sustainability

The president "almost-out" George W. Bush is quite a big spender. The national debt in the US has reached a record number during his presidency. Although Bill Clinton was since decades able to lower the national debt in the nineties, Mr. Bush happily spent a buck extra to compensate for it.

I.O.U.S.A. is a very well made documentary by Patrick Creadon which lays down the clear facts and history of the long mounting up debt crisis. Add to this the current financial crisis and the upcoming baby-boomers retiring wave, and you get a quite gloomy picture of the fiscal, and as a consequence political, future of the US.

This 30 minute preview of I.O.U.S.A. is well worth watching:

Companies such as tikitag (an internal start-up of Alcatel-Lucent) are desperately seeking for killer apps that will kick-start the RFID revolution. "The internet of things" have been predicted and evangelized about for quite some time, but the widespread use of RFID technology has still not happened. Many of the possible applications that are currently envisaged, are really not it (showing the website of "Toy Story" when you touch a RFID scanner with a Woody doll), and I have the feeling that these will not solve the current chicken and egg situation. But there is one thing which is gaining extreme momentum lately: people really want to live in a more sustainable way, but it is really hard for the average consumer to know what the ecological impact is of the products they are buying.

Alex Steffen presented in his CWF talk and in his WoldChanging.com book that one cornerstone of a sustainable world is metering. If people can easily meter what they use, they use less. A golden example is the fuel efficiency meter in the Toyota Prius: adding a simple gauge even increases the efficiency of the Prius because people try to be as efficient as possible.

This could also happen for everyday products. I propose to add RFIDs to everything. Not just on expensive products, but really on everything you buy. The main purpose of these small product-following-memories is to track the ecological history of the product. In the chips memory would be stored how much carbon dioxide was dumped to produce the product, how much water was used, the amount of toxins that were excreted, ... This bookkeeping should not only be kept for end-user products, but also for every conceivable base product. By setting up this eco-accounting system from the (almost literally) ground up, producers, transporters, and resellers of products can easily calculate the effective end-product footprint.

You might think that such a ground-up tracking of products is not feasible, but after years of scandals in the production of meat and dairy products in Belgium (mad cow disease, dioxins, bird flue, ...), there now has been enforced a complete traceability of these products. And this system actually works, but is still based on old technology such as burn-marks, stamps, and piles of paperwork ...

If we want to really make a change, we need not (only) tax the CO2 footprint of the industry, but put the eco-taxes directly at the expense of the end-user. Let the end-user pay the bill for CO2 heavy products. By doing so, we make CO2 a directly marketable product. Economical free-market dynamics will do the rest. One key technology which is needed to achieve this is ... micro CO2 accounting, which is provided by the eco-RFID revolution.

Oh and yes, by the way, this whole "internet of things", you just get it for free.

A few weeks back I watched this eye-opening Google Tech Talk of Richard Heinberg, recorded on October 2nd 2008. The talk is about the 4 major axioms which are needed for a society to be sustainable, meaning that the society can sustain its standard of living for centuries. Our current society is not sustainable... We are facing a huge climate crisis in the coming decades, natural energy sources are being depleted at an incredibly fast pace, and human population keeps growing exponentially. It will be very hard to maintain the standard of living we were raised up in and got so used to. A must see.

A large part of the talk is on the concept of peak oil: more oil wells dry up than new wells are found. Since the fallacy of the ever exponentially growing economy is almost completely build on an exponential increase in energy consumption, the fact that oil production (still the overall largest source of energy worldwide) is unable to follow this trend, will force us all to soon have to completely reconsider our views on a sustainable economy. The current financial crisis is nothing compared to what would happen if the natural annual growth of the economy would be 0%!

Note that the concept of peak oil (which is already around for quite some time) has sometimes been seen as an oil cartel conspiracy. Every right minded human being however can understand that the concept is totally valid: the oil peak might not yet be reached today, but it sure will in the next decades. When (not "if") this happens, our politicians will need a hell of a lot of courage.