Headlined: E-Books

E-books and e-readers have been getting quite a bit of attention on TreeHugger as of late, what will cool advances in e-paper technology and the death spiral of printed newspapers. E-books are very cool and will likely hold a significant place in our culture soon, helping us to cut down on the carbon footprint of the printed word while still maintaining broad home libraries, carrying books while travelling, even college students can put all their textbooks on a lightweight e-reader. And yet, there’s another very green resource that doesn’t get nearly the press it deserves…

Sidelined: The Library

According to our survey, only about 12% of you still use the library. And yet, along with a plethora of various resources, libraries offer the solution to pretty much any book craving we may ever get. Even if your library doesn’t have the title you’re seeking, they are likely hooked up to a network so that a nearby library can send the title right over to you. It may not be a perfect version of the instant gratification our generation craves, but it gets pretty darn close. And it’s all perfectly free.

Read the whole article to find out about:

• home energy monitors vs simply unplugging stuff
• hybrid cars vs bikes
• Electric composting machines vs a pile in the corner of the garden
• Recycling vs avoiding waste
• and more

It strikes me that there are dozens of areas in farming and gardening where we could also apply this principle.  With agriculture being such an important influence on our environmental well-being the solutions often lie simply in harnessing sunshine and rain rather than inventing new machines, chemicals and systems to try to repair an unsustainable food production system.

any alternative to growth remains unthinkable, even 40 years after the American ecologists Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren made some blindingly obvious points about the arithmetic of relentless consumption.

The Ehrlich equation, I = PAT, says simply that the impact (I) of human activity on the planet is the product of three factors: the size of the population (P), its level of affluence (A) expressed as income per person, and a technology factor (T), which is a measure of the impact on the planet associated with each dollar we spend.

Take climate change, for example. The global population is just under 7 billion and the average level of affluence is around $8000 per person. The T factor is just over 0.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per thousand dollars of GDP – in other words, every $1000 worth of goods and services produced using today’s technology releases 0.5 tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere. So today’s global CO₂ emissions work out at 7 billion × 8 × 0.5 = 28 billion tonnes per year.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that to stabilise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at a reasonably safe 450 parts per million, we need to reduce annual global CO₂ emissions to less than 5 billion tonnes by 2050. With a global population of 9 billion thought inevitable by the middle of this century, that works out at an average carbon footprint of less than 0.6 tonnes per person – considerably lower than in India today. The conventional view is that we will achieve this by increasing energy efficiency and developing green technology without economic growth taking a serious hit. Can this really work?

With today’s global income, achieving the necessary carbon footprint would mean getting the T factor for CO₂ down to 0.1 tonnes of CO₂ per thousand US dollars – a fivefold improvement. While that is no walk in the park, it is probably doable with state-of-the-art technology and a robust policy commitment. There is one big thing missing from this picture, however: economic growth. Factor it in, and the idea that technological ingenuity can save us from climate disaster looks an awful lot more challenging.

¨Growth¨ 1750 to 2000 Click to enlarge

It didn’t make front page news because we didn’t make ridiculous promises. Our policy is focused around access, freedom and open government. Free municipally owned wireless networks would be a great start. And Government needs to be more open with its information, both in the information it makes available and the compatibility of its systems. And it needs to prioritise local software development rather than relying on international corporations for managing NZers private information.

Just as important as investment in infrastructure is investing in the education of our children. Giving schools the ability to easily make the transition to free and open source software would be a giant leap forward. Not only giving students greater access to learning opportunities but additionally more access to computers via recycling initiatives like that employed by Warrington School.

How can saving money, recycling hardware (not up to spec for the latest version of windows but that still runs GNU/Linux comfortably) not be a good thing?

Richard Stallman critiques our policy and he made some important suggestions that we will feed into the policy process. For him our policy doesn’t go far enough, but then, thats why we need people like him and groups like the Free Software Foundation, to keep pushing the envelope. BTW, Richard is speaking tonight In Auckland, University of Auckland 1:00 – 4:00pm venue: OGGB4. Go and enjoy and say Hi from me.