Tag Archives: sustainability

Productive cheating?

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I cut out a Dilbert cartoon from the New York Times a few weeks ago that I found amusing and shared it with my new Head of School.  Dilbert informs his boss that he will be taking advantage of the new unlimited vacation policy by being away for 200 days in the coming year but will still double his productivity.  His boss replies that there is no way to measure productivity for engineers.

Of course, bosses are very interested in measuring productivity and marketing executives like to brag about the productivity or efficiency of whatever it is they are selling.  Engineers know that it is easy to cheat on measures of productivity and efficiency, for instance, by carefully drawing the boundaries of the system to exclude some inputs or some wasteful outputs [see my post on ‘Drawing Boundaries’ on December 19th, 2012 ].  So claims of productivity or efficiency that sound too good to be true probably aren’t what they seem.

Also in the New York Times [on October 15th, 2013] Mark Bittman discussed the productivity of the two food production systems found in the world, i.e. industrial agriculture and one based on small landholders, what the ETC group refers to as peasant food webs.  He reports that the industrial food chain uses 70% of agricultural resources to provide 30% of the world’s food while peasant farming produces the remaining 70% with 30% of the resources.  The issue is not that industrial agriculture’s claims for productivity in terms of yields per acre are wrong but that the industry measures the wrong quantity.  Efficiency is defined as desired output divided by required input [see my post entitled ‘National efficiency‘ on May 29th, 2013].  In this case the required output is people fed not crop yield and a huge percentage of the yield from industrial agriculture never makes to people’s mouths [see my post entitled ‘Food waste’ on January 23rd, 2013].

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/how-to-feed-the-world.html?ref=markbittman&_r=0

http://www.etcgroup.org/content/poster-who-will-feed-us-industrial-food-chain-or-peasant-food-webs

Year of Air: 2013

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I mentioned some time ago (Noise Transfer on 3rd April, 2013) that we are privileged to have magnificent views of the river and hills beyond from our city centre house.  From the back bedroom window you can just about see the sea and we are certainly aware of it in most days due to the almost constant sea breeze (or gale).  So despite living in a city centre we are not amongst the 95 percent of EU city dwellers who are exposed to fine particles levels that exceed WHO guidelines.  However, the EU levels are well below those in Beijing that are 300 times the guidelines and probably comparable to those in London during the Great Smog of 1952 that caused cows to choke to death and contributed to the death of about 3000 people.  London has come a long way in the intervening 60 years with current levels of fine particles at about half the WHO guideline, which is 25 micrograms per cubic metre, whereas Beijing has recorded levels of 400. it has been estimated that 13,000 people die prematurely in the UK due to combustion related pollution compared to 1.2 million in China

In my post entitled ‘Extraordinary Technical Intelligence’ on 10th April, 2013 I wrote about the process of urbanisation and industrialisation that has been seen repeatedly across the world.  The progress of this process in a region can also be measured in the levels and type of pollution being generated.  The West has been where China is now, and where India and Africa are likely to go next.  Air pollution on this scale effects the neighbours of the polluter so we have an incentive to help alleviate the problem.  We should also feel a moral obligation because much of the pollution is associated with factories producing goods that we buy and probably don’t repair or recycle at the end their useful life [see ‘Old is Beautiful’ posted on May 1st, 2013] .  If we drew the system boundaries more appropriately then the pollution generated during the manufacture of these goods is as much our responsibility as the manufacturer’s [see my post on 19th December, 2012 about ‘Drawing Boundaries’].

This is the Year of Air, maybe it should have been called the Year of Clean Air to make it absolutely clear what it is all about, i.e. giving everyone on the planet the chance to live and breathe clean air!

BTW, a fine particle is one of diameter less than 2.5 microns or 1/30th diameter of one of your hairs.  One my PhD students is working on tracking nano-particles about a hundred times smaller as they interact with biological structures such as human cells, but that’s another story [see last week’s post].

Sources:

‘Under a Cloud’ by Pilita Clark in the Financial Times, July 13/14, 2013 [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/83ef4b78-eae5-11e2-9fcc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2cgRhFXMs ].

Yim SHL and Barrett SRH. Public Health Impacts of Combustion Emissions in the United Kingdom. Environmental Science and Technology, 2012, 46 (8), pp 4291–4296.

‘Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China’ by Edward Wong in the New York Times on April 1, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-linked-to-1-2-million-deaths-in-china.html?_r=0

Silva, R.A., et al., 2013, Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change, Environmental Research Letters, 8:034005. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034005/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034005.pdf

Clean fossil fuel?

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The amount of energy stored in methane hydrate could be twice that of all other fossil fuel reserves based on data from the US Geological Survey, the New Scientist reported on 31st August, 2013 in an article entitled ‘Buried Treasure’.  At this point, most of you are probably wondering what methane hydrate is and where it is stored.  Microbes on the seabed eating organic matter produce methane molecules that at high pressure and low temperature combine with the water to form a hydrate, which is white crystal.  Large deposits of methane hydrate deposits are believed to lie along continental margins, mostly in ocean sediments.

Natural gas and shale gas (‘Fracking’ on August 28th, 2013) are also methane, which releases less carbon dioxide when it is burned than coal or gas and hence is regarded as cleaner.  However, methane hydrate deposits might have an additional advantage because some research has shown that the methane molecule trapped in the hydrate crystal can be replaced by a carbon dioxide one.  So we might be able to extract methane and simultaneously store carbon dioxide.  Sounds too good to be true and the second law of thermodynamics will ensure that there is a price to be paid somewhere and somehow (see post entitled ‘Sonic Screwdriver’ on April 17th, 2013 for more the 2nd law).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929320.800-frozen-fuel-the-giant-methane-bonanza.html

https://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html

http://www.jogmec.go.jp/english/oil/technology_015.html?recommend=1

Population Control

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The jury is out on whether the global population will reach 10 billion though there seems little doubt that our planet cannot sustain the current population, never mind 10 billion, with a Western life style.  Maybe some of you saw Stephen Emmott’s show ‘Ten Billion’ at London’s Royal Court Theatre last year; I didn’t but you can read his book of the same title.  As you will probably have guessed from the title, he thinks we are headed for a global population of 10 billion and that radical social and political action is needed because science and technology cannot avoid the impended disaster.  Erle C. Ellis does not believe that overpopulation is problem because he subscribes to Ester Boserup’s theory that population growth drives land productivity.  He suggested in the New York Times last week (13th September 2013) that we have transformed ecosystems to sustain ourselves in the past and will continue do so.

This idea could be extended to suggest that the human society or population is self-controlling that has parallels with the Gaia principle that the planet is self-regulating system in which organisms co-evolve with their environment.  The UN low-fertility model offers some evidence of self-regulation of the human population being to operate because it predicts the global population reaching a maximum of 8.34bn in 2050 and declining to 6.75bn by 2100.  At those levels engineering solutions could probably manage the rest and avert disaster.  Danny Dorling in his book ‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ provides further evidence by pointing out that the global average family size has never been so small with the norm being less than one child per woman for more than half the planet and immigration to wealthier countries leading to further declines in birth rates.  If the UN low fertility model is right then perhaps we will be able to avoid overpopulation but  scientists and engineers will still need to redouble their efforts to provide sustainable goods and services.  Progress is being made but mainly through incremental improvements that many of us take for granted perhaps in part due to our ignorance of science and engineering or at least of the advances in living standards that it are being delivered to billions of people who previously did not access to the internet, mobile phones and medicines.

Sources:

‘Overpopulation is not problem’ by Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times on September 13, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0)

‘Crowded Planet’ by Clive Cookson in the Financial Times on July 13/14, 2013 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7e5ba20-e7e4-11e2-9aad-00144feabdc0.html

‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ by Danny Dorling, published by Constable http://10billion.dannydorling.org/

’10 Billion’ by Stephen Emmott published by Penguin http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141976327,00.html

‘Damn the cynics and embrace the positive’ by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times on August 14th, 2013 http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson or http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson