EcoGeeks

Dell Shows Its Green Stripes At Greener Gadgets

Yoni Levinson

Last Friday, at the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City, EcoGeek had the chance to sit down with Michael Murphy, Dell’s senior manager of environmental affairs. Mr. Murphy was at the conference to participate in a panel discussion entitled “Measuring Your Hue of Green” – where he (as well as a representative from Intel, among others) talked about how consumer electronic businesses can lead and are already leading the industry in green corporate practice.

Over the last year, Dell has been embarking on various green initiatives, the most prominent of which was their announcement that the company was, officially, 100% carbon neutral. Some critics questioned this title, pointing to the fact that a large part of that “carbon netural” tag came from carbon offsets. When asked to address this, Mr. Murphy pointed out that Dell’s Austin headquarters were entirely run on renewable energy, as were the offices in Oklahoma City. He said that Dell was committed to running on renewable power wherever it was available, and that the offsets are only for those geographies where renewable power is not feasible.

He also made it clear that Dell’s products rightfully deserved to be called green. One of Dell’s big pushes was to build laptops whose displays used LED backlights. LEDs make a laptop more power efficient, and they contain no mercury. More importantly, though, power-sipping LEDs give what all customers want the most – longer battery life.

According to Murphy, the LED move summarizes Dell’s green philosophy: make a better product, and it will naturally be greener. A green computer is not a computer that skimps on performance. It is a computer that is built out of better materials, in a smarter way, will last longer, and will cost less.

Dell has also been taking steps to consider the overall lifetime of the computer. Dell offers the only free consumer recycling and takeback program across the globe, and they also have developed a program called Reconnect with Goodwill Industries. This program not only allows people to donate their old computers rather than throw them away, but also provides jobs for people in the recycling industry. Mr. Murphy pointed out that Dell had become so involved in these recycling programs that they were making changes in the way they designed machines -just so that the recycling could be done more smoothly and efficiently.

Dell is doing a lot. Some may take issue with the term carbon neutrality, or with offset usage in general. But it is clear that Dell is delivering when it comes to leadership. They are not only working to embody green values, but are teaching the lessons of responsibilities to all their partners, at every step in their supply chain. As Mr. Murphy’s put it, Dell is learning a lot by trying to make its own facilities greener, and they see it as their duty to share what they learn with the rest of the industry.

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Greener Gadgets Conference: Heirloom Culture

Megan Treacy

At the Greener Gadgets Conference last Friday, a lot of great minds came together to discuss how technology can advance and we can lessen our impact on the planet at the same time. One concept kept coming up throughout the day and, as obvious as it seems, it struck a chord with me.

This major theme was that we needed to focus on creating an heirloom culture. Saul Griffith concluded his keynote with this point and the other panels throughout the day seemed to keep circling around this idea.

The concept is that any products that we manufacture from here on out should be made to last, to the point where we could hand them down to our children, and we as consumers should take care of our things and consume less. The combination would mean cutting down on waste and the need for raw materials and energy to make new things. Ideally, our current culture of constantly creating and buying new things to replace another, would instead become a culture of maintenance and repair.

A good example of this would be that instead of electronics companies releasing new models of their products every six months to a year, hardware and all, they would instead only release software to update the electronics. This way, people could take advantage of gains in technology without having to throw out the existing product. Completely new models would be released much less frequently and only when the hardware itself truly demanded it. At that point recycling would be widely available and free.

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EPA Likely To Regulate Emissions For First Time

Jack Moins

President Obama promised change when he was elected, and now it appears that he has enabled a big one. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce within months that for the first time it will regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The move would serve as an official recognition of global warming as an environmental threat. And, frankly, we can't believe it took so long.

For some time agency experts have been virtually unanimous in their declaration that carbon dioxide emissions are a pollutant and a danger to public health. However, the previous administration refused to allow the EPA to regulate this danger. During the previous administration a Supreme Court order for the EPA to determine the impact of carbon dioxide emissions was essentially ignored.

Lisa P. Jackson, the new EPA administrator has announced that her staff is reviewing the evidence and has hinted that she may announce a decision by April 2, the second anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, which occurred in the case Massachusetts v.EPA.

Says Ms. Jackson, “We here know how momentous that decision could be. We have to lay out a road map.”

Regulation by the EPA of carbon dioxide emissions would be a tremendous victory for alternative energy technology. It would allow financial pressure to be applied to power utilities, making them more likely to switch to solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, or other alternatives. Further, it would mark the U.S. government at last deciding to join the world community in trying to cut carbon dioxide emissions and fight global warming, something which would make more than a few ecogeeks’ day.

Via NYTimes

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Four Scary Surprises of Global Warming

Hank Green

Every once in a while I'll get an email or comment that can be roughly paraphrased as "I'm not actually that big a fan of cold weather...so why should I be worried about increasing CO2 emissions?"

Well, for you, I've put together a list of four somewhat surprising (and quite unsettling) things that that scientists have determined are occurring because of rising CO2 levels.

Global Depression
Depending on who you ask, the necessary changes the world will have to make as a result of global warming (everything from building higher sea walls to relocating entire cities) will cost up to 20% of the world's GDP. So, yeah, you think it's bad when we have a financial fall-out from a little housing bubble...imagine having 20% of the world's economy sucked into a hole the size of the Larsen Ice Shelf.
Global Fish Kill
One of the oft-overlooked, but possibly most devastating consequences of global warming is the acidification of the oceans. Oceans suck up huge amounts of CO2. And as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, so does the amount absorbed by the world's oceans. Unfortunately, when the CO2 enters the water, it creates carbonic acid. So, over the last hundred years or so, the acidity of the ocean has increased so much that it is literally eroding the shells of mollusks. Unfortunately, these mollusks are the base of many marine ecosystems, important to everything from salmon to sperm whales. The possibilities of an oceanic mass-extinction are on the rise.
Global Hunger
There is a massive amount of infrastructure in place to create the world's food. And that infrastructure depends on a fairly stable climate. We expect the rain to fall where and when it falls, we expect the thaw to come where and when it comes. But global warming does more than change the temperature, it changes the climate. Projections show more rain in dry areas and less rain in wet areas, the result of which could be the need to completely re-create much of our farming infrastructure. In th meantime, while that infrastructure is being created, we should expect that a lot of people will be very hungry.
Feedback Loops
A positive feedback loop is not something one likes to see in nature. For example, if melting snow creates more heat-absorbing land which creates more melting snow which creates more heat absorbing land, we have a positive feedback loop that is likely to exponentially increase its effect on global climate. These feedback loops are everywhere in climate models. From decreasing albedo (the example above) to increased wild fires puffing cities-worth of CO2 into the atmosphere to the Canadian boreal forests dying due to climate change and thus releasing their 27 years-worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere.

So yes...this time of year, I appreciate a nice warm day as much as the next guy. But those who get excited about global warming just don't know what they're talking about. And my thanks go to the scientists who work tirelessly to determine what effect climate change will have on us all, and what we need to do to deal with it.

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Obama's First Week was Kinda Awesome

Hank Green

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Obama will get around to disappointing me really soon, but when you compare his first week with George Bush's last eight years, one starts to feel pretty happy.

Obama started out his week by calling up the EPA and telling them they could allow California to have stricter automobile efficiency standards than the rest of the country, if they so wished. Bush had previously made the EPA tell California it was illegal. Obama is letting the EPA make it's own decision, though it's pretty clear that they'll let California do whatever it wants.

Our new president also set a plan in motion to increase fleet-wide fuel economy to 35 MPG over the next ten years or so. This 40% increase would mean substantial decreases in greenhouse emissions, especially if coupled with second-gen biofuels. The auto industry, of course, is griping, but I think they knew it was going to happen. And, yes, I do believe that they can do it, especially since the government is planning on giving them $25 B to them make the shift.

The shift will begin in 2011, which is very soon, especially since auto companies might have been hoping for a different president to be elected. It takes a long time to re-design vehicles and it's clear that some vehicles might need to be completely eliminated before then to meet the first round of upgrades.

The stimulus package, of course, is full of good news for the clean tech industry. With proposals totaling over $150 B for renewable energy incentives to be spent over the next ten years. This includes a $10 B "venture capital fund." I don't know how I feel about the government getting in on the VC game, but at least they don't have to be too keen on exit strategies.

Of course, this is only a small part (!) of the economic stimulus plan and I have to ask...how exactly are we planning on paying for it. I believe that the renewable energy economy will more than make up for the money spent in future tax revenues. But, overall, the stimulus plan combined with already out-of-control spending is going to add up to about $2 trillion of new debt just this year. That scares me...a lot.

So while I'm excited to see Obama thinking green...I wouldn't mind if he thought about the other kind of green as well...particularly, where the heck it's going to all come from.

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