
Obviously a not-subtle reference to the film, it also highlights that it is, at most, an “Inconvenience” to change your lifestyle to save the planet, and by extension, humanity.
It’s verbable.
It can be abbreviated to iCon, which also has interesting connotations as being a symbol of something bigger.
The domain name is parked and possibly for sale (or donation?)
STRATEGIES:
Plant sedge-grass for carbon-credit offset.
Rules should include not buying carbon credits, has to be direct action.
Direct action can include educational campaigns, with some percentage of the effects of the educational campaign scored against the team.
Note that final teams will probably all have NEGATIVE scores.
PS:
If someone runs with this before I get it together, more power to you. But you should still use bountyup.com for the prize 
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