• Nau Pop-Up Shop Is Serious About Sustainability – One of my fave sustainably-minded companies, Nau, opens its first retail store since it scaled back operations – and in typically high-sustainability style…
• John Quiggen: Privatisation debunked – Economist John Quiggen debunks the Queensland Government's arguments for privatisation.
• The Big Green Idea – The British Council have launched a $10,000 grant for a "big green idea".
• Emissions trading: Auctioning permits vs giving them away – David Jeffery answers one of my questions about giving away permits to high-polluters as part of the emissions trading scheme. While it seems my hypothesis is incorrect about the lack of incentive for polluters to act, giving the permits away is still a bad thing…
• Climate (and other) change – Awesome post by Duncan at Digital Eskimo for Blog Action Day – says everything that I wanted to so, just more eloquently…

These links come from my Delicious feed.

Given the popularity of Freakonmics, and the resultant sense of authority the authors have achieved, I wanted to point out for any potential readers that the chapter in their new book, Superfreakonomics, on climate change (chapter 5) is completely whack.

If you happen to pick up a copy, do yourself a favour and read Brad DeLong’s take first (via Paul Krugman). As Krugman says: “in this crucial chapter, there’s an average of one statement per page that’s either flatly untrue or deeply misleading”. (More on the topic from Krugman)

Reader beware…

• Facing Climate Change – Benjamin Drummond / Sara Joy Steele – Fitting that I came across this on Blog Action Day. Recently supported by Nau's Grant 4 Change programme.
• SourceMap – Visualizing Supply Chains – "Sourcemap is a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing the supply chains behind a number of everyday products."
• How to Design for a Post-Consumption Economy – GreenerDesign.com – "There is incredible economic opportunity if we learn to reframe problems, seize opportunities and design solutions by looking beyond the consumption-oriented economic model." (via @pennyhagen)
• Here's One Good Climate Idea, Kevin – Economist Eric Knight writes on feed in tariffs and how they can spur investment in a low-carbon economy.
• Is VW's Electric E-Up The Beetle of the 21st Century? – Seems the market is betting on electric cars as the post-petroleum option of choice – some more details of VW's concept.

These links come from my Delicious feed.

Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s theme is “climate change”. This post is my contribution, professional cross-posted on my blog.

For those that don’t know, world leaders are meeting in Copenhagen December this year to discuss climate change and their responses to it.

So far we have seen very little from world leaders in terms of real, concrete targets and changes. There is a lot of hope (though dare I say not a lot of expectation) that the Copenhagen talks will result in an updated global agreement that reflects the severity of the situation as outlined by the scientific and economic communities (although Obama’s recent executive order is a positive sign).

It seems that governments the world over are having a deal of trouble committing to targets that are decades away. But I suspect this is part of the problem – the focus on decade long cycles (e.g. “25% by 2020″) needs to shift binding 1 and 5 year targets and plans as well. Whilever plans focus on 10 or 20 years away, action will not be swift. Let’s reduce by 1% this year, an addition 2% next year and soon the totals will add up to the 25%+ that we need to achieve.

To most people it is clear that societally we need to rapidly (i.e. over the next 10 years) reduce carbon emissions across the globe. It is also clear that the costs of acting now will be much lower than later.

To put this into perspective, WWF-Australia recently teamed up with Climate Risk to produce an estimate that places the cost of transforming to a low-carbon economy in Australia at half the cost of the recent economic stimulus package – if we act now. If we allow the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to reach potentially catastrophic levels, the cost will be far, far greater.

Our government and business leaders know this. There is popular support for action. And yet things are still stalled…

What we do know

While there are a lot of unknowns, and acknowledging there is no “silver bullet” solution to reducing carbon emissions, there are a few things that are already underway and with further support will make a significant impact on our emissions.

Renewable energy

Renewable energy systems need to be developed and rapidly deployed to offset coal-based generation. So-called “clean coal” is not a long-term solution, yet it has a medium-term development cycle – the case just doesn’t stack up (you might consider joining GetUp’s “iCoal 2.0″ campaign to let our politicians know we know).

Investment needs to be channelled to existing and emerging technologies such as wind, solar, and wave energy. Report after report shows how these, existing, technologies can service our needs. Google has stated that more early stage funding is required. But of course there are myriad ways the government could be supporting the industry – a “real” emissions trading scheme (one that doesn’t let big polluters off the hook) or feed in tariffs are a good start. But even better support for R&D in the area would be welcome.

Alternative fuel vehicles

Alternative fuel vehicles – especially electric vehicles powered by renewable energy – will play a significant role in the short-term transformation of mobility towards low-carbon goals.

It seems that the market has landed on electric vehicles – with the Tesla roadster launched and the Model S on the way in 2011, GM launching the Volt in 2010, followed hotly by the Nissan LEAF late 2012. Nissan’s concept is interesting as they plan to lease the battery – the most expensive component in electric vehicles – to reduce the up-front cost of the technology for buyers.

And of course A Better Place has a novel concept that they hope to launch in Australia, among other countries, soon.

There are longer-term solutions, including re-thinking our cities, something that City of Sydney council seems to be making a lot of noise about with their 2030 Sustainable Sydney plan. But in the short-term cars will be the transport option of choice for many people as our existing infrastructure is geared to best support this mode of mobility.

Energy efficiency

Energy prices will inevitibly increase over time – if not through government levies through geo-political and other factors. In addition, a shift to renewable energy will to an extent require us to be more efficient with our use of energy.

But being more efficient now can also have a significant positive impact by reducing consumption, or maintaining current levels of consumption as population grows, reducing the need for new capacity while new renewable energy capacity enters the mix and some emerging technologies gain a footing.

This is where individual action can make a big difference – if we all choose more efficient appliances, upgrade to more efficient lighting technology, and the like can reduce the need for new capacity, as well as reducing our bills.

Collective action

Over the past few years there’s been a lot of emphasis on individual action – in us as “consumers” playing our part in creating demand and making lifestyle changes. While individual action is important, this will only get us so far.

We need our leaders in government and industry to truly step up to the mark. This is why the Copenhagen agreement is so critical. There will be many, many actions that can be taken in the lead up to the Copenhagen talks – but on this Blog Action Day can I suggest writing or speaking to your federal government representative (you can user OpenAustralia to find out who your rep is) and telling them how important this issue is. Outline the ways that you’re doing your bit, and put forward your ideas about how you want the government to do theirs.

If that’s too much, consider casting your vote with EarthHour, or support an environmentally-focused non-profit who is doing good work in the area.

In either case, let’s give our political leaders the support they need to ensure that we get the right result at Copenhagen.

• New Birth for Australia's Eco Label – Details about the recent restructuring of GECA, the environmental standards/labeling organisation.
• Ultracapacitor Buses – Interesting collection of technologies for powering buses using electricity.
• Recurrent, ProLogis team up for 4.8 MW of rooftop solar in Spain – Clever: leasing roofspace across Spain to support solar energy generation. Interesting that the US company's move overseas is due in part to faltering domestic support for solar. Will be great to see more of these kind of initiatives rolling out in coming years.
• why i am not afraid to take your money, by amanda fucking palmer – Amanda Palmer on the "backlash" from asking for money as an artist. Amen…
• Nissan expects initial orders for its LEAF electric vehicle to top 20,0000 units – Nissan looks on track to deliver the LEAF soon – check out the video for what looks like a production prototype in action.
• Want to know why Australia (Adelaide) is out of water? This is why. – Document with simple visualisations outlining why water consumption for key agricultural crops in Australia is a significant cause of river flow problems and suggesting that water is underpriced (a position that I agree with given my understanding of things).

These links come from my Delicious feed.

• Why we don't ride in the door zone – Sydney Cyclist – When I'm riding I often ride in the traffic lane rather than the bike lane to avoid car doors (many of the lanes in Sydney are placed right next to parked cars). This video explains why…
• Surface Area Required To Solar Power The World – Interesting visualisation of the land mass required to provide for all our power using solar technology. While solar is not the answer (and has scalability issues esp. due to resource use/efficiency) it does present an intriguing perspective.
• Introducing About NSW – maps, census visualisations, cross search – Seb Chan, Dan MacKinlay and Renae Mason talk about About NSW – an innovative project out of the Powerhouse Museum. A number of my friends/colleagues worked on this project and it's definitely worth checking out!
• Eco houses snap together using Lego-style blocks – Eco-friendly "Lego-style" bricks for DIY home builders… too cool. (via @pennyhagen)
• yikebike – Self-described as an "electric mini-farthing" – looks fascinating…
• Snow Leopard saves millions of kilowatt hours of electricity? – ComputerWorld crunches the numbers to work out how much energy Snow Leopard (Apple's new operating system) will save compared to the previous version.
• The great give-away: Allocating permits under an emissions trading scheme – David Jeffery on a recent study that suggest the government's plan to give away permits actually results in a profit for affected industries.

These links come from my Delicious feed.

In my (admittedly limited) reading about the proposed emissions trading scheme here in Australia, I get the impression there’s two primary objections (mostly from business, but also the opposition party – coincidence?) to the trading scheme.

The first is that a scheme will raise prices for the Australian public for goods from high-emissions industries, like electricity. I suspect this is to raise public opposition to the scheme, but I think that we’ve mostly overcome this objection.

The second seems to be that the scheme will negatively impact exports for these products, which in Australia will have a significant impact on exports. An extension to this argument is that producers in countries that don’t have such impediments will be able to undercut the price of Australian companies’ produce.

Over the jump I’ve put together some initial thoughts on these objections and the Government’s proposed approach…

Read the rest of this entry »

• GreenXchange: Sustainable Innovation Meets the Creative Commons – This is an awesome initiative with great potential – a partnering of Nike and Creative Commons among others to open up sustainability inventions for businesses and researchers to further develop and use.
• Why Doesn't Green = Better? – Joel Makower nails it – this is what I was aiming for with Arketype and I think it is the key to us achieving broader uptake of sustainable products…
• Better Place Australia – Get Involved – I'm really excited by this concept after seeing Shai Agassi's (the founder) speach at TED. Happy to see it might be coming to Oz…

These links come from my Delicious feed.

I’ve just finished uploading and captioning on Flickr the few photos I took while in Hong Kong.

For some reason I felt really self-conscious about taking photos on the trip, so most of them are taken on the one “tourist” day I did, when I went to Lantau Island to see the cable car, Big Buddha, Po Lin temple and the Tai O fishing village.

Thankfully some other folks have taken some great shots of the other interesting things I saw, like Man Mo temple, the Peak, Tsim Sha Tsui at night and the experience of catching the MTR rail service.

I’m still waiting for Google Street View to launch in Hong Kong to see if they snapped me as the Google car rolled past. Might be the most fortuitous holiday snap of them all…

While in Hong Kong on my recent holiday (I hope to have some photos and thoughts up on Flickr soonish) I picked up a Novation 25SL mk II. I wanted something a bit smaller for live performance (the previous 49 note keyboard took up a lot of space on stage) that didn’t lack the various faders, controls and triggers of the M-Audio Axiom 49 that I’ve been using for some time.

Over the jump is my first impressions of the Novation, specifically as used with Ableton Live…

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