You can't cast a stone without hitting a list of tips to save the planet, but few of them come with any hard data on how hand-washing your dishes will save polar bears. And all those companies "going green" just to do something on Earth Day could be hurting the cause, not helping.
"All these major media companies are giving people green tips. Frankly, three quarters of the time they have no clue what they're talking about," said Thomas Scaramellino, founder of Efficiency 2.0, which makes energy-efficiency software for utilities. "We think the general awareness is helpful, in principle. But you're setting yourself up for a backfire into a deep skepticism."
Conserving the Earth's biodiversity and natural resources will not be simple and can't be accomplished by a smallish group of like-minded people turning out their lights for an hour or walking to work for a day. The scale of that solution doesn't fit the scale of the world's intertwined energy problems. We've got declining petroleum resources in an oil-addicted world, too much carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and billions of people without electricity.
Just hanging your clothes out to dry isn't going to change the entrenched systems that needs to be transformed. The first systemic step is to price carbon dioxide in some way and provide the right kinds of incentives for energy innovations. And it's going to take putting the right kinds of data into the hands of consumers and businesses, so they can guide producers into making environmentally superior products.
There are tradeoffs in buying a new energy-efficient fridge or a
solar-paneled backpack, and if you don't want to waste your
environmental dollars, you'll need some data to check the greenwashing that's splashed across the country.
Luckily, an ecosystem of companies is springing up to fill the information void around green products and ideas.
One such company, Efficiency 2.0, provides utility customers with
granular data about the specific energy usage and CO2 reductions that
their actions will have in their homes, based on the energy
system where they live. While it might be frustrating for greens in Birmingham that their power is dirtier than their friends in Los Angeles,
it also means that Alabamans reducing their electricity usage could
have a bigger climate impact.
Efficiency 2.0 estimates that replacing an old refrigerator with a new energy-efficient one would save about 1,000 pounds of CO2 annually in Chicago but only 582 pounds in New York. The aggregate data is
nearly useless.
"It depends a lot on how much coal the utility is using," Scaramellino said.
Or, take electric cars, which draw power from a grid that largely runs
on fossil fuels. In an analysis that Efficiency 2.0 conducted comparing
the electric version of the Toyota RAV4 to the Toyota Prius, it found
that for much of the country, the hybrid, not the electric car, would
emit less CO2.
And those solar backpacks? Another Efficiency 2.0 analysis found them to deliver "very little actual environmental benefit." Manufacturing a Voltaic Systems backpack, for example, creates about 30 pounds of CO2 emissions. Even if you charge devices with the bag for two hours a day, it would take seven years to save 30 pounds of CO2 by using the solar panel instead of grid electricity.
"Buying the bag is typically worse for the environment than buying a regular LL Bean bag," Scaramellino said.
The takeaway from all their data analysis is that we need numbers to
understand which actions make a difference and which just make
ourselves feel good.
University of Arkansas supply chain specialist, Greg Norris, said
finding the key levers to reduce climate change and energy consumptions
is "how the economy comes to know itself."
He's building an open source tool, Earthster,
that will use the power of the network effect to allow businesses to
see how green their suppliers are. A business enters info, such as its energy
usage, source of supplies, etc., and the software generates a broad environmental
footprint for the company that goes far beyond simple carbon
footprinting. While individual companies do this for individual
products, the key Earthster innovation is that it would connect up
these disparate analyses into a network of suppliers and producers.
By finding where in a long supply chain the energy-intensive processes
lie, retailers like WalMart or product manufacturers can spot areas
where innovation could reduce their overall environmental impact.
"Every manufacturing process in the country has inputs from other
processes," Norris said. "Some connections are much more powerful than
others, so let's use those powerful connections."
The more companies that add data to the system, the better the system
gets. The system is now in a closed beta test, but they are planning a
rollout soon.
The data, though, is already beginning to feed into services like GoodGuide, which launched last fall.
"We need that consumer-facing piece or there is no incentive to get the backend right," Norris said.
For example, two toy sets, LEGO's SpongeBob Squarepants and Hasbro's K'Nex Sesame Street Elmo Building Set look similar on the outside, but GoodGuide's ratings find the LEGO set far superior based on environmental and health data. If parents shopping at toy stores start to use these ratings to distinguish good environmental stewards from bad, they could start to change the way that companies make products. Large corporations could be rewarded or punished for changing their supply chains.
To do that, though, they'll have to figure out how to present
information in just the right graphical, numerical or textual form
that will actually change their behavior.
"Eighty-five percent of consumers have this intention to save energy,
but only 3 percent do," said Scaramellino. "What the hell is this
massive gap between intention and action all about?"
O'Rourke's GoodGuide is trying to close the gap by providing a full-featured iPhone app that lets you take the data into the store. Efficiency 2.0 is banking on social influence. The company is working with utilities to present consumers with data about how well their neighbors are doing saving energy and cutting carbon.
If an approach or combination of approaches ends up working, these tech tools could be the key link between those little things that a person does to feel good and the large-scale solutions that the world needs to prevent catastrophic climate change and continued loss of biodiversity.
"[We want] to move people from being consumers of products to
co-producers of supply chains," GoodGuide CEO and Berkeley professor,
Dara O'Rourke told Wired.com at the website's launch. "This is where we
move from individual action, solving an individual problem, to a
collective action."
See Also:
Image: Comp: flickr/hartkopf, flickr/wwworks
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.
