Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts

28 June 2023

How to Set A Deadline On Global Warming

Friends, colleagues, I have just published GEO-X: How 10 Big Firms Can Lead Us to End Global Warming. You can get it free through July 2023 on Apple Books, https://books.apple.com/book/id6450712229.

I ask for your help in distributing it to business executives, especially to executives of environmental sustainability.

“GEO-X” examines the political obstacles to ending global warming and concludes that governments will probably never overcome them. The book describes the weaknesses of existing regulatory systems, how they slow emissions but fail to incentivize true net zero operations, much less the enormous carbon removal required to reverse global warming. The book explains the failures of the carbon removal markets, especially the moral hazard so often resulting in fraud.

To solve all of these problems simultaneously, “GEO-X” proposes a bold three-part solution.

First, a coalition of willing firms could start a Global Emissions and Offset Exchange (GEO-X) to trade emissions permits and carbon removal contracts. Participating firms would end business with non-participating firms. The result would likely be a rush to join through the global supply chain.

Second, GEO-X would strengthen the carbon removal market with contracts backed up by modern data and biological simulation. GEO-X would not pay for reducing emissions, but only for removing carbon from the air.

Third, GEO-X would clear the carbon market with a state-of-art auction mechanism which prices a hard deadline on global warming. This auction mechanism appears to be the most efficient emissions trading system ever designed.

GEO-X would not need government to start, but would benefit from government cooperation. Governments could require businesses within their jurisdiction to participate in GEO-X, accelerating global participation.

“GEO-X” calls senior business executives to tackle global warming head-on.

Get it now and send it to your boss! And please re-post to your own networks.

#climateaction #climatechange #ClimateLeadership #ClimateSolutions #ClimatePolicy #corporatesustainability #environmental #globalwarming #markets #supplychain #sustainability

21 March 2011

25 September 2009

It's cheap to be green

Friends & colleagues, please read Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times today, "It's Easy Being Green."

Last June, I gave a decision tree on global warming. The distinguished economist says my numbers are wrong - that it's much cheaper to avert disaster than I had assumed. Skepticism of global warming is like smoking. It's socially unacceptable. We have to fix this earth.

If you want good news on the subject, read up on biochar. It would be cool to merge a simulation of a region's farms with a transportation problem, to see if biochar would do against petroleum, examining requirements and emissions for water, nitrate, and carbon. I bet the farmers would come out ahead from all that transportation saved. But I'm too busy with the water market work to get to it this year.

17 February 2009

Plant, Krauss, and ... Toth.

Whoa! Cool video. Maybe the world can still make cool music.



More importantly, here's another lurch toward saving the world with O.R.: my smart colleague Sandor Toth at University of Washington won the "Best Presentation" prize in forestry for "Optimal Reserve Selection Subject to Contiguous Habitat Requirements." The work aims to find the best way to connect plots of land into larger contiguous regions in order to improve ecological functions. Hard stuff - graph theory, economics, computer programming, algorithms, but this work and similar research will eventually show us how to improve ecology on a continental scale, and at least cost.

Here we are, nerds plodding along with our computers and algorithms, and few people see the impending revolution in the environment. Engineers and scientists don't get the visibility of the rock stars. Saving the world won't be easy, and undoing all the environmental damage we've done will take the best talent we can find to solve these problems, and political will, too. These problems are solvable, and the political will is starting to be there. But, again, we do need talented folk to help us. Then we have to raise the profile of these solutions sufficiently high that society can buy into them.

08 January 2009



I commissioned my talented niece Florence Kerns to create this image that represents some of my interests: the impact of business on the hydrological cycle; the interactions of water, energy, and nutrition; the impact of cities on ecology.

Agriculture produces demands of energy, water, and soil, and supplies of energy and food. These demands and supplies interact in complex ways. Agriculture’s supply of food also affects transportation, inventory management, and nutrition. Consumers' choices of foods produces demands on the food supply chain. Consumers' choices of habitat and transportation also produces demands on agriculture and the environment. It's a complex world!

How can we sending price signals to get commerce to back off its environmental impact? My research is to find ways to gently press business away from its environmental impacts. Toward that end, here is our proposal to solve part of the world water crisis.

If you use this image, please reference me and Florence.

27 December 2008

Good news & bad

1. Bad. Best to get the bad news out of the way. Burning coal at home is making a comeback. Here is a suggestion for high school science teachers: get kids to analyze coal for its toxicity. Let them find out for themselves. From a business point of view, people are working for short term profits without thinking about the obvious mid and long-term risks.

2. Good. International law comes down on Mugabe. The rule of law is civilization's way forward. Somebody seizes power then starts stealing. Then someone else seizes power and starts stealing, plus revenge. The cycle breaks only by intervention, local or international, which installs democracy.

3. CNN has a video of a human-powered car. I've been thinking of this for ages.



Now if we can just get a cheap Chinese-made clone of it!

30 January 2008

Choices - energy or food?

I read a disturbing article, "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler," on the NY Times web site. Meat uses far more energy and water, and it causes far more damage to the environment through runoff, than does vegetable foods. Furthermore, we're eating too much of it for our own health. Yet meat production is subsidized - another very stupid anti-environment, anti-health, anti-free market policy by some folks in Washington, D.C.

As oil runs out, and we find the limits of the agricultural capacity, we will have to choose between producing meat or producing energy. It looks to me like we're all going to be eating a lot less meat in ten years time.

26 January 2008

Two things you can do to help save the planet

First, go on a diet, where you eat less, especially less sugar and meat (please, no low-carb diets, as they're unsustainable). Use computer software to track your calories, and move to the correct body mass index.

Second, go on a budget. Pay down your debt and start saving. Start reading up on tricks to save money.

Wealthy western society has to cut its consumption, otherwise we're going to either overheat the planet or run out of resources in a hurry.

Sorry for the polemic today.