Carbon Copy

give a damn

There are a few homeless people in the world, but not nearly as many as some people would have us believe.

There are billions of inadequately housed, under-resourced, oppressed, crime-ridden, malnourished and disease-afflicted people. But that is not the same as being homeless. I draw the (perhaps obvious) distinction because governments responsible for the welfare of large numbers of housing-challenged people have a tendency to set themselves housing targets so that they can claim political points for providing homes for the homeless. It's time to change the paradigm; time to take the focus off the house and put it onto the services needed to support the community.

I am not for a moment suggesting that a tin-and-cardboard shack is preferable to a more robust dwelling, but given the inability of government agencies (in South Africa, at least) to deliver houses on a scale that eliminates informal shacks and in a way that keeps communities intact, I have to wonder why there isn't official recognition that conditions in squatter settlements need to be improved.

the three Rs return

As long as I can remember, we've been told about the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. At some point we've added Repair (to extend the life of a product) and Repurpose (when it isn't suitable any more for what it was made for, use it for something else). That's all very well, but most products aren't designed with this in mind, so it's difficult to take the mantra seriously. With the focus on carbon though, we're starting to move from cradle-to-grave analysis, as a way of looking at a product's lifecycle impacts, to cradle-to-cradle analysis that is intended to encourage products to be designed never to enter landfill sites.

Buildings are given recognition under green accreditation schemes like LEED, BREEAM and Green Star for being designed so that the materials that go into them can be used for something else when the building is disassembled. Products can also be C2C certified, which means they are designed not just to be carbon neutral, but to produce zero waste: either recycled or reused endlessly, or returned to a natural, ecologically benign state. If things are designed this way, then the three Rs become a meaningful paradigm, and the goal of zero waste might just become reachable.

storing heat underground

Some innovative green buildings use piles of rocks in the basement to store heat or coolness, to even out the night and day temperature fluctuations in buildings without air conditioning or fossil-fueled heating.

Now, tests have shown that it is feasible to store heat underground to do the same thing over several months instead of just days, using what amounts to sub-surface radiators. Paving on roads and parking lots do a wonderful job of storing the sun's heat. In summer, this unfortunately contributes to the urban heat island effect, but where pavement is necessary, the heat could be harvested in summer to keep ice off roads in winter, or to heat buildings.

In the UK, scientists found in a trial on a section of road that enough heat was captured in the summer of 2006 to keep the road above freezing for almost all of the following winter. On average, the heated surface was 3C warmer than the surrounding ground. And a trial at an Edinburgh supermarket car park suggested that the system could cut the store's carbon footprint by 70% and slash annual fuel bills by £26,000 for an initial investment of about £180,000.

wanna move some dirt?

Everyone knows about hybrid cars, but unless you are into heavy machinery, you probably haven't heard of the new hybrid Caterpillar D7E dozer. From next year we'll start seeing it on construction sites. A bit like a diesel-electric train, this Cat uses a diesel engine to generate electricity, which feeds electric drive and steering motors. It will be able to move 25 percent more material per gallon of fuel than the machine it replaces. Less fuel means less emissions, so this baby will help reduce the carbon impact of big construction projects.

will that be for here, or to go?

This mobile solar cooker is on display at the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town. According to the display panel,

The Sustainable Energy Society of South Africa, in collaboration with the Soweto Information Centre in Johannesburg, has initiated a project to promote the use of solar cookers in urban and rural environments of South Africa.

Mathias Weber decided to make a solar cooker more mobile by mounting it onto a tricycle, which is used by the Greenhouse Project for Recycling Programme. His 'Solar Tricycle Pilot Project' has been active in Newtown, Johannesburg, since May 2005 and has created a huge awareness of alternative cooking methods.

The tricycle-mounted solar cooker can cook porridge, pop popcorn and heat up a variety of dishes, using only the energy of the sun.

Currently, street food vendors in South Africa use hazardous, unhealthy and costly methods of cooking, such as paraffin stoves, Primus stoves and Imbaulas (perforated paraffin tins with a fire inside). These cooking methods release harmful gases and ashes into the atmosphere and contribute to the development of respiratory diseases.

Solar cookers are clean, non-polluting, efficient and cost-effective and offer a very viable alternative for street food vendors.

For photos of the cooker out in the community, and a description of Mathias' work, have a look at the Solar Energy Project. The site also describes other solar food projects in a number of countries.

Copenhagen Consensus - four years on

Four years ago, academic Bjørn Lomborg put together a panel of economists under the banner of the Copenhagen Consensus Center to come up with a prioritised list of projects to address a selection of the world's great contemporary challenges. Lomborg's assumption was that money allocated to address climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers could be most effectively spent if priorities were based on rational economic assessment. The resulting list put climate change strategies down at the bottom of the pile.

Lomborg's panel is meeting again this month for a fourth anniversary update, so it's worth considering why climate change fared so badly last time, and what might be different now. SourceWatch has noted that the Copenhagen Consensus "has been strongly criticised by NGOs such as Oxfam for drawing attention away from the existing consensus built up over several years and codified in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals." Given the political will needed to put significant resources towards any of these development challenges, this is a serious charge.

financing the future

The energy issue dominating South African headlines and dinner table conversation is the electricity supply crisis and how Eskom is going to worm its way out of this one. But in homes where the dinner table is a few cartons covered with cloth, and you have to shout to be heard above the din of rain on a tin roof, and the dog just knocked over the pot that's catching the drips, the perspective is going to be ever so slightly different. Let's face it: if your dinner was cooked over paraffin or a few sticks of wood, you aren't going to be too concerned about whether pebble bed nuclear is a better option than coal with underground CO2 sequestration.

We're talking about survival, and intellectual debate doesn't feed the masses. Arguments about the need to focus on a reliable supply of electricity to maintain a healthy economy (to provide jobs for the poor) and about how the forthcoming increases in electricity tariffs will hit the poor hardest, ignore the inescapable fact that there are not now and never have been jobs for a shockingly large number of South Africans.

The unemployed and underemployed need a solution too; and don't tell them they need clean energy unless you can tell them how they are going to pay for it. The poor are masters at innovation and using resources efficiently - ask anyone who survives on a few bucks a day. It's not because they enjoy ill-health from living in smoke-filled hovels that they continue to do just that. Their crisis is chronic, and it's not new. They don't need motivation to adopt energy sources that will improve air quality and reduce time spent scrounging for cooking fuel, they just need the means.

Which brings me to my point. A post last week on WorldChanging talks about the possibilities for using microfinance to bring cleaner energy options to poor communities. Microfinance service providers have a reputation for exploiting vulnerable communities with exhorbitant interest rates and improper repayment procedures, but where poverty is widespread and microfinance is provided through a well-entrenched network, as in South Africa, it seems there may be a viable market-based approach to addressing energy needs for those with almost no resources.

MicroEnergy Credits Corporation (MEC) have developed a model that works with existing microfinance institutions to broker arrangements that promote clean energy using carbon finance.

Allderdice and Dailey [founders of MEC] have developed two credit instruments, Microfinance-originated Carbon Credits and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) credits. With the first, MFIs [microfinance institutions] can receive revenue when they lend for energy systems that create verified carbon emissions reductions, such as solar PV systems, improved cookstoves and biogas digesters. With the second, MFIs can receive MDG Credits when they lend for an intervention that enables an MDG household to meet all or part of an MDG. According to Allderdice, "There is no established market in MDG credits yet, but MEC is building the infrastructure to enable it."

The WorldChanging post talks about the benefit of this approach in rural, off-grid locations, but it would be equally appropriate to urban off-grid communities, of which there are many in developing countries. Urban squatter settlements are far more desperate, in many ways, than rural settlements, and upgrading these areas is a more promising option than state-supplied housing. If residents have a financial mechanism to provide their own energy more sustainably, even better.

the brutal art of persuasion

I grew up feeling suspicious of the marketing industry. Admen tried to convince me that I wanted something that I'd never heard of, and needed something I thought I only wanted. Levi's and Coca Cola have left their mark on my psyche. Like Freddie Mercury, I want to break free. These days I'm more accepting that branding is not all bad, but I still bristle when it's about the cult of personality, or a company image that has nothing to do with the product or service on offer.

Despite lingering fears of manipulative messages and subliminal stereotyping, if I am honest about my own field of transport planning, I have to ask: Why is it OK to change behaviour by building a new road, but not by persuading people to change their transport habits by convincing them that it would be better for everyone? Rory Sutherland poses the question in the April 12, 2008 edition of The Spectator. He suggests that if 15% of people drove to work later, we might discover we don't have a transport problem, we just have a timing problem. As long as problems are defined by civil engineers, we find that the solutions are - surprise! - more civil engineering.

That's an oversimplification, to be sure, but as much as the transport planning industry is starting to grasp the concept of integrated planning as a way out of unsustainable urban growth patterns, it has failed to recognise the extent to which current transport problems are a direct result of the way we plan.

Transport planners have deliberately and systematically created a transport system that favours private vehicles, at the expense of other transport modes. The result is that we have actively changed the way people move from place to place - we have manipulated societal norms of behaviour, and done so almost without question, without admitting that we have engineered an unsustainable situation. We can talk about improving public transport or creating better walking environments, but these plans will only bring about the necessary change if we alter our planning mindset, and undo the travel patterns we have created.

Should we enlist the admen to make it happen? Many will argue that it is not the job of government (or anyone else) to change public opinion, but the other way around. But such arguments fail again to recognise that traffic engineers have been doing that for decades. Is it worse to make people aware of the impacts of their behaviour than to force them to change, as engineers have done? Government might not always know best, but neither, apparently, does the general public. So who is going to step up and turn things around? (If you're interested, the comments below the Spectator article provide an intelligent debate on the issue of persuasion vs. coercion.)

feeling patient

Following Tuesday's post about how small things matter, here's another example of small things in big volumes: online searches. And a reminder that "efficiency" can be a misleading term - or at least one that has different meanings, depending on who is seeking it.

the planet will survive - but can we?

Today is Earth Day. Joseph Romm explains why he thinks our attention is misdirected.