Rich Citizens poor state _Food for thought in current times

Food for thought 

Apologies for not being able to produce more data.

Reference

The Economist "A German movement argues that the debt crisis could be solved if governments taxed private wealth more heavily" econ.st/S24Ntk

Mea Culpa_Maximizing performance, minimizing waste RightScale takes much of the risk out of choosing a cloud

It is all well criticising as in one of  my earlier posts today entitled "Setting the Example_Still a long way to go judging by the Top Cloud Computing Proponents"

Mea Culpa:
Well I was busy loging-off and closing my tabs when I discovered that the issues rightly raised by Greenpeace and echoed by Scientific American are being addressed by the innovating companies RightScale and Technology Pioneer Enphase Energy.

The reference entitled Maximizing performance, minimizing waste

RightScale takes much of the risk out of choosing a cloud computing system by offering a free edition of its myCloud platform for developing and testing private cloud infrastructures.
The open-source model is almost as revolutionary as the technology. The company makes its profit from services, once the cloud is up and running. Its specialty is fine-tuning servers to handle different types of data seamlessly while providing strategies that create as little downtime as possible.
Also
Solar power systems are not without risks too. One big problem (I trust this is not hype-seems obvious) is the “Christmas light effect”, in which a single bad light knocks out an entire string of perfectly good lights. In a similar fashion, most solar systems are connected in series to an inverter that changes the power generated into electricity in a form that can be used. When a cell loses power, it reduces the output from other cells to the lowest common denominator. Technology Pioneer Enphase Energy gets around this drawback by assigning a small micro inverter to each cell individually. The arrangement makes it possible to connect the cells in parallel and it also considerably reduces system weight and makes installing systems much easier.

Enphase’s approach draws the maximum output from each cell, and uses a computer relying on a wide area network (WAN) to coordinate the output.

This and many more innovations and innovating companies at the ref. link below:

Reference:

Technology Pioneers 2013 from The World Economic Forum (WEF) [pdf]

Why CFOs Are Skeptical About Sustainability? - Answer: They don't know about Factor 10 Institute

"To a great extent — and unfortunately — “sustainability” is a quality that exists in the mind of the beholder is the opener for David M. Katz  article in CFO webzine. David is editor-in-chief of CFO Online/Mobile.

While the complete aruement may be read in the references 1.  CFO's  I shall choose a few excerpts for the sake of argument.

"While any good finance executive will focus first on the costs and revenue opportunities in proposed energy-saving plants, the risks and benefits to company employees and external society will be squarely on his or her radar, because they potentially affect the company’s brand reputation. 

But doing good deeds is and should be the gravy (not the meat") in this discussion. The corporation, by its very nature, needs to benefit from any sustainability effort to go ahead with it and be motivated to succeed at it. Self-interest needs to be the prime driver, and the extent of self-interest needs to be benchmarked.

Of course, there are sweet spots where what’s good for the planet melds seamlessly with what’s good for the bottom line." he concedes.  For example, he mentions one company which by changing its energy consumption helped cut its costs. (He doesn't tell us what type of change -mean of him don't you feel? or is it a trade secret to strive to lower the energy bill, and let me add to increase material savings - The Material Productivity )

He rightly concludes (with some ignorance that all activity can be described in terms of Carbon Footprint which admittedly may be a far too global metric to put into practise and monetary value savings and gains.

  

"The reason for this is that for corporations, metrics for sustainability — in particular the environmental kind — amount to just so much greenwash. There are few environmentally based metrics to match the financial metrics most corporations run on.

For example, while measuring a company’s “carbon footprint” may be a good way to prove how good a corporate citizen it is, it addresses finance only tangentially — perhaps by increasing sales among environmentalists, or making it less a target of lawsuits. But really, what does a carbon footprint have to do with an income statement, balance sheet, or cash-flow statement?

The challenge of sustainability at the corporate level is to find a way to answer that question in hard, numeric, provable ways that take into account the self-interest so basic to our free-enterprise system. Then, if the metrics are there, the incentives needed for productive action will be too."

REF 1. Full Article CFO.com (http://s.tt/1jQsf) 

An  this is where Factor 10 Institute comes in 

The Factor10 Institute 2008

The Factor 10 Institute has been created to provide practical support for achieving significant advances in resource productivity in the production and consumption sectors through:

• The design of eco-efficient logistic systems, processes, and services;
• The development of dematerialized products, services, buildings, and infrastructures with high resource productivity;
• Appropriate marketing strategies, maintenance, recycling and disposal of goods;
• Enhancing consumer information on the environmental quality of products and services;
• The creation and performance of research and development plans;
• Offering seminars for firms, politicians and other interested people, giving practical advice for implementing the Factor 10 and the MIPS-concepts at home, in the public domain, in firms, and in governments;
• Small scale seminars for political and business leaders to identify long-term sustainable economic options;
• Forging coalitions among international initiatives for practical approaches toward sustainability, such as The Natural Step, Sweden, the Zero Emission Forum, Japan, The Environmental Footprint, USA, and the Dutch Sustainable Technology Program.

The Factor 10 Institute takes particular interest in questions relating to the increase in employment and the sustainable financing of governments. It also provides services to the international Factor 10 Club.

REFERENCE

2. The Factor 10 Institute

cf also

 Factor 10_Position Paper 08/01: “FUTURE - BEYOND CLIMATIC CHANGE” (pdf)

Setting the Example_Still a long way to go judging by the Top Cloud Computing Proponents

Following twitting my previous post "Green economies around the world ? Implications of resource use (materials in fact) for development and the environment", I found the following post due to Scientific American entitled

"How Clean Is the Energy Used by Tech Companies for Cloud Computing?"

Intro:

Quote: "This emerging trend, dubbed “cloud computing,” means that these providers have had to scale up their power consumption considerably, as they are increasingly responsible for providing more and more of the computing horsepower required by the world’s two billion Internet users. 

Savings estimated by research firm Verdanix

 "sharing such resources on centralised servers is more efficient than every individual and business running their own versions separately.  Verdantix estimates that companies off-loading data and services to cloud servers could save $12 billion off their energy bills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 85 million metric tons within the next decade. But for the greenhouse gas savings to be realised, the companies offering cloud computing services need to make the right energy choices."

 “How Green is Your Cloud?"

 "Gary Cook, a Senior Policy Analyst with Greenpeace, tells us that highly innovative and profitable companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are building data centers powered by coal and acting"

Greenpeace highlights the Issue:

"Greenpeace’s report evaluates 14 major tech firms and the electricity supply chains in use across more than 80 different data centers that power cloud-based services. Some of the largest data centers are in buildings so big they are visible from space and use as much power as 250,000 European homes. 

If the cloud were its own country, says Greenpeace, it would rank 5th in the world in electricity consumption."

Top Techies let off the hook:

"“Companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook are beginning to lead the sector down a clean energy pathway through innovations in energy efficiency, prioritising renewable energy access when siting their data centers, and demanding better energy options from utilities and government decision-makers,” reports Greenpeace. But...

The Villains

"the majority of the industry is not marching in step. As such, Greenpeace is calling on all tech companies with cloud services to develop siting policies based on access to clean energy sources, invest in or directly purchase renewable energy, be transparent about their energy usage, share innovative solutions so the sector as a whole can improve, and demand that governments and utilities increase the percentage of clean, green power available on the grid. "

Hence my title 

'Setting the Example_Still a long way to go judging by the Top Cloud Computing Proponents'

If the savy guys are not playing by the clean rules is their any hope?

Naturally this title and underlying meanings applies well beyond techies and Computing to many if not all walks of life as underlined by the New French President, François Holland. François, please do not stop at your first "symbolic" measures but put this into practise throughout Government - Make the example the rule, the standard. (There is no ISO XXX standard for Politics or Managers) Your position as a leader can only be re-enforced. Only on such a trajectory can The CAC 40 enterprise leaders-demeanours and the negligent Techies be brought to task.

Enjoy 

 REF:

Scientific American.com "Computings-Substantial-Footprint"

Greenpeace International_Climate-Reports_"How-Clean-is-Your-Cloud/"

Verdantix

MORE for the 21st Century?

Green economies around the world? Implications of resource use for development and the environment - Zunia.org

Allow me to bring to your attention the following comprehesive free report on global materials activity.

"The report addresses three main issues:
1. Patterns of material extraction, trade, consumption and resource productivity in
different world regions and countries;
2. Connections between material use and indicators of economic and social development;
3. Links between material use and selected major environmental problems, such as
carbon emissions, land use change and water use."

This work is fittingly classed in the MILLENIUM category of issues for Global consideration

REFERENCE:

The Report entitled Green Economies Around the World (pdf) 

More from ZUNIA
Green economies around the world? Implications of resource use for development and the environment - Zunia.org

Jared Diamon reviews and recommends the book_ "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty"

Two hundred years ago Adam Smith wrote his pioneering work "The Wealth of Nations", 

Jared Diamond authored two now famous books at the beginning of the new century 2000  " 1.Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 

and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed 

2. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which also is the winner of Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize. 

  

Here, Jared Diamond reviews for us:  
"Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" 
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson 


Diamond's overall assessment of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s argument is that inclusive institutions, while not the overwhelming determinant of prosperity that they claim, are an important factor. Perhaps they provide 50 percent of the explanation for national differences in prosperity. That’s enough to establish such institutions as one of the major forces in the modern world. Why Nations Fail offers an excellent way for any interested reader to learn about them and their consequences. Whereas most writing by academic economists is incomprehensible to the lay public, Acemoglu and Robinson have written this book so that it can be understood and enjoyed by all of us who aren’t economists.


Why Nations Fail should be required reading for politicians and anyone concerned with economic development. The authors’ discussions of what can and can’t be done today to improve conditions in poor countries are thought-provoking and will stimulate debate. Donors and international agencies try to “engineer prosperity” either by foreign aid or by urging poor countries to adopt good economic policies. But there is widespread disappointment with the results of these well-intentioned efforts. Acemoglu and Robinson pithily diagnose the cause of these disappointing outcomes in their final chapter: “Attempting to engineer prosperity without confronting the root cause of the problems—extractive institutions and the politics that keeps them in place—is unlikely to bear fruit.”


Diamond's full two page review of  Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson 's work, is published in The New York Review of Books at the following link: 


Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty



A MUST READ FOR ALL IN THE CURRENT FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC CLIMATE.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

An easy access link to The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis(IIASA) has been added to my list of  Forsight-Hindsight Institutes and Videos.  The IIASA, is an international research organization that conducts policy-oriented research  into problems that are too large or too complex to be solved by a single country or academic discipline.

IIASA research investigates the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. The researchers, some 200 mathematicians, social scientists, natural scientists, economists, and engineers, develop assessment and decision-support methodologies, global databases, and analytical tools to study the issues. IIASA concentrates its research efforts within three core research themes:

• Energy and Climate Change;
• Food and Water;
• Poverty and Equity.

Please do not hesitate to visit the website and read their publications. LINK