Experience shows that the first wave of Internet-enabled change was tainted by irrational exuberance. A sober analysis of today's trends reveals that this new participation is both a blessing and a curse. Mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery... (but) the new participation will also cause great upheaval, dislocation, and danger for societies, corporations, and individuals that fail to keep up with the relentless change.
- Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Wikinomics, page 15.
A recent study by McKinsey & Co forecasts that the world’s data centres will surpass air travel as egregious environmental offenders (as measured by greenhouse gas emissions) by the year 2020 if substantial improvements are not made.The cause of such emissions will be the tremendous amount of electricity required to run, and more importantly, to cool these ever-growing data repositories.The electricity required to power these data centres is matched, and often exceeded, by the amount of electricity required to cool these always-on, heat-generating beasts.For those having trouble visualizing what all this might look like in more familiar terms, a typical server rack is about the size of a refrigerator, and consumes as much as 30kW of electricity.This is the equivalent of 300, 100-Watt light bulbs running incessantly – a whole lot of power and a considerable amount of heat.
The study points to gross utilization inefficiencies as a particular cause for concern, pointing out that on average, servers are typically run at 6% of their overall capacity, with data centres as a whole running at less than 60% of peak capacity. Read More »
Today’s Globe and Mail discusses a survey of 1,500 Canadians who were asked for their opinion on the economy. The most shocking part of the survey is what people ranked as the biggest “challenges facing Canada”. The “price of gasoline” was ranked an astonishing number 2, only “the state of the health care sytem” ranked higher. That puts gas prices ahead of issues such as “education”, “crime and safety”, “reduction of poverty” and “climate change” (which is ranked way down on the list at number 11).
I’m ashamed to see price of gas as number 2 on this list. Obviously when the contest is between our personal pocketbook and a variety of social and environmental issues (including climate change itself) we put our own interests first. If high gas prices are the biggest thing we have to worry about, then everything else in our society must be faring very well indeed.
With higher gas prices, maybe we’ll see more car pooling, fewer SUVs, trips that combine errands, and even more walking/biking/blading. Every $.05 in price in gas hikes brings automatic C02 redution with it. A $2 gas price would be the best thing that ever happened to mother nature.
I’d take improvements to education, crime & safety, and poverty reduction over cheap gas prices any day.
An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented—thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multi-media, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring where everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions.Read More »
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the mass movement to curb global warming and all that…. But has anyone else noticed something interesting. There has been a lot of talk about it. (Almost) Everyone knows that it’s basically an inevitable truth … so why does it seem like nothing’s being done?
Well, to the contrary – there’s a lot being done. Perhaps, too much being done. Now, this is just a theory of mine, but I would argue that there are too many different ‘curb climate change’ initiatives going on. There’re so many, that people get confused, don’t know what to do, don’t know where to start.
For example, Al Gore gets credit for getting the ball rolling with his documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth”, and as I pointed out in a previous blog post– that really spiked people’s interest in the topic of global warming. Gore also has affiliations with the ‘Alliance for Climate Protection’, a web 2.0 initiative to raise awareness about global warming and things you can do. But here’s the thing - I was charged a little while ago to go searching for some ‘mass collaboration’ projects on the web dealing with climate change, and I found over 20 different websites, blogs, social networks and mashups.
I attended the Update 2008: Progress on Climate Change session that was chaired by Yvo De Boer — Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on climate change. He painted a very dangerous picture: Climate change is a serious problem that has fairly short term implications, and little is in place to avoid this situation. De Boer noted that the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook projects that by 2030, 60 percent of all energy demand will be fuelled by coal, while over 40 percent of the demand growth will come from India and China alone. Within the next 20 years more Chinese people will migrate to cities that don’t yet exist than currently exist in all of Europe. He says: Yes we’re on the verge of a recession — but that should cause us to be bold on climate change not conservative. When you’re broke you need to save and be efficient.
Had a good discussion with Scott Brison, former Canadian Minister of Public Works and Government Services and a big campaigner on the environment. He noted that a few years ago CEOs at Davos were climate change deniers. Today they are evangelicals because they see the business opportunity here. Businesses are ahead of governments on this — market forces are causing them to change. Business leaders clamouring to get into the environmental sessions because they have a responsibility to shareholders to get ready for a carbon constrained economy.
Ideas being discussed include every product will have a price on carbon that reflects the carbon input in production and transportation — and for certain products like cars, or food, the lifecycle costs of carbon too. Apples grown in Costa Rica will have a bigger foot print than in Ontario. California is talking about putting a carbon tariff on imports. If there is going to be a price on carbon, the companies and countries that act on carbon reduction will have competitive advantage. Those who don’t act now will be left in the dust.
I agree with position that we should be greening our tax system in Canada — taxing carbon and using that revenue to reducing personal and business income taxes. We can shift revenue sources away from personal and business taxes. Give people more disposable income. We also need to be world leaders in the cleantech industries itself — bringing the three E’s together Energy, Environment and the Economy.
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — As it has done for more than three decades, this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos will bring together leaders from around the world in business, government, academia, civil society and the media to discuss world affairs. This year’s theme is the Power of Collaborative Innovation. For five days delegates will talk, brainstorm and forge alliances to tackle top issues on the global agenda, such as climate change, income disparity or the credit crunch stemming from the U.S. subprime mortgage debacle.As always, the Davos meeting is not designed to achieve an all-encompassing statement of beliefs, such as we see at G8 summits. Rather, Davos brings together leaders from around the world who would otherwise not meet. Bono can talk to Bill Gates, who in turn may talk to Tony Blair, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Harvard business professor Michael Porter or Condoleezza Rice. Delegates find issues of common interest and form new relationships that will help one another achieve their goals.
Attendees are not permitted to bring staff of any kind - the only guests are spouses. Accommodation is modest as CEOs of global 100 corporations find themselves staying in three-star hotels in this small, overcrowded skiing town. But the intellectual stimulation and initiatives that are catalyzed are worth it. From my experience, many of the best discussions are in small meetings, hallway conversations, over dinner or in the bar. My wife, Ana, and I have found that we often learn as much from the spouses, who tend to be very thoughtful people.
In response to critics who say Davos is elitist, since 2003 the Forum has collaborated with the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches to run a parallel Open Forum for the general public. It offers a venue for an open debate on globalization and its consequences.
Davos organizers also invited citizens around the world to respond via YouTube to The Davos Question. “What one thing do you think countries, companies or individuals should do to make the world a better place in 2008?” The most popular responses will be played at Davos, and leaders around the world will record their reactions to the suggestions. The WEF also has numerous other programs around the world that engage people from all walks of society throughout the year.
In materials distributed prior to the meeting, conference organizers lament the “leadership vacuums” that are evident on a wide array of critical issues. “Complexity, competing interests and scarce resources remain the greatest obstacles to progress on the global agenda in the absence of greater leadership and global stewardship … a paradox has emerged in our networked world where knowledge is ubiquitous and change is rapid, but the absence of a common vision and agenda ensures that the status quo will be maintained with respect to major global challenges.”
This year’s theme of collaboration is a topic that I’ve been working on for many years. Last year, Anthony Williams and I published Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The book looks at how developments in digital technologies (particularly the Internet), demographics, business and society enable new paradigms in collaboration in the global economy. Firms, governments, educational institutions, civil society and others can now orchestrate capability, innovate and create value in new ways. No institution in society will remain unchanged.
I’m delighted with the theme for Davos 2008 because I believe collaborative innovation is the path to solutions for many of the vexing problems facing our shrinking planet. Take global warning. Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying “Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.” Now that’s changing.
Rather than discuss climate change in isolation, delegates will explore the interrelations between the climate crisis and extreme poverty and see if there are solutions common to both. How should international efforts to eliminate poverty and to solve the climate crisis be co-ordinated to improve the chances for success in both efforts?
Last week Anthony wrote about the application of the mass collaboration concept to climate change. He noted that despite the evident potential for Web 2.0 tools to be used to disseminate information and galvanize public opinion, unlike the human genome project or efforts to develop specific drugs, “it seems unlikely that someone, or some organization, will ever be in a position to coral the entire world around developing one “magic bullet” solution to climate change in the same way that organizations such as the National Institute of Health and Wellcome Trust helped to coordinate efforts to synthesize the genome.”
At the heart of the issue is the fact that climate change isn’t a “magic bullet” issue (let’s ignore nuclear for the time being…). Rather, it’s the aggregation of billions of actions, billions of daily decisions, and a short vs. long-term trade off of economic and social well being. Because of those factors, I fall firmly among the pessimists, doubting that we can collaborate to tackle such a dispersed problem.
But perhaps there’s a precedent that proves pessimists like me wrong.
Earth Hour 2007 might just be it. The brainchild of joint efforts between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Sydney Morning Herald, Earth Day 2007 saw Sydney, Australia plunged into darkness in a what could be considered a collaborative effort to combat climate change. Evidently, Web 2.0 plays little role in this project, outside of acting as a medium to facilitate information flows and discussion, but this may be the closest we see to the “magic bullet” that gets everyone pushing in the same direction. Read More »
The lack of transparency and information has for decades been a friend to rampant polluters. On the flip side, without objective comparisons, it is very difficult to recognize the positive efforts of some industrial plants to clean up their acts. Now a project called MapEcos is bringing the kind of transparency that tackles both sides of the problem.
MapEcos, which is an effort by a team of Harvard, Duke and Dartmouth academics and students, is a mashup that maps environmental performance of U.S. industrial sites. The emission information comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The mashup also includes information reported by plant managers on their efforts to improve their environmental performance.
Without information sources, such as MapEcos, most people view the environmental problem as an abstract issue that does not affect them directly. Finding out that a massive polluter may be located next door will bring the issue home. This type of information has the potential to galvanize communities into putting more pressure on companies to improve their performance.
MapEcos also has the potential of highlighting the positive efforts made by industrial managers. As good environmental performance will not be overlooked, managers have an incentive to come up with ways of cutting pollution. This in turn, puts additional pressure on polluters to fall in line.
The value of the site can be increased by adding new information sources and analytical tools. MapEcos already gives the ability to sort by industry, corporate owner, chemicals emitted and emission levels. An easy way to calculate industry averages or displaying the environmental profile of a chosen area would be useful. A difficult, yet worthwhile undertaking, would be to develop an objective green rating for every U.S. industrial plant that would quickly allow stakeholders to assess environmental performance based on the plant’s activities.
As reported yesterday, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM (the leading earner of US patents for the past fifteen years) are partnering with Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony to release a portfolio of dozens of innovative and environmentally responsible patents to the public domain. This portfolio of IP is entitled the “Eco-Patent Commons” and is available on a website hosted by the WBCSD.
According to the WBCSD, the patents are searchable by anyone through a search engine on their website and global participation from businesses in diverse industry sectors are welcome. It will be fed with initial and subsequent patent pledges by companies that become members of the Commons. Through the Commons, the patents will be made available for free use by all, subject to defensive termination.
The objectives of the Eco-Patent Commons:
To provide an avenue by which innovations and solutions may be easily shared to accelerate and facilitate implementations to protect the environment and perhaps lead to further innovation.
To promote and encourage cooperation and collaboration between businesses that pledge patents and potential users to foster further joint innovations and the advancement and development of solutions that benefit the environment.
Examples of environmental benefits patented inventions may provide:
Use of environmentally preferable materials or substances
Materials reduction
Increased recycling ability
It is fantastic to see big business making such great strides to help the environment. Not only will these patents help the public domain to share economical and environmentally sustainable practices directly, but the concepts and specific information in these patents could inspire others for formulate new ideas and methodologies for other products and services.
Don and I have been ruminating over the potential to develop the equivalent of the human genome project for climate change and would like your input on the issue.
An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented—thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multi-media, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring where everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions.
On January 31st in the United States, for example, millions of American students at over 1,300 academic institutions will take part in “Focus the Nation,” a one-day academic and civic-engagement discussion focused on climate change, its consequences and potential solutions. Organizers hope the event will create a groundswell of activism and help spur government policy-makers into action. The event will feature an interactive forum where citizens, students and political representatives can discuss issues, challenges and solutions. Participants will then vote on their top five priorities for action and the results will be forwarded to local and state representatives. Few other issues have garnered the attention of more than a million participants, and few, if any, have gone as far as Focus the Nation in convincing colleges, universities and secondary schools to lend an entire day of instruction to just one topic.
Before we get too excited, however, we should consider the pessimist’s case. One could argue, for example, that while there was there is only one human genome there are many, many solutions to climate change. It seems unlikely that someone, or some organization, will ever be in a position to coral the entire world around developing one “magic bullet” solution to climate change in the same way that organizations such as the National Institute of Health and Wellcome Trust helped to coordinate efforts to synthesize the genome.
Moreover, the worldwide effort to decode the human genome promised significant advances in health care and huge commercial windfalls for companies that learned how to exploit it. Apart from extremists, few people argued that the human genome project was a bad idea and there was little organized resistance. The efforts to stop climate change seem unlikely to produce similar windfalls, although there will undoubtedly be money to made in green energy, construction materials, and consumer products. Worse, halting the warming of the planet will require action — and in some cases, uncomfortable and perhaps unwelcome lifestyle changes — by billions of dispersed individuals and some very powerful economic interests that will resist change.
If we fail to stop climate change there could be devastating consequences. But for most people those consequences seem distant and it’s certainly true that the worst of it will be inherited by future generations. Given the short-termism that dominates our political systems, our economy, our capital markets, and day-to-day decision-making as individuals, I am not convinced that humankind will be sufficiently motivated by a sense of inter-generational justice to make the deep and difficult adjustments that are required to avert global ecological disruption.
So, I reluctantly put myself in the pessimist’s camp for now. While I think there will be many significant collaborations to stop climate change, I don’t see the equivalent of the human genome project emerging in this space. That being said, I am eager to see someone prove otherwise. It’s true that no issue has captivated the attention of a broad internal audience as much as climate change has in recent years. And, as noted by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations, “For far too long, climate change has been seen as a problem of the future, one that only a limited range of ministries and institutions should manage. This must change now. Climate change requires broader engagement.”
Will the “killer application” for mass collaboration turn out to be saving the planet? What do you think?
I must admit that I didn’t run a regression analysis, but I think it’s safe to assume that there is a relationship between the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” with the spike in searches for “global warming”.
As you can see, there is a steady increase of interest in the topic, and this interest peaks right around the time when “An Inconvenient Truth” wins an Oscar - Check out point ‘C’ on the graph. It’s interesting to see that a movie was able to increase people’s interest in a topic like this, and if that’s what it takes to raise awareness about pressing issues that people like to pretend aren’t there, then so be it. Angelina Jolie should put out a documentary with a compelling slide show to talk about her forays in Africa… and so on.
For the most part, the human civilization is reactive as opposed to proactive. We see all the signs, but often times, it just seems easier to avoid and deny the situation than dealing with it directly.
There are many web 2.0 initiatives out there looking to deal with this pressing issue. Some of them are even quite innovative and engaging, and you know there are definitely some social networks out there charged with dealing ’solving’ this issue. Hopefully the power of the web 2.0 is strong enough to start a mass movement towards action… and only time will tell if it is up for the challenge.
Here are some of those sites trying to educate and make a difference:
Tree Nation: Help plant one tree out of 8 million in Africa, in the shape of a heart.
MyAbodo: Cool application that teaches both adults and kids how to ‘build’ an environmentally friendly home.
ZeroFootprint: A social network aimed to engage citizens to fight climate change. The City of Toronto, has a community of their own - this is a partnership between ZeroFootprint and the City of Toronto.
The next version of the popular city-building game SimCity will strive to teach people about the downfall of using carbon emission heavy energy sources. Electronic Arts, the producer of the game, will allow gamers to choose how they power their cities in realistic scenarios that include the tradeoff between the cost of energy and carbon emissions. Gamers can choose from a variety of energy sources including traditional power plants, natural gas, wind farms, solar power and hydrogen. Carbon polluted cities face disasters such as heat waves, droughts and extreme weather.
Embedding an education component in gaming has the potential of reaching many more people than traditional models of persuasion. (SimCity has sold over 18 million games to date) The method is particularly effective with the Net Generation which likes to be engaged and involved in the learning process. An interactive program that allows gamers to see the consequences of their actions will sway more minds in the global warming debate than dry statistics and presentations.
On that note, here is an interesting video on the current state and future of the education system.
Flipping through my latest issue of The Economist I stumbled upon an advertisement entitled Chevron Presents: Energyville… An energy game developed by The Economist Group. The advertisement concluded with Play it. Power it. Discuss it. Intrigued, I popped on over the website hosting the game - www.willyoujoinus.com.
This looks to be an interesting experiment, as the website greets you with a running tally of the global oil and gas consumption that has occured since you reached the site (while admittedly I’m typing slowly and had some trouble with the link for some reason, I just crossed the 680,000 barrel mark while typing this sentence). From there, you are invited to play the game and/or join the discussion.
Being all discussed-out for the day, I’ve decided to play the game - Deniville has been launched, and now I’ve got to go sort out the portfolio of energy sources I’m going to use, and keep my little utopia churning through 2030, while every little decision will have an economic impact, environmental impact, and security one as well.
Will I find the magic solution to all the world’s energy problems by myself? Probably not, but if enough people play and discuss what they’ve learned with each other maybe, just maybe, we’ll all make a little more headway on this front. To quote the ad again:
After you play, share your results and challenge others. Because only when we come to understand and discuss the energy problem our planet faces, can we find the inspiration and know-how needed to solve them together.
Oh by the way - when I hit publish on this post, I will have crossed the 1.5 million barrel mark on the site… and I don’t type that slow.
I doubt anyone who has watched Fox news recently will find the content of this YouTube video particularly surprising. Nevertheless, it reminds me of a conversation I was having a yesterday with a few New Paradigm colleagues about the Bush administration’s concerted attack on science. This attack is now well documented (see The Scientist, subs only unfortunately) and includes not just climate science, but everything from sex education to stem cell research. If you’re going to launch an assault on science, it certainly helps to have a major broadcast network on your side.
The Dumbest Generation? Have your say. I must first acknowledge my personal bias on this topic...
As a member of the Net Generation research team at nGenera (and a member of said generation myself), I am a firm believer in the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the Net Generation (those born between 1977 and 1997). So, I must say that when I [...]
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