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Here’s an interesting post which has amassed a collection of 179 different attempts to visually communicate “sustainability.”

Lots of models include notions of economic, social and environmental sustainability.  Some include cultural sustainability (institutional?).  What’s interesting is that few of the models seem to depict “governance” as important, and yet governance is a central part of so-called ESG — environment, social, governance — models of sustainability (e.g., Goldman Sachs, KLD, GRI, etc).  Thoughts?

In today’s New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman’s “Have a Nice Day” column highlights quite nicely the connection between uncertainty and the adoption of renewable technologies — in this case the adoption of solar energy technologies.

In particular, he argues that the solar panel industry is thriving in countries whose governments that have enacted policies aimed at overcoming the triple uncertainty threat:

1. Regulatory uncertainty — “[A]ny business or homeowner can generate solar energy.”
2. Connectivity uncertainty — “[I]f they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid.”
3. Price uncertainty — “[T]he utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business.”

Friedman reached these conclusions, in part, after touring the Applied Materials solar panel “war room” in Silicon Valley, from which it maintains “real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years.”  According to Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, “We are seeing the industrialization of the solar business. In the last 12 months, it has brought us $1.3 billion in revenues. It is hard to build a billion-dollar business.”

And yet because U.S. policies have not adequately addressed regulatory, connectivity and price uncertainties, all 14 factories of these solar panel factories have been built outside the U.S.  As a result “[R]ight now, our federal and state subsidies for installing solar systems are largely paying for the cost of importing solar panels made in China, by Chinese workers, using hi-tech manufacturing equipment invented in America.”

Interestingly, Friedman points out that the debate over U.S. energy policies need not depend on competing beliefs about global warming.  ”[S]o, you don’t believe global warming is real. I do, but let’s assume it’s not. Here is what is indisputable: The world is on track to add another 2.5 billion people by 2050, and many will be aspiring to live American-like, high-energy lifestyles. In such a world, renewable energy — where the variable cost of your fuel, sun or wind, is zero — will be in huge demand.”

His point is worth exploring.  To understand the magnitude involved in supplying electricity to 2.5 billion more people AND supplying them with more electricity per person, consider that in 2007 the world consumed 18,187 terawatt hours (TWh; 1 terawatt hour = 1 trillion watt hours) of electricity.  That represented consumption of approximately 2,752 kWh for each of the world’s 6.6 billion people.  However, consumption is far from evenly distributed.  For example, OECD countries consumed an average of 8,477 kWh per capita, while China only consumed 2,346 kWh.  Meanwhile in the U.S., average electricity consumption was 13,616 kWh per capita.

All of this means that electricity demand by 2030 is expected to increase nearly 50%.  Perhaps not surprisingly, some have described energy as “the biggest challenge of the twenty-first century.”  But those challenges also may make energy — already an estimated $6 trillion dollar industry worth about 1/10th of the world’s economic output — the ”largest economic opportunity in the twenty-first century.”

Something must be in the, err, water…

On the heels of my recent post about Toxic Waters, tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal features a story about plans by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to tighten regulations on the quality of the wastewater discharged from coal-fired power plants.  At issue are the toxins left behind from the scrubbing process used to remove the toxins from the air.

“Power plants pump out dirty water in part because of technology installed to stop the spread of soot and ash from smokestacks. The systems that clean smokestack emissions scrub the exhaust with water-based compounds. If left untreated, that mixture of water and metals can contaminate waterways and drinking water, the EPA said.”

For the full story, visit “Utilities Face Stiffer Wastewater Rules.”

On Friday night I watched Frontline’s “Poisoned Waters“ (from Netflix via Roku), a two hour investigation by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Hedrick Smith into “the growing hazards of water pollution to human health and the ecosystem.” The program was divided roughly into two segments: First, a look at Chesapeake Bay, and second, an investigation of Puget Sound.  In addition to detailing issues specific to each location, both Chesapeake and Puget were “read” as microcosms of the much larger problem facing America’s waterways.

Broadly speaking, the show highlighted two major issues: agricultural runoff and storm sewers.  Technically speaking, both are considered “nonpoint source pollution” and susceptible to increased ambiguities in terms of measurement and accountability (as compared with “point source pollution”). On the issue of agricultural runoff specifically, The Washington Post described Frontline’s interviews with Jim Perdue, chairman of Perdue Farms, and Bill Satterfield, spokesperson for the Delmarva Poultry Industry, as “the kind of verbal evasions that would twinkle a tobacco industry scientist’s eye.” I’m pretty sure that having yourself compared with tobacco “scientists” is never good. Frontline also noted the Clean Water Act’s “citizen suit provision,” which allows citizens to sue polluters and the government for enforcement failures.

Another point raised by the Frontline “Poisoned Waters” episode is the growing gap between the contaminants in use and those covered by regulations. In particular, Frontline discussed a study by the U.S. Geological Survey that tested the Potomac River for some 277 new contaminants NOT covered by the Clean Water Act. Overall, they found 85 contaminants. Of these, only about half of the compounds had safety guidelines. But Frontline also noted a second gap — this one between the contaminants in use and the contaminants capable of being detected. Not even the expanded list tested for by the USGS covers the range of contaminants potentially in use.  In other words, here we see the possibility of externalities which are not yet capable of being externalized, let alone interalized.

Then last night The New York Times home page featured a lengthy story on “Toxic Waters,” along with a companion interactive database of more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge water pollutants. The reporting behind the story is massive, drawing on data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), along with “hundreds of thousands of water pollution records [obtained] through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state,” and interviews with “more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists.”

A few key points:

• “Nationwide, polluters have violated the Clean Water Act more than 500,000 times.”
• “[T]he E.P.A. regulate[s] more than 100 pollutants through the Clean Water Act and strictly limit[s] 91 chemicals or contaminants in tap water through the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
• According to Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s administrator, “[D]espite many successes since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, today the nation’s water does not meet public health goals, and enforcement of water pollution laws is unacceptably low.”
• “[R]esearch shows that an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.”
• “Because most of today’s water pollution has no scent or taste, many people who consume dangerous chemicals do not realize it, even after they become sick.”

According to the database, Pennsylvania is home to 8,654 regulated facilities. Here in the Centre County region where I live, most of the facilities have no reported violations.  However, there were 6 facilities in the area with violations, which I have listed below, first, based on length of compliance failures (e.g., Cerro Metal has been out of compliance 11 of the past 12 quarters), and second, for those facilities not out of compliance, by the number of reported violations (e.g., Mid Centre County PDF has 37 violations, but is not out of compliance). As with Pennsylvania more broadly, NONE of these facilities has been fined for these violations. Again, these data are all from the New York Times website and based on EPA data for 2004-2007 inclusive.

In anticipation of a summer of traveling — vacation in Portland, Eugene and Cannon Beach, Oregon; and academic conferences/presentations in Barcelona, Florence, and Chicago — I bought a a Samsung NC10 Netbook so as to avoid lugging around my albatross Dell Latitude laptop.  Not only is the Samsung Netbook perfect for traveling, I love it so much that I now use it almost daily.  Other than adding a 2 GB memory upgrade (from Crucial of course), my unit is stock (Win XP Home, etc).  The battery life is amazing (7-8 hours).  The nearly-full-sized keyboard works great.

As part of the transition from laptop to netbook I decided it was time to get rid of some of the bloatware applications I have long taken for granted.  By bloatware I am referring to applications that chew up lots of computing resources or lots of economic resources — or both.

My first worry was keeping my email in sync across two laptops.  Since most of my email is picked up using POP and not IMAP, I knew keeping two copies of Outlook in sync would be a pain.  But as I longtime Outlook user I was very reluctant to consider giving it up.  After considering a bunch of options I decided on Gmail.  I had signed up for a Gmail account circa 2005, but had not opened it in years.  After about 4 months of using Gmail exclusively I have become a total Gmail convert.  I do not miss Outlook at all.  More impressive, I even managed to use Gmail’s IMAP support to push my most recent 2 years (about 2 GB) worth of email from Outlook to Gmail, putting it all in the cloud for easy access anytime, anywhere.  Another plus is the Gmail “offline” feature which allows you to compose and reply to emails offline — just like Outlook.  Similarly, I now use Google Contacts and Calendar.

My second biggest concern was having access to all my files from both laptops — and easily keeping them in sync.  For this I decide on a program called Windows Live Sync.  This free application (formerly called Windows Live Foldershare)  does an amazing job of synchronizing several gigabytes and several thousand files across both machines. Now, I can work on any document I want from either machine.  The only thing better would be having all my documents in the cloud, but I could not find any free services offering enough storage space.

Some other new found favorites:  For browsing I use Google Chrome exclusively.  Not only is it the thinnest and lightest internet client available, it also takes up the least screen space.  With only 600 vertical pixels on my Netbook screen every pixel counts — and Chrome lets me see more of the pages I am browsing than Explorer, Firefox, etc. I also replaced Adobe Acrobat Reader (something like 90 MB) with Foxit Reader (closer to 5 MB).  For virus protection after the 90 day free trial of Symantec expired I switched to AVG Antivirus Free Edition.  For opening and creating file archives I use 7-Zip, an open source application which not only reads .ZIP files, but also .RAR and about a dozen others.  For FTP I use another open source package called FileZilla.  Finally, for photo management I love Picasa 3 and its companion Web Albums. And for photostitching I found a terrific free program called Autostitch.  For example, this panoramic picture of the Villa La Pietra gardens stitches together 9 different photographs.