The author of the NYT editorial I wrote about on August 4th brought up this idea:
“Domestically, a power company can earn credits by, say, helping farmers capture methane emitted by animal waste ponds or cultivate land in ways that help absorb carbon.”
I’ve read a few articles about these “black lagoons” (term borrowed from NYT article linked below) of animal waste created by farms, specifically pig farms. Recently, I started wondering whether people really understand what these farms are like. If you haven’t ready anything like The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, you could live on not knowing what kind of atrocities there are out there that are connected to producing your food.
The animals raised on large lot farms are kept in close quarters, and can’t be near each other’s waste because it would make them sick. (Which is quite understandable. It would make me sick too.) So the waste needs to be trucked out of the animals’ barns and deposited somewhere, often on one big piece of land on the same farm. This turns the land into a black lagoon of animal waste that contaminates the soil, possibly the groundwater, toxic gas emission, and tons of other issues that affect the environment and the health of humans.
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We all have a friend who is one. An electricity-hog. A 45-minute-showerer. The drive-to-the-gym-so-I-can-run-in-place kind of person. The most common of these types of habits among young adults today seems to be the excessive bad computing habits, like leaving a computer on when it isn’t being used (especially overnight) and printing things that don’t need to be printed.
Computing and printing habits are some of the toughest to break in our culture of excessive everything (perhaps not as tough as that of food, but still tough).
GreenPrint is a computer software company trying to battle these habits by giving the user more control over what gets sent to the printer. (NYT article and gadgetwise blog) There is also a corporate edition that could really make a difference in the workplace.
However, as useful as GreenPrint may be, it is not really getting at the heart of the issue. There might be less paper being used for each specific print job, but the number of print jobs might even increase because people feel they can print more often since they have been saving up “printing credits.”
Instead of printing something to look at for a few days, hours, minutes, whatever, there has to be a change in judging what is necessary to print or just a better way of having a copy in your hands (perhaps e-ink? E-ink is the technology that is used in Amazon’s Kindles and Sony’s Reader as well as other reading devices).
What really needs to happen is the change in mentality of users. Much like the ideas that Michael Pollan promotes regarding food portion sizes, the solution might not be to force the shaving of fractions of what is being used, but to fundamentally change what we think is an acceptable level of use.
Image credit
GreenPrint http://www.printgreener.com/images/logo.gif
Will Allen is an urban farmer featured in this NYT article. He does interesting work in greenhouses to feed 10,000 local people. It is so exciting to see something great happening where it is needed most.
Urban centers, especially inner city areas, often lack access to fresh produce. This has enormous implications for health because, while it is easier to get a hamburger and fries for dinner, no one will be able to stop the obesity trends.
The article talks about composting and urban farming and the recent rise in appreciation and interest for such work.
The author seems to make a big deal about farming systems that close the cycle, using the “waste” to continue the growth and nutrient cycle.
But this is not something new!! We have been aware of these ecological principals for such a long time. By we, I mean scientists…and all the old school farmers who understood the relationships between all the living things on their farms.
There is no waste in Nature! That is the missing underlying idea that the author skips over. The history of how we are returning to this type of farming is not mentioned at all.
But the author makes a good point of bringing up the fact that farms like these are not and can not be self sufficient with the current condition. Will Allen’s farm receives grants and other types of support to keep up and running. For more similar farms to be successful, it has to become profitable. It makes me sad to say that, but it is basically true.
In any case, it is an enjoyable and informative article and I hope you read it!
There is an interesting NYTimes article about a researcher who studies about fireflies.
Different species of fireflies have different patterns of flashing, but only the males flash while flying! The females usually sit in the grass observing the males, often looking for a male of their own species to respond to. Often you can find several different species of fireflies in the same field. This researcher studies the flashing of the fireflies and what the different patterns might mean.
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The New York Times Magazine recently put out a piece by Jon Gertner about environmental decision-making and the different social dynamics that are involved. The author discusses several different studies that involve individual and group decision-making. One group doing such research is the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions is an interdisciplinary based at Columbia University that receives funding for their research from the National Science Foundation.
Gertner brings up several interesting points such as the ethics of using “frames” and “nudges” to send signals and possibly influence decisions. The idea behind these terms is that the way that a choice is “framed” could affect the outcome by taking advantage of our cognitive biases and that nudges “structure choices so that our natural cognitive shortcomings don’t make us err.”
I find it fascinating to read about studies involving decision-making, especially the ones that compare individual versus group actions. Gertner talks a little bit about the comparisons between carbon taxes and offsets, and how there generally is an aversion to the word “tax,” when in reality taxes and offsets function in nearly exact ways. Gertner also cites a study that suggests that group decisions for which individual preparation beforehand was not allowed leads to better inclusion of long term goals. This is also interesting as part of the discussion of the general bias towards information received early on in the decision-making process.
So maybe one day we could frame questions and choices so that we nudge people into making the right decisions, or at least set up a fair situation for all choices considered. But who decides what is best in the long term interest? And who is to say those who are deciding aren’t also affected by similar cognitive bias related phenomena? Possibly even some being phenomena that we are not yet aware of?
Decision-science seems to be a very pertinent field, especially in the realm of climate change related decisions. However, very little of the funding going towards climate research is going to social science studies such as these. I think that being open to these types of questions of cognitive shortcomings will become increasingly more important as challenges brought on by climate change become more complex and intricate.
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Just when we think we might make progress…
August 4, 2009
Society, Some Comments
1 comment
The Senate is in a position to pass a climate change bill aimed at the energy industry. There are some things that were changed through much of the politicking going on, and it is unsure whether the bill would be successful at doing much in the way of reducing emissions.
Here are a few opinions:
Whichever method is chosen, something should be done soon. If cap-and-trade policy is less effective than taxing carbon, then we will find out and should be flexible to adapt our policy.
We WILL NOT get things right the first time around! We cannot expect to! Policy should not be written and left stagnant anyway! But we can’t afford to argue back and forth about which policy will work better. That would take way too long to make anything happen.
We are missing the point by debating over what type of policy would work better. We should be open and flexible while ensuring that whatever policy is implemented is as strong as it can be, predicts any abuses, and doesn’t have any loopholes.
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