Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to attend a Growing a Greener Campus mini-conference sponsored by IP Logic. Essentially, this was a few presentations about the IT aspects of sustainability from a higher education perspective. For all that it was small, it was a good and useful event.

The first speaker was Debra Rowe and she gave a nice presentation that covered a lot of basics and background about sustainability. One of the very good things she did was to establish some common vocabulary and general context for later discussion. She also tried to do some myth debunking, but ever since reading an interesting article about the persistence of myths I’ve become a bit dubious about the effectiveness of that particular approach.

She talked a bit about the idea of the triple bottom line, an accounting system that takes into consideration social and environmental impacts as well as economic ones. She generalizes it from a business concept to a societal one - that is, a sustainable society is one with a “flourishing environment”, “social well-being”, and “strong economy”. While that sounds good and precise, on further reflection I find that the fuzziness of the terms involved actually makes it less useful than the general definition of sustainability: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs“. The latter actually suggests ways one might go about creating some metrics (looking at stability / longevity, and at create and consume rates of resources), while the former leads to debates on semantics. On the other hand, TBL invokes some positive goals rather than being just avoidance based. On the gripping hand, it doesn’t really matter how it’s sliced as long as we get done what needs to be done.

She then went on to discuss the role of education in this context. There are two main ways educational institutions are tied to sustainability. First, they educate. That is, the provide knowledge, skills, and, unavoidably, values. She proposes (or perhaps propagates from the US Partnership for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development?) that “Education for a sustainable society: ‘enables people to develop the knowledge, values and skills to participate in decisions, that will improve the quality of life now without damaging the planet for the future.’”. Second, education is a significant economic sector in its own right and the choices it makes on operational and investment fronts can have a huge impact.

One scary and depressing tidbit - she did a quick show-of-hands poll at one point and only about 25% of the people attending believed we were experiencing human-impacted climate change. This in a group of (in theory) smart, well educated professionals. In the scientific community it’s about as well accepted as evolution - that is, barring extremely unlikely coincidence and the beliefs of some fringe individuals, it’s true.

She covered a whole bunch of organizations and groups that were involved in sustainability efforts, either directly as a primary mission or by participation in some other group. I won’t list them all here, but if you want a jumping off point try the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium. Another good one is the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. (Williams has not signed the latter, as far as I know because it feels that the goals are unachievable in the given timeline by anything other than massive purchase of carbon offsets, and that the offset market as it stands in the US is… suspect at best. On the other hand, I’m not convinced it would have been signed even without the climate neutrality clauses.) Another is the Disciplinary Associations Network for Sustainability. A final one is Play A Greater Part, which is focused on particular projects.

She closed with a series of suggestions for things institutions and individuals could do. They’re pretty much the same thing I hear everywhere, but they bear repeating (taken mostly directly from her powerpoint slides, my few edits added context words (e.g. “hot water” in front of “tank”):

Reduce energy, and thereby reduce tons of pollution and save money in the millions.

Buy and invest in renewable energies systems (e.g. Carleton)

Impact the manufacturing sector

Take it to your local and national politicians - this is CRUCIAL

Take it to your local schools, business community, government, non-profits and other higher education institutions

Environmentally and socially responsible purchasing - www.coopamerica.org, www.newdream.org, www.heasc.net - resources page

Environmentally and socially responsible investments - www.socialinvest.org

Caulk and weatherstrip

Get rid of parasitic power consumption - unplug the TV, computer, etc. when not in use!

Fill the freezer and clean the coils

Carpool or use bikes and buses

Turn down the hot water tank to 120 and use water conserving showerheads.

Permaculture instead of grass

Eat lower and local on the food chain

Buy renewable energy locally and offsets (www.nativeenergy.org is a good one)

Be an “energy waste detective”

Reduce, reuse and recyce

Prefer products made out of sustainably harvested materials and sustainable processes

Utilize the media to publicize the positive steps all can take to both teach and model sustainable development.

All of us engaged as effective change agents in our sustainability challenges

Caring involvement instead of despairing apathy

Know that our daily decisions affect the quality of life of people around the globe.

Help create policies that support stronger economies via the building of healthier ecosystems and social systems

She also makes a very good point that the community / government has to be involved at local and national levels. Try to get your community to do an energy audit and sustainability plan. If you’re looking for a starting (and possibly final) framework, the Climate Protection Agreement (signed by over 600 mayors) may be a good place to start. At the federal level, take it (ideally in person or by hand written letter) to your Senators and Representatives. Two good starting actions to request of them are 1. Undo the uneven subsidies, and 2. Pass a carbon tax (Tax pollution instead of income.) or a Cap and Trade system with AUCTIONED CREDITS.

She closed with a really long list of resources. most of which I won’t bother repeating (the mess of links above is already more than anyone will get to). However, There were a few specific to IT which bear repeating:

Green Computing Guide from Michigan State (c. 2004 but still has a lot of juicy stats and ideas) http://www.ecofoot.msu.edu/documents/green.computing.guide.pdf

Computers and lighting in a library analysis at Auburn http://www.auburn.edu/projects/sustainability/storage_public/AU%20Library%20Lighting%20and%20Computer%20Energy%20Report.pdf

EPEAT is a system to help purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes. http://www.epeat.net/

Electronics Reuse Initiative started by a university in collaboration with others http://www.wincycle.org/

Greener Computing site http://www.greenercomputing.com/

Cornell University’s Facilities Services Computer & Network Support office guide and accompanying website to promote sustainable computing http://computing.fs.cornell.edu/fsit/Sustainable/FSSustainableComputingGuide.pdf http://computing.fs.cornell.edu/fsit/sustainable/fsit_sustainability.cfm

All in all, a long and interesting presentation. She covered a lot of things I’ve heard before, buit I almost always find it useful to hear other’s perspectives on ideas. She also did a really good job of presenting pro-active steps that one could take in this area - I came away feeling a little less overwhelmed than I usually do when it comes to sustainability issues.

I saw Amory Lovins (of RMI fame) speak at Mass MoCA last Wednesday night about Winning the Oil Endgame. It was neat to have such a big speaker in town, and it took a collaboration among four colleges (Williams College, Bennington College, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and Souther Vermont College) to get him here. In addition to whatever else results from the talk, getting those four institutions working together is a Good Thing and I hope to see more of it in the future.

The talk itself was a little strange, both in content and in larger ways. In a general sense, it seemed like the sort of presentation that would be given before a group of diplomats, pentagon officials, industry leaders, etc. and not really appropriate for an audience of students, academics, and community members. While there were interesting parts, in many ways it came off as largely.. irrelevant. As a speaker he came across either as confident, optimistic, and visionary, or as conceited, overly glib, and unrealistic, depending on how charitable or mean one was feeling. Not knowing much about him, after seeing his talk I’d guess he’s a libertarian and an engineer. The talk itself covered a lot of ground, and I’ll just touch on a few points.

He spent a lot of time talking about the hypercar, the design principles behind it, and the way the automotive industry has responded. The hypercar concept is a good one and worth reading about in more detail. Essentially, the idea is that modern materials and manufacturing methods can let us build vehicles that are cheaper and safer than our current ones and that simultaneously get 3x or better mileage and can be adapted to run on fuels / power sources other than gasoline. The design process used was also interesting in the way it exploited spirals of efficiency. For example, lighter materials means the car weighs less which means it needs a less powerful, smaller engine which means it weight even less which means this that or the other part can be removed, and so on. The result is a vehicle built out of expensive parts and materials, but so many fewer of them that the finished car is actually cheaper than our current ones. It’s a nice reminder that there are positive feedback loops that can be good. The industry has responded slowly, but there are indications that they’re finally (after 10-15 years?) really beginning to buy into the idea and we may see cars that incorporate some hypercar ideas actually on the road in the next 5 years.

This touches on one of the less convincing aspects of the talk. He presented his ideas about the hypercar and suggested that it made such good business sense that whoever pursued it would dominate the industry and that it was nigh inevitable. This seemed largely at odds with reality. That is, the hypercar concept has been kicking around for quite a while now and he’s been advocating for it rather intensely and even with 3 million+ dollars worth of RMI effort in the project, it’s only now that the industry is even beginning to look at it seriously. If it was all as good as he says, it all should have fallen into place 20-30 years ago and we’d all be driving 200 kg cars that got 120 miles to the gallon. This discrepancy between his model and reality suggests that one of the other is flawed…

He tossed around a lot of numbers about various returns on investment and consumer savings, but glossed over the difference between societal benefit and individual or corporate benefit. For example, if things work out as he believes and we quickly manage to reduce our transportation oil consumption by 50% that represents a vast savings to the country at large. However, that also represents a vast LOSS for whoever would have sold that oil.

He also tossed around the phrases ‘cellulosic ethanol‘ and ‘algal oil‘ with gleeful abandon. Perhaps with his connections he knows something about pending breakthroughs and / or announcements. The last I heard we were still a long ways away from prime-time on those technologies. Anyone know any more details about that stuff? Regardless, there’s a lot to be said for designing for the future. The trick is designing for the future that will happen rather than just the future one wishes would happen.

On a related note, he seemed to have some strange blind spots, especially in the realm of ecology. He used the term ‘forestry waste products’ several times when talking about feed stocks for ethanol and avoiding using food crops for fuel, but came across as oblivious to the ideas that those ‘waste products’ are actually an important element for forest health. We’re already seeing some issues related to that in whole tree harvesting. With modern process there aren’t really any waste products. If, as he proposes, cellulosic ethanol is a future major fuel for our transportation then that may not bode well for our forests and associated systems. Environmental conscience aside, forests perform some really important services like water and air purification. It’s certainly worth some research into how much forest would be needed to sustain our current and future fuel consumption.

He stated the 70% of our oil goes to transportation and the remaining 30% to buildings. I’d thought agricultural use was a significant part of our oil budget as well.

ETA: The government data suggests the breakdown is something like 60% transport, 27% heating (fuel oil), and 13% everything else. Look at the Finished Petroleum Products section of the linked chart for more detailed numbers. So, he was off, but closer than my best guess was.

Back to the larger talk, one thing I found very strange was how he completely avoided talking about anything individuals could or should do. He focused only on the really large organizations: major auto manufacturers, huge retailers, the DoD, whole governments, etc. On some levels, that makes a lot of sense to me - such groups have huge leverage, and convincing the relatively small number of people that direct those groups can have a disproportionately large effect. However, the flip side of his message was that we as consumers should do nothing different, that the way we behave with respect to resource use is good and normal and even necessary. I have real problems with his implications in that direction and I think his lack of consideration on that front is a serious problem with his thinking.

He had some neat info about modern material and the toughness of carbon fiber composites. He didn’t get into the manufacturing process of such things at all. I’m curious about the embedded resources / energy. I suspect it’s less than metals (if you include mining costs) and more than woods. If anyone has more info about it please post a link or some such.

So, overall it was an interesting talk, possibly even a good talk, but definitely not a great one.

Recently the Sustainable Endowments Institute released a report on the green status and endowment practices of 100 leading colleges and universities. Williams was one of the four schools to receive the highest score. In many ways that’s great - we’re working hard and I think we’re doing a lot of things right, especially in our endowment management and our food services. However, from the inside I think we have a long ways to go over all, and I’m not convinced we yet deserve that top grade. In a couple of years, maybe, but for now it feels like we’re still ramping up on many green issues and don’t have much to actually show at the moment.

I suspect that the report grades on a curve. Which is to say it’s not so much that Williams is doing so well (on an absolute scale the grade would to me indicate that we were already fully sustainable by almost every measure), but that it’s doing so much better than many other institutions. That’s frightening. Leading instititions have the resources and the long-term view such that sustainability really should be a priority, but clearly that’s not the case. For the most part.

But the good news is that we seem to be on our way to actually earning that generous grade. Just yesterday the board unanimously passed this important, perhaps even momentous, resolution:

“WHEREAS, The President and Trustees of Williams College believe that the
principles and practices of environmental sustainability in general, and
greenhouse gas emissions reductions specifically, are institutional
priorities,

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT:

As recommended by the President’s Staff acting on the report of the Climate
Action Committee, Williams College hereby adopts as a goal the reduction of
its greenhouse gas emissions by ten percent below the College’s 1990-91
emissions level by the year 2020.”

This was the result of the hard work of the Climate Action Committee, which President Shapiro established last year just before Earth Week (in no small part as response to a student lead petition). Just last week the Climate Action Committee reported their results and recommendations to the board. The initial petition called for a 10% reduction by 2010 and the 20% reduction by 2015, though it didn’t specify that baseline. The goals recommended by the committee and adopted by the board are at least roughly in line with that.

However, that’s not the best part of this resolution. The really good stuff is at the end of the first paragraph, where sustainability is made an institutional priority. This is huge. In the past we’ve gotten good stuff done because committed individuals worked hard and often against the flow. They could justify some project on the roundabout grounds that sustainability is an important part of a modern liberal arts education, but that only goes so far. It’s hard, for example, to justify installing wind turbines to provide power for the college solely on the grounds that it’s educational. Now, sustainability is an official college priority, up there with diversity and accessibility.

Of course there’s still a lot of work to do, but now it’s not only possible, it’s encouraged. The board could have gotten away with just the carbon emission reductions, but they didn’t. They made a bold move to do the right thing for the long term, and it makes me proud to work here and be an alum, more so than anything else the college has done since I arrived as a freshman in 1991.

Williams has recently been at least vaguely interested in Green Computing. There were a number of articles a while back about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it was mentioned at a few conferences I and/or my co-workers attended, and it’s a topic in which I’m interested so I push the idea a bit around the office and larger campus. Finally, the college has recently begun to more closely monitor energy consumption and various people were astonished and a bit panicky at the amount of energy the computer center is using. Computers are un-green in three to four (depending on how you count and group them) main ways: the energy they use (this generally gets the most attention), waste when they break or are superceded (this usually gets the second most attention), the habits they engender (usually ignored), and their embodied energy (also usually ignored, though sometimes considered as a part of the e-waste discussion). Those problem areas are a good place to start when thinking about making computing more green.

Energy consumption is relatively straight forward. You can get a simple electricity meter (e.g. Kill A Watt) and figure out how much energy a computer system is using in various states (what the computer is doing - word processing, listening to music, running a ’screen saver’, etc.) and configurations (what kinds of parts make up the system - what size screen, speakers, printer, etc.). Here are some rules of thumb about using as little energy as possible when computing:

• the fewer peripherals a system has the less energy it requires
• more powerful machines require more energy (sometime much more - e.g. the Mac G5 workstation uses 185 watts when idle, while the iMac G4 uses 46)
• larger screens use more energy than smaller screens
• flat-panels use less energy than CRT monitors (though not so much less that it makes sense to actively junk CRTs and replace them with flat panels)
• laptops use much less energy than desktops (generally they use less than a third the energy of a desktop, but they’re more expensive, more fragile, and usually have a shorter useful lifespan)
• the harder a machine works the more energy it uses (playing a video takes more energy than editing a text file)
• the more machines you have in agiven space the more your secondary energy drain will be for keeping the space climate conditioned (though if your building is smart enough to have a room-by-room HVAC system you may be able to recoup some of that energy in the months for which you need heating).
• energy star rating is good
• more functions per piece of equipment is good (from a single monitor attached to multiple computers, or 18 virtual machines running on a single piece of underlying hardware)
• machines should always be running at the lowest acceptable power state (sometimes a machine needs to be fully on 24/7, but other times it could get away with only being on a couple hours a week and should be off the rest of the time)

It’s worth noting that most of these are trade-offs: a system with out a printer and scanner will use less energy, but some people need printers and scanners for their work; a 10″ screen (which might minimize energy use) for a standard desktop is just as ridiculous as a 28″ screen (though for different reasons), etc. Green computing isn’t about absolutely minimizing the energy used by a computer system (for that, just leave it unplugged, or simply don’t buy it to begin with), but about finding the right balance. This machine might need a scanner, but perhaps it doesn’t really need speakers, a web-cam, nor a floppy drive, and maybe a 17″ monitor could be used instead of a 21″. This aspect of green computing is usually a pretty easy sell because it (usually) saves money both up front and over time.

Electronic waste is a much more complicated issue, and I know a lot less about it. The high points as I understand them are:

• electronic waste is often shipped to other countries where it is buried unsafely or burned
• a number of manufacturers are now running recycling programs, and you should participate if at all possible
• the faster new computers are bought the faster the old ones turn into junk
• donating old computers to schools or non-profits doesn’t solve the problem, it just pushes the problem on to the recipient (that doesn’t mean that old machines shouldn’t be donated, just that donating them doesn’t mean the eventual disposal problem can be ignored)

There’s no easy solution to electronic waste. (At least, none within the current manufacturing paradigm. Concepts wil crable-to-cradle design and build-to-rebuild would go a long way towards remedying this problem, but for now they’re not common enough to count on, especially in the electronic industry). I think the best option these days is to send ‘used up’ machines to a recycling program, which costs money and so can be a hard sell.

Computing habits are nice in some ways because they require no technical changes / advances, but they’re notoriously hard to change. Some of them arise from things that were true in the very early days of computing and don’t apply with current technology (e.g. ’screen savers’, leaving a computer on so it doesn’t go through a startup cycle), and others are simply behaviors that people have developed for whatever reason (e.g. printing out documents instead of reading them on-line). People in all sorts of realms have thoguht long and hard about how to change people’s habits: advertising firms, governments, schools, activist groups, religions, etc. It’s well beyond the scope of this post to go over that in detail, but in broad strokes, it’s about marketing/convincing, educating, and restricting/forcing. In green computing this means telling people what to do in posters, in person, on screen, etc., explaining to them the effects of what they’re doing and why it’s important, and providing machines with good default settings (eg. screen turns off after 10 minutes of inactivity, always print duplex, etc.) and maybe locking them there in some cases. Some problem behaviors of note here are:

• leaving computers on 24/7 - most people really don’t need it, and modern computers aren’t harmed by it at all.
• leaving monitors on all the time - monitors use quite a bit of energy and have a very short startup time. Even if someone is stepping out of the office for 15 minutes it’s probably worth getting them to power off their monitor. Also, modern monitors have good power management options, take advantage of them.
• running ’screen savers’ - a screen saver does nothing but eat energy, and for many people it’s the most energy demanding application they run. To really save the screen, have it go to sleep or turn it off.
• peripheral explosion - not every computer needs all peripherals. Only include the ones that are needed, and for those make sure they’re off when not in use.
• printing lots of everything - we have serious printing problems, with people printing multiple copies of large/long documents which they never even pick up from the printer. In general, avoid printing if possible and if printing is necessary it should be duplex (both sides) if that’s reasonable and should only be of the needed pages.
• leaving machines/peripherals on when no needed at all - this is a bit different from the first point. The problem here is more with people not thinking than with people thinking the wrong thing. If someone’s going on vacation for a week, they really should turn off their system before they go, and maybe unplug it too (to avoid a vampire load)

There are many other such things - I’m sure everyone can think of a few. Some occur at the level of an individual (e.g. a person who habitually prints out every email), some at the level of an organization (e.g. computer labs that are left fully powered when the students are on break), and some societal (e.g. users have been trained that any computer they sit at will be on, and if it’s not they’ll call technical support before trying the power button). There’s a lot of work to be done in this area, and none of it’s easy.

And finally we get to embodied energy. If you don’t want to read the detail in the wikipedia entry, you can think of it as the total energy required to create a thing, from initial resource extraction and refinement, to transport, packaging, etc. The whole shebang. There are other approaches to the same idea (emergy, system ecology, footprint, etc.), and the particular one used doesn’t matter that much for my purposes. They all get at the idea that the dollar cost of a thing is not necessarily a good measure of the impact that thing has on the planet (though many of the methodologies mentioned are being used be economists to try to internalize some of those external costs). Embodied energy is why, for example, it doesn’t make sense to go out and replace all your CRTs with LCDs. The flat panel does indeed use less energy, but over the expected life of the equipement you will not save enough energy to make up for the energy it took to create that CRT you just threw away. Unfortunately there’s little in the way of solid information about the embodied energy costs of things. This leaves little to go on besides generalities and intuition. For now, that will have to be enough.