b l a s t u l a reblog++

by Bryan Mitchiner

Last Thursday was the launch of the Know The Number greenhouse gas emissions counter: the first real-time counter that advertises the increasing amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

At 10 characters wide and atop its own 70-foot tall billboard, Deutsche Bank’s latest project looms large over all who enter New York City’s Time Square. The digital billboard displays the amount of equivalent greenhouse gas emissions in terms of carbon in the atmosphere, and is constantly updated based on measurements from NASA, NOAA, and supporting research from MIT.

We knew the carbon was there, so why so much hype? Displaying the numbers in real time changes the conversation. NASA and NOAA are able to measure the concentration of gases in the air, but even these measurements cannot constantly update themselves as often as the counter. The counter achieves this by predicting a bit into the future according to recent trends. In addition, the number is a reflection of all greenhouse gas emissions (methane, nitrous oxide, etc.) by their impact equivalencies in carbon. It even accounts for dips and rises in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere due to seasonal changes so not to appear to be slowing down certain times of the year.

Before Thursday, people could find out how much carbon was in the air, but the information was only updated every five years. That means that for four years, conversations about greenhouse gas emissions and about global climate change in general were numerically supported with outdated data. That’s akin to using 2000 census data to talk about cities in 2009. Kevin Parker, the chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank asset management says that displaying the count in real time “allows people to begin to engage in the debate around the issue.” In words that were used repeatedly throughout the event, the counter creates a sense of urgency, a call to action, and is intended to spur action to take the steps necessary in saving our planet.

The choice to install the counter in Times Square references the other famous counter this locale proudly hosts once a year. The countdown for each New Year and the dropping of the ball serves as a reminder of a new beginning, a fresh start, directed not just to New York, but around the world. Robert Socolow, a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton explained the number during the panel discussion as, “a planetary number…the world is connected, this number is exactly the same wherever you are on the planet. So it promotes planetary thinking, planetary identity.”

Professor Socolow says we already have many solutions; we just need to put them in action. While much discussion throughout the event revolved around capping carbon emissions and putting a price on carbon, we were constantly reminded that this is only part of the answer to our problem. Another part of the answer lies in the solutions already out there, including electric vehicles, green building and renewable energy (see the Worldchanging archives for about 10,000 more examples).

The last part of the answer is what we have yet to dream up. This is what makes the counter exciting. The idea that the problem as advertised in the number is an opportunity for growth, for investment, for job and wealth creation.

We’ve been in need of something like this for years now. Ever since climate change has threatened a wide scale transformation of our economy, industry leaders worried that they will lose profits and have been fighting dirty — with disinformation campaign designed to deceive the masses. Yet, these CEOs and executives have either failed to understand the business potential in such a transformation or are too stubborn to commit to change. The call to action and drive towards a bright green economy that this counter provides is a positive reminder. While it does remind us of the doom and gloom that we are climbing towards, it should remind us that we must get going now. What I hope and think we will see in the coming years: meaningful reduction. Let’s do more than just hope.

Bryan Mitchiner studies Community, Environment and Planning at the University of Washington. He is an intern at Worldchanging.com.

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Originally from Worldchanging: Bright Green by WorldChanging Team

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This article was written by Alex Steffen in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

If we want to build a bright green future, we need to know the actual nature of the problems we face. In terms of climate change, this may be less simple than some might have us believe. In the past few weeks, I’ve come across three concepts that illuminate unexpected angles of the climate crisis (and thus perhaps open the way to unexpected thinking about solutions).

The first is the idea that the emissions for which we’re responsible — our personal carbon footprint, say, or our city’s progress towards climate neutrality — may not tell the whole story. That’s because globalization has tended to move heavy polluting industries offshore, away from Europe and North America, and to places like China and Brazil. We still consume the lion’s share of the goods these nations manufacture, but the carbon is emitted there, not here, while our exports are largely things — like blockbuster films and financial services — whose carbon footprints are comparatively small. As one wag says

If Britain meets its Kyoto target in 2012 (and it may well do), it won’t be because British consumers have made sacrifices to save the planet; it will be because we, like other Western nations, have exported a sizeable proportion of our carbon emissions to China.

Call it offshoring emissions. Or the virtual carbon trade, like the virtual water trade:

When we manufacture goods, we embed energy in them: that is, their existance means we have already spent a certain amount of energy, no matter what we then do with them. In a similar way, when we grow crops we are in a sense embedding water within them. If a kilo of wheat takes a thousand liters of water to grow from sowing to harvest, we can, seen from a certain light, think of that kilo of wheat as containing 1,000 liters of water. When we consider how much water is embedded in the food we transport around the planet, it turns out that there is a massive trade in virtual water. The wetter regions of the world every year ship vast amounts of embedded water to the drier parts of the planet.

In a similar way, the fact that we’ve offshored our emissions by having our consumer goods manufactured elsewhere doesn’t remove what we might think of as the embedded emissions from the carbon footprints of our lives.

Emissions for which we bear hidden responsibility are obscured not just by distance but by time as well. Those of us in the Global North are wealthy today because our ancestors did the things — like burning whole mountain-sides worth of coal, clear-cutting the vast majority of our forests and building an automotive culture — that are causing the climate change we’re already experiencing.

Historic carbon demands attention. Historic carbon — the carbon already emitted, often long ago, not the carbon being produced today — has filled our atmosphere with the current concentration of roughly 383 ppm of CO2. Over the last century, the United States produced over 30% of all the CO2 emitted worldwide (because of our meat-focused diets, our share of all emissions would actually be higher). Our wealth, then, is a form of historically embedded carbon.

The implications here can get a little staggering. For one thing, it means that even if we’ve greened our lifestyles — eating our veggies, driving our hybrids, lighting our rooms with CFLs — these lifestyles are still made possible by using vast stores of embedded carbon. Everything around us is like a landscape of frozen emissions.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t reduce our current emissions. Quite the opposite. Historic carbon emissions burden us with a further ethical obligation. We’ve already used far more than our share of the planet’s ability to absorb pollution. Therefore, we need to move far farther and far faster than those in other countries whose lives are impoverished in part because their nations have been historical light-footed, when it comes to carbon. (There is another benefit of moving quickly, which is that the faster we create better alternatives, the more quickly those alternatives will be available for use in newly-developing countries. This is a win-win for everyone.)

This historical imbalance is why some in the Global South like to call efforts to create a global carbon trading system “imperialism.” There is some legitimacy to their critiques, though many then go on to make claims about climate change that are just stupid… but that’s a matter for another column.

Here let me just end with this: the real imperialism in this situation is not primarily geographic. It is temporal. Unbalancing the atmosphere, creating catastrophic effects, the worst of which will not be felt for decades and then may have to be endured for centuries, is a crime against the future. We are taking from our grandchildren and their grandchildren the temperate, hospitable climate they would otherwise enjoy, and leaving in its place a climate full of droughts, disasters and suffering — and we’re doing it for our own short-term benefit.

This, then, is the real climate imperialism.

Offshoring Emissions, Historical Carbon and Climate Imperialism is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:18 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment