Does Anyone Disagree With Global Warming?

I heard a radio program today on global warming.

Global Warming is Not a Crisis -- An Oxford-style debate that is provocative, intellectually rich, humorous, and dramatic. For each debate, three panelists argue for a motion and three argue against it, with a moderator controlling the proceedings. After the formal arguments, the debate is thrown open to the floor for questions. Each side attempts to persuade the audience to vote their way. Arguing for the motion are author and filmmaker Michael Crichton, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT Richard S. Lindzen, and emeritus professor and biogeographer from the University of London, Philip Stott. Arguing against the motion are Union of Concerned Scientists' national climate program representative Brenda Ekwurzel, NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, and University of California-San Diego distinguished professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography Richard C.J. Somerville. Moderator Brian Lehrer is host of the New York Public Radio program "The Brian Lehrer Show" and award-winning author and documentary producer. -- KQED Radio

At the beginning of the audience Q&A section, a New York Times reporter asked a couple of incisive questions. First he asked whether anyone on either side of the issue disagreed that humans were contributing to global warming. No panelist disagreed. Then he asked whether any panelist thought it was bad to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Only one panelist disagreed, the rest thought it was good.

I turned off my radio.

Wow, I thought. I wasn't thinking of Microsoft Vista. I was thinking that the real global warming debate comes down to ROI. The panelists arguing so forcefully against investing in greenhouse gas reductions were just like atheists who say they are agnostic. If the insurance policy for purgatory is just to say that God might exist, why not? Likewise, if the insurance policy for global warming disasters is a set of investments in CO2 reduction that provide market ROI, why not?

An emerging idea is that if there is good business in greenhouse gas reduction, by all means reduce the greenhouse gases -- just don't ask anyone to give up their SUV.

I wrote previously about pricing problems related to global warming. Another economic problem revolves around entrenched industries. A good example of an investment that reduced greenhouse gases while providing good ROI? How about the recent replacement of traffic lights with LED lights? This government action reduced energy usage significantly, but it required administrators to evaluate infrastructure costs using total cost of ownership (TCO) rather than lowest bid (although LED lights costs are dropping enough to win bids on upfront costs in many cases).

If traffic lights have been replaced by LED lights, why not streetlights? Energy investments work very differently when evaluated on a TCO basis rather than an upfront cost basis. Until administrators change their evaluation methodology, inefficient solutions that generate lots more greenhouse gases will dominate markets.

Change may be on the way. SunEdison, for instance, is using financial contracts to encourage the use of solar energy. Industry and government can do much more, though, to encourage better use of financial contracts and TCO evaluations to reduce greenhouse gases. Industry can help define and market standards that make it easy for buyers to understand TCO. For instance, most electric devices provide specifications on power draw. A smart buyer can add up the costs of power over the life of a device (as well as maintenance, replacement costs, etc.), and calculate TCO for the device. But industry can make this easier. For instance, websites could help buyers make TCO calculations and trade-offs for devices deployed in specific environments and applications to determine the most cost-effective device over the life of the application.

Government can require TCO analysis before it lets contracts, and even weight energy savings more favorably to reduce CO2 emissions. It also can provide policy direction, identifying areas where TCO analysis will have the most impact on greenhouse emissions.

As I realized listening the global warming debate on the radio today, whether your stand on global warming is that we should do something about global warming or that spending money on global warming is a waste, no one can argue with economically rational investments. While the debate rages, industry and government can start today to take steps reducing greenhouse gas emissions without debate: evaluate TCO before buying energy consuming devices.

Leveraging Existing Infrastructure, Part I

I ran into my friend Keith Schaefer a month ago. A serial entrepreneur, Keith told me about his most recent company, BPL Global. BPL's premise devices shed electric load during peak demand and provide demand response tools so its customers can automatically shift load in response to dynamic pricing programs. Economically, BPL enables electricity markets to shift investment from generation to demand management. A marginal dollar invested in demand management effectively provides more power than a marginal dollar invested in generation.

An emerging idea is that incremental investments in information technology to manage expensive infrastructure like energy, transportation, and communications will provide a higher return than incremental investments in the infrastructure itself. Most of these kinds of infrastructure management technologies focus on three areas:

• Measuring infrastructure usage
  
• Providing methods to shift peak infrastructure demand to off-peak times
  
• Caching, or storing infrastructure supply locally to reduce infrastructure usage during peaks
  

BPL uses all three of these items to leverage existing energy infrastructure. Previously I wrote about an information technology for managing traffic infrastructure here. This technology leverages existing road traffic infrastructure to reduce congestion and increase automobile flow.

Information technology itself uses information technology to leverage its own performance. In fact, information technology probably uses more information technology to manage its resources more than any other industry. Caching is a common ploy to increase computer or network performance. Memory systems, for instance, layer memory to cheaper and cheaper caches. Memory on the CPU caches its contents to Random Access Memory which, in turn, caches its contents to hard disk drives which, in turn, cache their contents to tape or DVD back-up. System designers and the computers themselves use multiple measurements to calculate how much of each type of memory a computer requires, and where and when to move data between each layer of memory most efficiently.

Inexpensive measurement of supply and demand is key to leveraging infrastructure. No wonder information systems can utilize management systems so pervasively: they constantly measure (among other things) CPU usage, process load, and memory requirements by using existing components inside the computer. Other industries such as energy and transportation have not had the luxury of inexpensive measurements until quite recently. Rapidly decreasing costs of sensors and networks have begun to lower measurement costs to the point that these older industries can apply information technology to manage their respective infrastructures costs effectively.

More on how techniques for running computers more efficiently can help run other infrastructures more efficiently in Part II!

Online Media Production

When you start companies, you often run into naming problems. First is the name of the company itself. Then the name of the products and product features. Think of the plethora of terms that didn't exist ten years back for Internet services: "pop-up", "spam", "AJAX", "Google", "web-enabled email client", "IMAP", "mash-up", "podcast", "Blackberry", and on and on.

As more and more media moves to the Internet, I've been looking at changes in media production tools. Most professional media production takes place on computers these days, using products like Adobe Photoshop or Apple Final Cut.

An emerging idea is that, as more and more content assets migrate to the Internet, media production tools also will migrate to the Internet. Today, though, if you search for "online media production", though, you end up with computer based production products like this. You run right into the naming problem. Inconveniently, the term "online media production" describes precisely media production tools that have migrated to Internet services, but according to the search engines that term means something different.

Most of the Internet photo services like flickr and picasa have simple media production tools, mostly for organizing and feeding photos rather than manipulating images. Here's a video on flickr that shows, for instance, ways that photo assets can be incorporated in slide shows and blogs.



If you search on using flickr or using picasa on YouTube, you'll find many more ways that people are using these online photo services for media production.

SoundStreak is an example of a company that provides online media production services. SoundStreak provides Internet Recording Studio services that move recording sessions out of physical studios and on to the Internet. It uses smart caching of recorded video and audio assets to enable real time interaction between producer, director, and voice talent over the Internet. Services like SoundStreak's will reduce significantly the time, travel, and cost associated with media production.

For the next year or two, most media production will continue to take place on computers. Expect our language (and search engine results) about media production to change as more of these production tools migrate to the Internet.


Update: Someone at HP must have read this post!

HP plans to leverage Tabblo's technologies to make printing from the web easier and more convenient than it is today. Tabblo's technology allows people to simply and efficiently arrange and print text, graphics and photos from the web. This is made possible by Tabblo's custom template engine, using an AJAX-enriched interface. -- tabblo.com

Feeling Congested

If you're feeling like car travel takes longer than ever, this chart from a U.S. Department of Transportation study on traffic congestion should validate your feelings. Growth of motor vehicles has far outstripped growth of roads, and traffic jams are the inevitable result. Lots of studies have measured the losses in terms of time, money, and pollution. So, aside from getting out of our cars, what are the options for reducing traffic congestion?

Wikipedia presents Anthony Downs' (author of Stuck in Traffic and Still Stuck in Traffic) view on the economics of the congestion problem here:

In a capitalist economy, goods can be allocated either by pricing (ability to pay) or by queueing (first-come first-serve); congestion is an example of the latter. Instead of the traffic engineer's solution of making a "pipe" large enough to accommodate the total demand for peak-hour vehicle travel (a supply-side solution), either by widening roadways or increasing "flow pressure" via automated highway systems, Downs advocates greater use of road pricing to reduce congestion (a demand-side solution, effectively rationing demand), in turn plowing the revenues generated therefrom into public transportation projects. Road pricing itself is controversial, more information is available in the dedicated article. - Wikipedia

Since the cost of building more roads in congested urban areas has become exorbitant (for lack of more space, Los Angeles has even considered double-decker freeways), the usually supply-sided White House agrees with Downs' assessment.

President Bush's fiscal 2008 budget proposal would fund pilot projects that encourage metropolitan areas to experiment with congestion charging as a way to reduce traffic. - Washington Post

One problem with tolling is the economic burden it places on poorer commuters, often the commuters with the longest commutes. However, tolling is the easiest solution today because current queuing technology in the form of metering lights fails to solve the congestion problem.

Why? Well, metering lights look at local traffic to determine how much traffic to allow on a highway. Metering lights fail to consider the accident 10 or 20 miles down the road, or the interchange that has started to back up. They merrily meter cars on to the highway, feeding the growing traffic jam until it engulfs traffic around the on ramp. By then, the damage has been done.

How much traffic fits on a highway?

The California Department of Transportation figures that the maximum capacity of a highway occurs at about 45 miles per hour and about 2,000 cars/hour/lane. - University of Washington

It turns out that automobile traffic networks break down in a way similar to the way Internet traffic breaks down. In both kinds of network, after the traffic surpasses the maximum sustainable flow, it slows way down and it takes some time to recover. The Internet's advantage, of course, is that it's much easier to re-route electrons than atoms. So, the Internet can heal itself by re-routing while the traffic jam lingers until road network demand drops.

To increase lane utilization, one solution is conversant cars that communicate and coordinate with one another. Another solution uses cars with built-in technology to drive themselves. One organization is trying to create a competition like the Ansari X Prize (for private space travel) to stimulate private solutions to traffic congestion. Here's a video that shows how such a system might work:

The problem with solutions built in to cars, though, is the time it takes to introduce such solutions into the market. The costs are prohibitive, too. If tolling seems bad, think about charging everyone $500 or $1,000 for a device that enables conversant or smart cars. Most of these systems require every car to carry the device for the desired traffic decongestion.

This explains why economist Downs proposes tolling to solve the congestion problem. Are we really stuck with tolling to fix the demand side of the traffic congestion problem?

A promising emerging idea is to mix and match tolling and queuing. In this scenario, a driver would check online or call a phone number to make a reservation for a trip. If drivers provide the start and end points of their travel, it is easy to meter traffic correctly because all the traffic patterns can be computed in advance. In the simplest sense, this scenario requires each driver to agree with all the other drivers about the best time to get on the highway and the best speed to drive. It's similar to airline pilots agreeing when to take off so they don't all arrive at, say, JFK airport at the same time. Waiting five minutes on the tarmac is safer, arguably faster, and certainly more fuel efficient than circling with 20 other aircraft waiting to land.

Queuing doesn't preclude tolling, though. In fact, such a system could use tolling to allow drivers to buy earlier reservations. The design of such a tolling system could give paying drivers faster access while delivering the non-paying driver to his or her destination more quickly net of traffic congestion. In other words, the economical traveler would arrive sooner with this system than without this system, even though some drivers are paying for priority reservations. Tolls would pay the cost of deploying such a system. In the long-run, tolls would reduce tax burdens and provide additional funding for road maintenance.

The drawback? Drivers may have to wait to get on a highway. The benefits? Most drivers reach most destinations much more quickly. The costs? Net of tolls, the system can pay for itself.

The queuing/tolling solution has two important side-effects. First, you can fix the supply side problem. By measuring traffic flows through a network, the trip data tell you exactly where to add capacity cost effectively. Since congestion in California probably accounts for something like 1-2% of the state's total CO2 emissions, the second side effect is that this queuing/tolling system reduces greenhouse gases significantly.

My prediction is that you'll see a queuing/tolling system on urban highways in fewer than five years. There isn't any other good solution to congestion.