A (not so) taxing idea for the environment

Putting a price on carbon

I’m going through a green bent at the moment. I’m not going out and hugging any trees but I like doing what I can to minimise my footprint on the planet. Little things, like growing herbs out on the balcony, hanging out the washing instead of using the dryer, and worm farming.

While reading a book about the latter – a book called Organic Growing With Worms by David Murphy that spends several chapters teaching how to set up commercial worm farming operations – all kinds of grand ideas entered my mind, one of which involved turning dry, arid desert properties at the outer fringes of populated areas into arable farming land, simply by taking people’s organic waste and processing it through a commercial-scale worm farm. Furthering the delusion was a networking opportunity through a friend, who could introduce me to a person who owns a large scale waste processing operation.

I have many similar harebrained business ideas*, but the reason why none of them, including this one, are likely to succeed is because there’s no economical value in putting things back into the environment. We have all kinds of economic devices for pricing stuff that we dig out of the ground, but not a single blessed one on putting back in (and I’m not talking about the $25 entry fee to dump your trailer’s worth of trash into landfill).

Let’s dwell on that for a moment. We have prices for everything that we do to destroy the planet, and capitalism and consumerism have caused these to keep inflating. Things that benefit the environment however, have no value. Sequestering carbon, using less water, not using plastic bags, etc. the means of controlling these things are all stick, no carrot.

The point is, no “green” ideas are commercially viable unless we have a carbon price, because the costs to implement them are very real, but the “profits”, which can’t yet be measured in dollars, aren’t. Once a carbon price is set, then, and only then, will the innovation (and benefits) follow.

Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that I’m going to vote Green at the upcoming election. The only association I make between the Greens and the word “environmental” is the “mental” part; but that’s another post altogether. What I am trying to do here though is to offer up a my perspective on why I believe the carbon tax currently put forward by the Government is so important, regardless of whether Julia Gillard broke an election promise or not. She’s not the first politician that’s ever lied, and as much as the rhetoric is preventing her from saying so, I’d rather suffer a politician that corrected their mistakes even while refusing to admit it, than one that kept their word based on a deeply held but flawed belief.

Do you think a carbon price will make a difference, or just create more problems than it solves?

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Here are a couple more of my crazy green ideas:

• Replace the bitumen in roads with solar cells (a more durable version than the ones on your roof, which would be too fragile for driving on – maybe protected by large sheets of Gorilla Glass like the iPhone? :-P)
• Take organic waste (think green bins), convert it into charcoal through pyrolysis, and bury it in the desert thereby potentially turning dry, useless properties into farming land (see how).

Toiletiquette

Has anybody else ever wondered why public toilets are designed in a way that’s opposite to the way that humans behave? Viz: the male stereotype is that we are solitary, antisocial creatures yet urinals are largely open affairs. That leads to a mathematical conundrum as to the optimal spacing that minimises the possibility of accidentally (or even intentionally) seeing another man’s junk through a sideways glance.

Women on the other hand, are supposed to be social creatures, with a persistent stereotype that they go to the toilet together in pairs or packs. They love checking each other out, although of course you’d never get one to admit it, yet they’re forced into separate cubicles. Admittedly this arrangement does allow for handbag hooks on the doors, which I’m told comes in handy.

Is there any logical reason why “socially sensible toilets” aren’t more common?

To finish on a completely random note: they’ve installed squat toilets at Adelaide University (video):

What a big waste!

Just needs a bit of a wipe…

Australia’s still going through one of the greatest natural disasters in living memory, and my thoughts and prayers are with those affected, either directly, or indirectly through friends, families and acquaintance. While not trying to gloss over the magnitude of this tragedy, I’d like to bring up an issue that’s got me wondering: as the clean-up effort begins we’re constantly shown footage of diligent volunteers carrying away flood-damaged stuff by the truckload. Where are they taking it all?

Storage issues aside, surely not all of it is irredeemable? On previous occasions I’ve mentioned my affinity for garbage and fixing things. In another life I’d absolutely jump on the opportunity to go up to Queensland and spend my days going through the mountain of refuse, cleaning what can be cleaned, fixing that which can be fixed, and recycling the rest to the greatest possible extent. The goods could then be either: returned to the people of Queensland (although that begs the question of who gets what); donated to those who are in need; or sold and the profits returned to flood victims.

It would be a massive waste (literally!) if it all ended up as landfill.

Do you think it’s worth trying to salvage stuff?

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Image credit
feber.com – Bränd iMac fortfarande fungerande

The future of shopping

The current online shopping debate shows the tension that is going on in the retail industry. In the same way that the Internet is forcing the music and movie industries to look for new business models to combat piracy, globalisation is bringing about a drastic shift in the way that the commerce of physical objects is handled.

Here, I’d like to share a vision of what the future of retail might look like. You may have read similar stuff before – futurists probably predicted similar things years ago, but I feel we’re that much closer to seeing it become reality.

A shift in shopping
In the future, you won’t buy products from stores any more. Shopping will be done at entirely from home through the Internet and 3D holographic representations of the products. With clothes, you’ll be able to try things on using a digital scan of yourself, and mix and match unlimited combinations including hair and accessories all at the same time. If you’re worried that it won’t be very realistic then you obviously haven’t watched a 3D movie or played a video game lately. The cloth simulations are so close to the real thing that they can even move and sway to a virtual breeze. You won’t miss out on the touchy-feely experience either, as haptic technologies will enable you to touch the item, mimicking the sensations of weight and texture.

Everything will be delivered rapidly through a global logistics network, direct from the manufacturer to you, bypassing all of the middle men that exist in today’s supply chain: distributors, wholesalers, retailers – all cut out of the deal, meaning the lowest possible prices for you.

It’ll spell the end of trips to the concrete jungle, fighting for parking spaces, arguing with overworked, underpaid shopping assistants and dragging heavy bags from one shop to another.

What if I need it now?
As the pace of the world continues to increase, who’s going to have the time to wait for a product to be shipped around the world? One possibility that this trend will give rise to is more local manufacturing, including manufacturing at home. That will allow for items to be delivered in mere hours and minutes, instead of days or weeks – like Japan today where on some Websites you can specify the time of delivery once you make an online purchase!

What will we do with all the space?
If we don’t need shops any more, there’d be so much more space available! More green parks for people to get back in touch with nature; land reclaimed for hyperlocal farming so that the food that you eat is as fresh as it possibly can be. I still can’t get over the fact that when we visited Jenny’s parents in Belgium they made fresh chips for us using potatoes grown on a nearby farm (I mean like a few blocks away).

In the meantime…
Of course shops aren’t going to simply vanish overnight. There must be a transition phase, and one way it could work is for brands to do the direct distribution model as above, but set up “experience centres” in various population centres. That is, you go to one of these centres to try the product, and they might even have some limited amount of stock on hand that they would sell you at a slight premium to cover the upkeep of the store, but otherwise they exist only so you can try before you buy. Ultimately you’d still go online to make the final purchase, to take advantage of the lower prices.

I wonder if we aren’t already seeing this happen today. As one example, you may have noticed a lot of “Nespresso” stores opening in various shopping centres. Most people I’ve spoken to wonder out loud at why these places even exist – they don’t offer much over and above what you get at a department store. But you go there, and one of their friendly staff makes you a complimentary coffee of your choice, demonstrating the product. You may not buy from them, but if you were persuaded by the experiences chances are you’ll buy one somewhere – and ultimately the brand makes a sale, which works out the same for the parent company regardless of where you buy it from.

Today, retailers like Harvey Norman demand lower prices from manufacturers (without passing the savings on to customers), product training for sales staff, and even payment for advertising products in their catalogues, etc. It’s a relationship that largely favours the retailers, and sometimes they get a bit too cocky. For example a couple of years ago Harvey Norman managed to piss off Nintendo so badly with their demands that they were banned from selling the Wii. You can see why the brand might as well set up shop themselves, given that they’d have full control.

The main reason why I think this is going to happen? Almost all of this technology already exists today, and the only obstacle is greed. Just like the music and movie industry associations, they’re fighting tooth and claw to keep from becoming irrelevant in the minds of consumers, trying every trick in the book to pursuade you that they’re adding value to the supply chain. But they’re not. And the sooner we give them the flick, the sooner we’ll arrive at the future of shopping.

The end of privacy

The Wikileaks saga has cemented one thing in my mind: digital privacy is no longer probable (or maybe even possible), and the people of the future will just have to submit to being better PR managers for themselves and learn how to manage their digital persona. I don’t belong to Generation Y but I’ve completely immersed myself in the Internet and so I’m fairly comfortable with being the constant stream – some would say deluge – of information from tweets, blogs, feeds and other useless minutiae from people’s lives.

Jenny, on the other hand, is an intensely private person and has never been comfortable with even having a Facebook account. She only signed up (or rather, got signed up by me) as a result of my pestering her about being able to put her in the “married to….” part of my profile, to which she very reluctantly agreed. She never touched it though, and I had to go in there and shut off every kind of notification, request, update, etc. After watching The Social Network though, she made me delete it.

I don’t claim any kind of noble reason for my digital openness – far from it in fact. As best as I can tell, my brain has developed in a way that I see life as a game, and one best played with perfect information. If you can’t be bothered clicking on the link, the term comes from a type of game described in the Game Theory branch of applied mathematics, where a player know all of the past moves made the other player(s). Wikipedia gives the example of Chess, where the board and the position of the pieces are known and visible to both players at all times.

I’m sure you have this problem: keeping an addressbook of your friends and family. When people keep moving around, and without significant effort and diligence you end up with way too many Christmas cards not received or returned (that’s right – if you didn’t get a Christmas card from me it’s your fault). My ideal state would be to have an addressbook where everybody owned and updated their own entry. Facebook is about the closest I’ve come to achieving this goal – not that it’s the best tool out there (Plaxo is good) – but because of the high rate of adoption amongst the laity.

But of course if you make your information publicly available then you have to deal with the troublemakers. People like telemarketers, thieves, stalkers and other unsavoury elements that seek to use your information for their own gain. For that reason (and especially at the insistence of my wife), my address details aren’t public, and I don’t usually mention things like our holidays until after the fact. I also actively maintain two separate and distinct e-mail addresses – you could even say separate personas. “zzyss” is my digital persona, my nickname in discussion forums, and a hotmail address. It’s also a magnet for spam, and despite having my junk mail filter settings turned to maximum I still have to contend with a number of messages from legitimate service providers (although I religiously opt-out and unsubscribe from all advertising, newsletters, notifications, alerts, etc. My preferred means of staying on top of things is via RSS feeds, but I won’t go into that here…)

Of course, those of you who know me will know that I also maintain a separate “personal” address on the same domain as this blog. That’s one of the great things about having your own domain name – I can create as many fake e-mail addresses as I like, and change them as necessary. For example a previous incarnation of this site used [email protected] as the address for feedback and comments (this is in the days before blogging and comment features). Now I can post that address here with impunity without having to worry about being being found by a spambot crawling my site harvesting e-mail addresses, because I no longer use it.

Those are some of the techniques that I use in my digital life. I don’t fight against the elements that antagonise my privacy and try to expose me, and I get very little in the way of trouble in return. How public/private are you?