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?

Making a thing, almost ANY thing, takes an enormous amount of energy input. These days, most of that energy input is petroleum, generating huge amounts of waste carbon. So regardless of how much BETTER the end product is, it needs to fulfill two criteria to justify the switch:

1. It needs to last forever (or some reasonable facsimile).
2. It needs to use so much less carbon, that it offsets the output of buying something NEW in the first place.

Our problem, as a culture, is less an OIL addiction, as it is an addiction to CONSUMING. Endlessly.

Let’s take the principles of the “Tucker” automobile, and apply them to all consumer goods. Do away with “designed obsolescence“, and try building things to LAST, for a change.

My favorite example of this? A Stanley #2 plane.

(‘But wait!’ you cry. ‘What about the Rabbits?’)

Ah yes. The Rabbits.

Even in “Peak Everything”, when the author discusses how America may need to shift back to a nation with 20-40% of our workforce involved directly in agriculture (in a move called re-ruralization), which mimics much of what Cuba did after the trade embargo was put into place – there’s still too much emphasis on simple vegetables and grain. As a passionate carnivore, I have to ask – Where’s the beef?!?

What’s wrong with cows, anyway? A lot, as it turns out.

1. They produce tons of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s hundreds of times worse than simple carbon dioxide.
2. They’re horribly inefficient at converting feed or pasture to meat.
3. They’re grazed at great distances from where they’re processed, and then transported great distances AGAIN to where they’re consumed.

4. They require relatively high-quality rangeland, and human-edible feed – which contributes directly to the worldwide shortage of arable land.

What’s better? Locally-grown, locally-processed rabbits. Why?

1. Rabbits are incredibly efficient at converting vegetable scraps, and simple non-human-edible vegetation (dandelions, for instance) into meat.
2. Their meat is lean, perhaps cutting down on the obesity endemic.
3. They’re fast and simple to process, with very little toxic byproduct from slaughtering.
4. They breed like, well, like rabbits.
5. They’re simple to breed on a highly-localized scale, reducing transport and attendant fuel costs, pollution, etc.

So here’s my pitch, Mr. Cuban – strike some direct-to-restaurant business deals with major fast-food chains (I’m thinking Wendy’s or McD-scale) for the “Bunny Burger”. Work with these guys on some compelling branding to take the stigma away from breaking fast on the bunny scramble, and put together massively distributed production of bunnies (and their attendant feed). Compost and sell the manure. Feed them kitchen scraps from the same restaurants that are buying your bunny burgers.

Hire the homeless as Neo-shepherds, to keep stray dogs and eagles away from your flock. And where do you put them? How bout the parking garages that will be abandoned as our global economy (and our ability to make ridiculous monthly payments) hits the toilet?

Rabbits. FTW.

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:

“Hey Jim, did you realize that these hard drives fail as they get older? And really reliable hard drives are WAY more expensive.”

“Wow! That SUCKS! Why don’t we just put TWO hard drives in every computer, and copy all the data to BOTH of them?”

No joke. We’ve also done the same thing with (redundant) power supplies, and since all these extra disks and transformers are putting out more HEAT – we’ve had to install more AIR CONDITIONING, too. Oh, and in the REALLY high-end data centers, we’ve got at least one (sometimes two or more) Diesel Generators running at all times – just in CASE the power goes out.

As is typical of the world’s larger problems, the smartest folks haven’t done better – they’ve just done WORSE… in a more complicated way. Let’s take a look at programmers.

Writing software has changed a lot since we started this business. We’ve drifted from the “low-level” languages, up through the “high-level” languages, to things now rightly called “frameworks” that are too abstracted to be considered a language at all.

But along the way (with all this gratuitous computing power sitting around), we’ve gotten UNBELIEVABLY lazy. Here’s an example – it is, by no means, the only one:

Ruby on Rails. A very popular framework, with some fairly typical problems.

Ruby is not, to start with, an efficient language. This means it doesn’t do a very good job of translating “high-level” code, into “low-level” machine code.

Rails, as a framework, is intended to be really easy to use. Which means it does a LOT of stuff for you – much of which you don’t actually need done, in any given case.

Rails uses a database access pattern called “Active Record”. It’s pretty cool, actually – it encapsulates about 10 layers of abstraction, into a few easy-to-use commands.

Unfortunately, that encapsulation ignores most performance impacts. Also unfortunately, the implementation of that pattern – is not thread-safe.

Here’s where the laziness kicks in – rather than fixing the ActiveRecord implementation, or making ruby more efficient in general, someone wrote Mongrel.

What’s Mongrel? An extra web-serving layer, it simply manages a bunch of ruby instances, and hands http requests back and forth. It’s a workaround for the thread-safety problems we were mentioning above.

In software development, it’s called a “Kludge”. In human society, it’s called a “Rat Race”. (We all drive SUVs, even when we object to them environmentally, because we need to be safe – safe in case someone ELSE driving an SUV crashes INTO us. Are you starting to appreciate the irony?)

“So what,” I can hear you saying, “Buying more hardware is cheaper than fixing a whole language, right?”

Yes, it is. And that’s the problem.

Because there are other, more insidious, global impacts of this wasteful computing philosophy. If you need a wickedly fast CPU and a few gigs of Ram to run a Ruby on Rails server, might as well turf out the old servers, right? Those old servers end up as e-waste in developing nations. (HEADLINE: “Lazy coding kills children in the third world”)…

Now, I’m not espousing a return to the good-ol-days of hand-coded assembler, or even web apps written in pure C. But I’ve managed 10,000 http requests per second on a single server (yes, including DB) – simply by taking the extra day or so to tune the database, install some byte-code cacheing – oh, and not running RoR.

Even if you don’t care about the 12 year old kids dying in Thailand while they bake your discarded motherboard over a camel-dung campfire – at least think about the abuse you’re putting your electrons through.

(Editor’s note: Many thousands of electrons were tortured in the writing of this blog post. And yes, this is deliberately provocative link-bait for my overly-zealous RoR-fanatic friends. Which doesn’t make it any less true.)

“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?”

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: nv08, moosecamp, transitcamp, opensource government

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.)

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

I’ve been struggling, every day for some years now, on trying to plan how I can change my entire life. I have to get to the point where I KNOW that my work, my lifestyle, and my household, have a net POSITIVE impact on the planet. And just to be difficult, I’ve challenged myself to do one better – I have to do it in a way that everyone I know can copy.

This means no hermitage, no fleeing to the remote wilderness, no proposals of massive population reduction (unless I can suggest a huge population that we could do without – other than lawyers and lobbyists, of course).

I don’t have a plan, yet. But I’ve started moving, anyway, and I think that’s helped me a lot. (At least, I feel more relaxed about it). Rather than attacking a huge project that I can fail at, here’s how I’m getting moving:

1. Do one thing, right now, that you can do again every day.

Bicycle to work. Bring your own coffee cup to Starbucks. Turn the thermostat down two degrees and put on a sweater. Say “Hi” to your neighbor on the way home.

2. Read one book

It doesn’t even matter which one – just making a tiny commitment to getting educated will, in the long run, help enormously. If you’ve got socially- or environmentally-aware friends, borrow a book from them. If not, hit your local library, and grab something that inspires you. As a last resort, you can browse my bookshelf.

3. Tell one friend (what you’re doing)

Military recruitment works on pride, nationalism, and shame. If you can embrace the planet as your country, and life on it as your kinsmen, then you’ve damn well got plenty to be embarrassed about. Once you’re moving, you owe it to your friends to embarrass them as well.

4. Ask one question (in public, if you can)

As has been oft-reported in the blogosphere lately, no one is asking the candidates anything about their platform, especially when it comes to global warming. Never be too embarrassed to ask a dumb question – that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Now, here’s a dumb question for you: What happens to the smoke that comes out of the exhaust pipe?

5. Skip one trip (in a car)

Not only might you feel great about the pounds of CO2 you’ve kept out of the air, but spending those extra minutes with your children, wife, or dog will help you learn to value slooooowing down. (For added value, give your son or daughter a “get out of the car, free” card, and let them decide which trip you skip. No milk at breakfast time? Maybe it’s time to learn how to cook eggs.)

6. Buy one less (gift, coffee, etc.)

From an early age, we’re taught to equate success with acquisition – of a beautiful woman, a nice car, a big house, a “good” job, etc. It’s taken me years to admit that I often buy coffee, not for the rush of the caffeine, but for the safety-blanket feeling I get from spending money on something expensive that I don’t need. Try getting all the way up to the counter, and then simply not buying it. Not only will you be ahead by a few bucks, (and a few ounces of CO2), but you’ll have a beautiful moment to confront your addiction to consumption.

7. Change one vote

It’s not every election that gets me fired up – I often feel like I don’t even have anyone I could, in good conscience, vote for. But frankly, that’s a cop-out – there’s always some opportunity, usually at the local level, to make some thoughtful contribution to democracy. Try sitting in on a local City Council meeting, or even a School Board meeting. Did you realize that grade-schools in Arizona are planting trees to offset the Carbon Output of the SuperBowl?

8. Pick a reason

This is the “Vision Statement” part, the “Dream Changing”. For many of us, it’s as easy as the four-year-old asleep in the next room. For some of you, it will be your faith, or perhaps your sense of honor, duty, or even guilt. Whatever it is, try and find a personal vision of a future of the human race.

9. Embrace inconvenience

I’ve blogged about inconvenience before, but I’ll state it here again. (Credit goes to the Author of the “Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook“, Albert Bates). If you run out of gas and have to push your car to the side of the road, it’s a lot of hard work. Imagine pushing that car up and down hills, for a distance of 25-30 miles. That’s the equivalent of 6 weeks of hard labor – and when we’re debt-financing that on our carbon credit card, we’re making a down payment of just $3.00.

Walking to the store, cycling to work, carpooling across town, buying from local grocers instead of big-box stores, even taking the time to understand the issues – it’s all inconvenient. It takes time. Embrace it.

10. Measure yourself

Fat people don’t look at scales. What you measure, you change. It’s not about setting goals explicitly; it’s about digging further and further into the truth, until the goals state themselves.

I haven’t found an online “Carbon Output” estimation tool that I really like yet – when I do, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, try keeping track of how much you spend on gas, heating oil, water and electricity. (Those are easy to total up once a year). For the go-getters, you can compare the pounds of garbage you bag up every week, with the pounds of recycling and/or compost.

11. Strive to do better

Striving is a simple idea – that we’re not done, yet. That we’re responsible. In my family home when I was growing up, we had a big mirror in the front hall, with a sign under it. The sign said “The Buck Stops Here.”

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.

It’s true. Even wars need to be personified. As individuals, and as a mob, we treat threats with a face (terrorism, muggings) as way more serious than those without (car accidents, poverty, environmental issues) – regardless of the real numbers. As an example, cited from the book I mention above, the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11th killed around 3,000 people. Another 24,000 people died that day from starvation – and every day before, or since. But starvation has no face.

Recruitment has done well with a face, too. Remember good ‘ol “Uncle Sam needs YOU”? Possibly the most successful propaganda campaign EVER run by any government anywhere, and it was simple personification of military recruitment, as a stern but friendly family member.

So we need a face for Carbon – and no, I’m not suggesting we single out any particular political, special-interest-group or petroleum multinational for this visage; something more along the lines of Uncle Sam. But an evil, twisted, half-relative with social problems – the crazy, knife-wielding brother of Aunt Betty. He needs to be committed – for his own safety, as well as ours.

Maybe we could borrow some terror from 50 years of Hollywood, and name him Carbon Krueger.

If we give him a face, then people can compare him with other threats (dictators, both at home and abroad), and decide how to prioritize.

So here’s my stab – tag photos CarbonKrueger if you think they’re a good candidate. Tag bookmarks CarbonKrueger if you think they help personalize and personify the impacts of Carbon. Use #CarbonKrueger on twitter for your discussions. I’m going to add a Google News Alert, and watch how this works. (I’ve never done the blog-meme thing before, but let’s give it a try.)

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“.

• 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

Blogged with Flock