Here’s a great piece about a guy who was able to produce a bumper crop on a vacant lot in Tuscon, Arizona by harvesting runoff from roofs and streets around the lot. It’s a nice bit of daydreaming for the wannabe urban farmer.
Here’s a map of the growth of his terraced gardens over the years, which I include because it’s a lovely small-multiple visualization:
The Evolution of the Russ Farm
I just had lunch at Amanda’s (“feel good fresh food”), right next to the downtown Berkeley stop. They’re like a McDonald’s you don’t have to feel guilty eating at. The food was delicious (I had a mushroom-walnut veggie burger, baked sweet potato fries, and a salad), cheap ($6.95 for the combo), the interior of the restaurant was really nice, and service was super friendly.
I hope they do well and expand to the city and beyond.
Amanda’s in Berkeley,To left is a live meter, showing the current estimate of my personal energy footprint. This combines all my energy usage (electric, natural gas, oil) encompassing transportation, the embodied energy of my possessions, and my share of the energy used by the governments of the USA and California.
You can make your own energy profile at WattzOn.com. They have incredibly easy-to-use interfaces for quickly estimating your energy profile.
More importantly, the site provides some very useful context for your profile. I’ve included some screenshots, below. The first is a pie chart showing the relative magnitudes of different parts of my energy usage. I don’t commute by car, so the vast majority of my energy usage comes from the energy expended by government and by airplane flights. For example, the nearly 2000 Watts of energy I expend flying comes from six short flights and four long ones I take each year, on average. You can also see that food and my home heating are also big energy expenditures.
There’s also a screenshot showing how I stack up amongst world citizens (somewhere between Japan and Russia, less than 2/3 the energy consumption of the average American.) After than is a graphic showing how large of a solar panel would be required to power my lifestyle, if it could all be powered by electricity (one enormous panel, 15m square, or somewhere between $50k and $100k worth of solar panels!)
How much energy should we be using, though? Saul Griffith (MacArther Genius Award winner, head of Makani Power, parter of Squid Labs, and one of the founders of Instructables) is the man behind WattzOn. He created WattzOn in response to a year of thinking he did on climate change. You can see the very well-thought-out, very straightforward presentation of his ideas, below. The bottom line? To stabilize the climate in the next few hundred years and restrict the impact of climate change to moderately-terrible effects (“only” 20% species loss, tens to hundreds of millions displaced, etc.), each of us need to reduce our energy usage to 2,250 Watts. 2,250 Watts! That’s the energy usage of the average Chinese person, a third of what I currently use. When I look at the numbers this way, the future looks pretty grim.
Of course, every bit counts, and being able to visualize my energy usage goes a long way towards changing my behavior. I’m certainly trying to fly less, these days, eat less meat, and ease up on using the heaters in my room. I think WattzOn has a lot of potential to do the same for others. I’m sure they’re working on new features that the public doesn’t know about, but I’ll take that risk of telling them what they already know and make some suggestions.
My biggest one is to allow people to interact with this data socially. It means one thing to be able to visualize one’s energy usage, but the application’s spread and impact will increase dramatically if people can show off their numbers and compare with others. Here are some example social features:
There are many other sites experimenting with this idea. See eco:Drive, Positive Energy, and the Climate Pledge Facebook App. The Nike+ workout tracking system has also implemented many competitive social features that would be useful for the WattzOn team to examine.
Good luck, WattzOn! In the meantime, I hope everyone signs on and takes a hard look at their own energy usage.
Note: Jay also mentioned that his company, SolarCity, also has cool information visualizations for its solar panel clients. Here’s a nice example.
The reports are quite detailed. Here’s the page for all the most recent products. Here’s the PDF for the new MacBook Pro. The Carbon footprint of the MacBook Pro’s entire life cycle is below, for example:
It would be really nice if Apple did analyses on their older products, as well, but they have an incentive (a transparently self-serving one) to keep those less-efficient products and processes hidden.
Regardless, kudos to them for making big efforts to reduce their impact.
Fiat has a cool new app called eco:Drive that uses accelerometers to analyze drivers’ efficiency (speed, precision of gear changes, etc.) The data is shared online, letting people compare their driving skill with others and estimate the cost/CO2 savings that they earn by becoming better drivers.
Unfortunately, it only works with specialized hardware in certain Fiat cars. It would be amazing if they could create a tracker that could use the accelerometers now built into any iPod/iPhone, cellphone, or laptop.
I’ve finally started educating myself on the current economic crisis. However we move past this current credit crunch (soft landing vs. hard landing), the fact is that Americans will likely face a lower standard of living within our lifetimes. You might not have believed that the decline of the American Empire had begun up until 2008, but it’s clearly in motion now.
Unfortunately, the imperial decline could have dire effects, worldwide. Whatever your opinion on the fairness of an empire, one thing it can promote is stability. If our capacity to service our national debt diminishes to the point where we have to remove our military presence from the hundred or so nations where we have bases, we may see scores of regional wars in the power vacuum.
Additionally, an empire in decline has few resources to devote to stewardship of the enviroment (or, put more simply, long-term planning.) We can elect as progressive a government, come November. The US may simply be unable to withstand the political and economic costs of raising energy prices in order to combat global warming.
Perhaps another nation will take up the role of “global policeman.” Perhaps dramatic new technologies will save our GHG-saturated climate. The future is unknown, but the dire scenarios are looking worse and more likely than ever.
I love how Robb generalizes phenomena, creating useful frameworks that find application in many disparate domains (e.g. economics, politics, warfare, sociology, etc.) His latest is the concept of a “dissipative system,” a system that draws energy from its surroundings to resist entropic forces:
This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (obsessing a bit, perhaps) about how complexity emerges in various forms (at different physical scales, on different substrates), and how our own individual experiences of consciousness fit into those ideas. Robb’s “dissipative structures” is a useful tool for generalizing the underlying constraint that shapes selection functions for natural selection at every level.
For example, in a later post, Robb begins re-framing economic and conventional warfare in terms of dissipative systems in conflict:
NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and “heat death”). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).
I had this to add, in a comment on that post:
The function that translates energy into complexity is far from constant. It is highly dependent on technology, for example (compare joules required to power the Pony Express vs. fiber optic communcation, per byte.) You might call this “efficiency,” but my suspicion is that the translation function is much more complicated than that.
In any case, struggling over energy sources is necessary tactic for dissipative system, but a system may prevail with lower energy sources if its energy-to-complexity function outperforms.
And by RIP, I mean “rot in historical ignominy.” It turns out that consumer demand for fuel is more elastic than we all feared. With gas prices going through the roof, people are finally starting to buy more reasonable cars.
GM saw a 28% drop in light-vehicle sales in May. Ford’s sales fell 16%. The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States almost every year for the past three decades, was knocked off its perch by both the Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla.
Hummer sales fell by 60%!
GM has announced the closure of its Janesville assembly plant, and the discontinuation of the plus-sized Tahoe, Suburban and Yukon lines as early as 2009. No word on the Hummer, but the buzzards are circling. GM will add additional shifts to plants that produce more fuel-efficient cars, and the company hopes to have the electric Chevy Volt in showrooms by 2010.
As a side note, the H2 hummer was not only an obnoxious and wasteful “fuck you” to everyone whose visual field it polluted, it was also a shitty car, engineering-wise:
A couple items from my Flickr feed. The first is a photo of a landfills taped to all the trash cans at work. The second is my long-lost license got returned to me when someone simply dropped it, loose, into a mailbox.
I wonder if there’s a better way to integrate blog-like images into my actual blog…
Landfill Portal,
License Reappears,This one is beautiful. The entire plane is being deconstructed and reassembled into multiple structures. Here’s the main page, and the page for the main residence. Some photos and renderings, below.
I have some previous posts on this topic in the related links, below…
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