Troy Angrignon: Adventure Capitalist » Sustainable Development

I’m in the June/July/August issue of Backbone Magazine talking about cleantech in Canada

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 15 May 2010 18:28:05 +0000

Does this mean I'm now a cover model?

Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to the Globe team and Lisa Manfield the author for a great article. You can either jump to the article, to the table of contents of this issue, or to a list of all of the issues.

Vancouver’s CO2 Impact gets good coverage at Care2.com for their gold standard multi-benefit carbon credits

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:22:25 +0000

Disclosure: I’m an advisor of the CO2 Impact team.

I’m quite excited about the work that Boyd Cohen and his wife Elizabeth Obendiente and the team are doing and happy to see that they’re getting the coverage they deserve. They have a great article written about them on Care2.com’s site. You can read the article here. In it you can learn all about how they are helping Latin Americans build cleaner community-centered kilns that help clean up the air, prevent health issues, and also return funds to the village from the sale of the carbon credits. It’s slow but necessary work.

Two curves: My view on the BC cleantech sector at the beginning of 2010

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:50:23 +0000

I was asked recently what I had learned from my informal survey of the local BC cleantech sector. This was my response and I was encouraged to share it more widely. I’d love your own thoughts on the following.

Dear (Friend):

You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time to survey it. Let me answer by starting with the big picture and the thing that prompted me to look at cleantech in the first place. Then I will be better able to answer your question at the bottom.

First, the global view.

Globally, we are standing at the confluence of two exponentially increasing tides. The power of one may help us address the risks of the other, but only if we engage them both head-on. One is the curve of resource usage, the other is the curve of technological change.

Curve 1: Overshoot and collapse and “peak everything”

We have used up half of our forests and half our our fish stocks on the planet to-date and given our “peak everything” 3.5%/yr compounding resource usage curve, we will use the same amount of resources in the next 20 years as we used in the last 260 years. It is widely understood that we have already exceeded the capacity of this planet to support our continued growth as a species by between 20-30% and are already going to have to plan for a “controlled crash.”

Curve 2: Double exponential technological advances

Simultaneously, technology is developing at a double exponential rate such that we can not even comprehend what our world may look like by 2050 from a technology perspective. A brief reminder: 30 steps taken 1 foot a a time moves you forward 30 feet. 30 steps taken exponentially moves you forward 1.07 billion feet. It’s hard for our brains to grasp. The next 10 years will be like our last 100 in terms of new technology and that is accelerating. If predictions by people such as Ray Kurzweil come true, we could have nano solar devices providing 100% of humanity’s power requirements by 2030, the wealthy and maybe even middle class will be iiving long healthy lives free of disease and many of them will be integrated into computers and robots. If we choose our technologies wisely, even the poorest will have the benefit of low-cost desalination and solar power.

In terms of scenarios, it will already probably be either a huge cliff, a controlled step-down crash, or in a miracle of miracles, a bounce off the bottom and a move to a regenerative world. Hopefully we still have those options.

Actions we need to take:

We need to understand and act on the knowledge that comes from both of these curves.

Regarding the first curve, we need to stop the denial, anticipate the issues, structure responses that address both the rational and irrational causes of inaction, address our flawed, emotional, homeostatic tendencies, and work towards creating a regenerative world, rather than the destructive negative overuse cycle we are in. We know a lot about why we do not act. We don’t need “more information”, we need to build plans that take into account our very human responses to things. Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter‘s work is key here.

Regarding the second curve, we need to stop sticking our head in the sand about technology and embrace and channel technological development. Relinquishment of technologies won’t work. That would be like standing idly by saying “I will have no part in that river coming dangerously close to the village” when that river is doubling in volume and power every year. We can’t stop it, but we can channel it. We need to slay our sacred cows by revisiting nuclear power (which is emissions free) and genetically modified foods. We need to use every advantage we have to both increase resource generation and regeneration and also to decrease resource usage per person. This will require structuring government incentives for radical expansion of green technologies. The Sustainable Development Technology Canada program is a great start. We need more. We need to think like Vinod Khosla who says “if we do not address maintech (building materials, concrete, water, chemicals, coal, oil, efficiency) and solve them at low-cost, that can get to market unsubsidized in China and India and scale to the whole planet, then we won’t solve our problems”. Since we don’t know where the innovations will occur, we need to structure capital to create massive “optionality” and R&D across the board, focusing on those areas that are most ripe for change / disruption / innovation and that are causing the biggest problems. Sadly, I think we should also continue to support companies and organizations like Space X and the LifeBoat foundation, both of which are trying to get off the planet in case we really make a mess and can’t live here any more.

We need to work the top line by increasing resources

We need to Increase outputs and resources and regeneration through restoration of forests, soils, forests, fisheries. We need to boost agricultural outputs (again) by raising land and water productivity and studying ways of producing protein more efficiently that with the standard corn-fed cattle approach. This includes continued research into genetically modified foods.

We need to work the bottom line by decreasing our resource usage per person

We need to also lower our resource use/person by restructuring economically through things like cap and trade, removal of subsidies on things like oil (we spend $700B annually across the globe subsidizing the exact wrong behaviours), restructure the energy landscape by decommissioning coal, shifting to renewables, pushing for all of the efficiency we can get now and every year going forward. We need to get MUCH better at urban design since in 30 more years, 80% of the planet will live in 3% of the surface area in cities and that means urban transportation, bikes, water use, city farming, squatter gentrification. We need to implement “third world” solutions in our own backyard – micro finance, entrepreneurial education, population stabilization (which happens automatically as people move to the city).

National leaders…aren’t leading

Global progress on our bigger issues is stalled. Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure. Nations are too slow to act. China and the US refused to take material action at Copenhagen and that means that no other nations will follow. The US is frustrating cap and trade. Canada is also lagging. Within our borders, our provinces and territories are too heterogeneous and their populace has too many diverging interests.

We have structural capital issues that are impeding our ability to bring investment into Canada that will continue to haunt all forms of technology development, including cleantech, and they need to be addressed. The Section 116 problem has never been resolved and makes it difficult for investors to invest in Canada without great hassles. We need to fix this as it continues to scare US venture capital away and is causing a hollowing out of Canadian companies as US investors must move our companies south in order to invest in them. It’s easier for a US company to buy out and move a Canadian company than to simply invest in it.

This revolution will happen provincially, regionally and municipally:

BC is already the 10th largest “cleantech market” in North America. We have top-notch universities that pump out research, we have core resource and mining people, law, and organizations in place that can be repurposed for cleantech company creation, financing, and implementation of things like carbon projects. We already have an excellent industry association leadership in the BCTIA, the Premier’s Technology Council is already very supportive of cleantech, and we have programs such as the newly launched CleanWorks BC marketing campaign intended to attract foreign investment to BC. We also have a large number of excellent cleantech companies here and we have strong core competencies in hydro electric power, power transmission, storage and battery technology, wastewater management, and bioenergy.

The Lower Mainland as a region and all of the cities inside it will be key. You can make a difference at the regional level. Cities are massive producers of the problem and they’re also massively incentivized to solve the issues for themselves – they are almost self-contained zones.

In Vancouver, we have a mayor who sees the benefit of working on all three pillars of sustainability: “people, planet and profit” as it is often referred to. He is building ties with Governor Schwarzenegger from California and Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room Initiative , among many other things. In short, he is trying to put Vancouver on the global map as a “Green Capital” in the world.

So what do we need to do next?

We need capital fixes. There are many others who know much more about this but I know that we have capital gaps. The exits are long and difficult for investors (10 years) for many of these green technologies and so many companies suffer or fail as do their investors.

We need to continue to back primary research at the universities that feeds into our technology landscape.

We need to build more funds that create small companies that can fail faster – allowing us to create promote “optionality” or the creation of as many options as possible.

We need to build a more unified province wide Cleantech BC association that unifies traditional energy, renewables, materials, efficiency, and water all into one cohesive strategic plan.

We need to survey our assets in the universities and our companies, scan the market for current and latent need and then really support those clusters where we can excel and build networks of inter-related and successful companies.

As a province, we need to realize we are competing globally, not within Canada.

As a province, we need to redefine “cleantech” to include all of our “maintech” – the stuff that will move the needle. That will require vision expansion and coaching. This means expanding our idea of “cleantech” from renewables to greening of the entire supply chain and all materials and energy usage.

We need to continue to push these changes bottom up because waiting for national governments (Canada, US, or otherwise) will take too long and be too ineffective. The only exception to that is major cap and trade policy and other regulation which mostly needs to happen federally. But even without it, cities and regions can adopt their own and enforce them locally as they’re doing now. It’s less effective but it’s a step until the national dithering is resolved.

The province must address issues of forest, agricultural land, fisheries and water restructuring in order to once again focus on maximizing sustainable, regenerative yields. One area I’m significantly concerned about here is water rights. It appears that we are selling off our water rights to foreign interests and that needs to be reversed. Peak water is right behind peak oil as a critical issue.

My final summary?

We have a lack of national leadership on the major environmental challenges ahead of us as evidenced by Canada’s embarrassing performance at Copenhagen, but that is countered by highly motivated provincial, regional, and municipal leaders. And we have a province filled with excellent cleantech companies, entrepreneurs, and teams that are highly capital efficient.

So, while my survey of the sector has tempered me with its long, difficult, unpredictable company builds and exits, the people working on those companies have excited me with their passion, vitality and energy for finding and creating solutions to our big challenges. That passion and energy is one of the key reasons I have decided not to return to the US and to instead, stay here and work to build BC’s local technology sector. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get to it.

Adam Werbach to youth: You were born to save the planet. Find a way. Make a way. Do it now.

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:49:28 +0000

Aside from the continuing use of the annoying “save the planet” meme (the planet will be fine – it’s really “save the humans from an ugly step-down crash”) this is a great talk that Adam Werbach just gave recently tothe Teens Turning Green conference. Adam is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, author of “Strategy for Sustainability”, and the former President of the Sierra Club.

I’ve excerpted the beginning below. Click here for the full speech transcript over on Care2.com.

You were born to save the planet.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it has all been leading up to you. 4.4 million years ago an ancestor we now call ARDI roamed the land of Ethiopia, and her life was leading up to you. The last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, thawed, leaving the redwood forests to our North, and all of this was leading up to you. The Earth needs you right now.

Your generation was born to save the planet.

Have you ever wondered when things started going wrong? Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we’re putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies. Every mother who is breastfeeding in America today is probably passing a man-made chemical to their child. There’s something fundamentally wrong when mothers need to worry about chemicals that they’re passing to their children.

We’re born with better sense than that. You learn basic rules in kindergarten. Don’t break your friend’s toys. Share. Wait in line. Don’t hurt anybody. Robert Fulghum wrote a little book called All I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten. But then we grow up. We forget all of that. The plague of Middle School is visited upon us. We get focused on soccer practice. And bands. And ballet. And sex. And STAR tests. And SATs. And college.

I actually want to write a sequel to Fulghum’s book. We could call it: All I Need to Forget I learned in Middle School.

Whenever it started, the bad news seems to keep on coming.

Ten months ago the last wild jaguar in the United States was killed. The last one. They called it Macho B. Biologists had been seeing Macho B for years. The Arizona Department of Game and Fish killed it accidentally in a bungled attempt to save it, because the Federal Government had refused to give the jaguar Endangered Species Protection.

This is happening in your lifetimes. This isn’t something you need to wait for a Kens Burns Documentary to hear about, the crash in biodiversity in our last wild places is happening now.

Click here to read the rest.

Interesting reading: food that kills, augmented reality, death by board meeting, lazy people, and big ideas.

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:52:51 +0000

Jamie Oliver pleads with us to stop killing our kids with crappy food: www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html
Blaise Aguera y Arcas will blow your mind with the next generation of augmented reality mapping tools. Makes Google Maps look like crayons and paper. www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html
Running more effective board meetings. Not rocket science but good basic article. www.cloudave.com/link/running-more-effective-board-meetings-at-startups
It turns out that conservation is hard because people (even motivated people) just don’t like change. Good lessons to keep learning. Boulder Struggles With Energy Conservation – WSJ.com
It took us 14 years from idea to reality to host the Olympics. What is our NEXT big idea? We need to start it now: ‘I’ve got an idea’: The moment our Olympics dream began

City of Berkeley launches their Climate Action Plan using Vancouver-based Visible Strategies’ “See-It”. WOW.

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:40:51 +0000

Check out the newly launched Climate Action Plan Indicators tool from the City of Berkeley that is based on Vancouver’s own Visible Strategies‘ “See-It” application.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

Google releases tool for assessing global forests

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:28:11 +0000

Here is a cool project from Google.org – a cloud based platform for monitoring the health of the world’s forests over time. I’m glad to see Sergey’s continued influence at Google on not just “doing no evil” but on working on tools and platforms to address some of humanity’s largest issues.

30 Days of Sustainability 2007 is coming!

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:32:15 +0000

30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 – May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 – Day 2 / “It’s all about the infrastructure” by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations Group

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:44:02 +0000

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

“It’s all about the infrastructure” by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations

The cloud sounds romantic but it’s 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. Not so romantic. (Image courtesty of Niall Kennedy’s Flickr photos)
Opex and Capex are THE KEYS: If your revenue goes up a hockey stick….and your CapEx and OpEx curves go up with it…you haven’t succeeded

[finally!! Somebody else is talking about this!! This is super critical in SaaS. It's easy to make a company deliver apps over the web. It's hard to do it in a way that you can serve a lot of people cost effectively and make more profit as you scale.]

Scale: can you scale up to 3.5GB/minute TOMORROW?
Reach: Microsoft is running services in 235 countries around the world
Servers: This is critical

configration optimization: go for standardization / optimization
Density: watts/square foot is important; drive density up by 200% you can drop power costs 40% (!).
Storage costs: There has been an 85% drop in a Terabyte of data THIS YEAR.
Technology evolution: staying on the curve helps you be operationally efficient.

Data center critical success factors. (there are more but she wouldn’t share them)

connectivity: critical
location, location, location (close to connectivity and supplies and resources and people)
materials and equipment: (if you buy a million pounds of steel and steel prices go up….you have a $5M bill)
trades and labour: we have waited months for an electrical person
power:

we now count in terms of megawatts not square footage. That is a key metric.
30-40% of your power usage is COOLING!!!! so build green!
looking at solar – it’s incredibly important to us
Opening a data center in Quincy Washington that is completeley carbon neutral

Additional useful links:

Why is $10/gallon gas a great thing? And what does it have to do with evolution, adaptation, and local economic growth? Everything.

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 10 May 2006 11:10:00 +0000

I think I have found the magic number. Every fifth article from Mark Morford is so brilliant, insightful, and articulate that I need to post most, if not all, of it here for my readers. Today is the day for another.

In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of my favourite subjects: the environment, structure driving behaviour, adaptation, complex system effects, social policy, cultural behaviour, global policy….he has hit it all.

The archive of his writings can be found here. The current article is below:

Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas
It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don’t you agree?

Here’s what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up ’78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the overall economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL et al.), because not doing so would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence will encourage you to shop locally once again, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voil

Border wars: Plumbers union fights green building because the waterless no-flush urinals will “spread disease”. Um, don’t you mean they will spread “less work for plumbers?”

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 14:23:14 +0000

I’m intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

30 Days of Sustainability: Sustainable Homes

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:47:45 +0000

Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés:

When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC

SUSTAINABLE HOMES

Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted by the Sustainable Building Centre and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC.

Moderator: Helen Goodland is the Executive Director of the new Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island and is a LEED accredited architect with over 15 years of experience in green building design, education and construction.

Please visit http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com for more information.

The First Annual “30 days of sustainability” has launched in Vancouver!

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 23:13:00 +0000

(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.)

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

One key component of the 30 Days of Sustainability is a dynamic, interactive website, which also launched on March 2nd, 2006. To learn more about the 30 Days, check out http://www.30daysofsustainability.com.

Special features of the website include:

a comprehensive event calendar, listing the dozens of workshops, sustainability cafes, speakers, and so much more taking place through the 30 Days;
a collection of photographs that will be taken by attendees at events all month;
A What’s New section that lists all of the news updates;
an interactive 30 Questions section, where a new question will be posted each day, and the public will have the chance, along with our panel of sustainability experts, to discuss actionable things we can do to advance sustainability.

This website is our primary tool for getting the word out about all the exciting events taking place this month. Please take a minute to forward it far and wide to your sustainability / environmental / social change networks, and encourage others to do the same.

Thanks so much!

19th Annual Angel Forum (Vancouver, Canada) comes to a close

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:22:00 +0000

The 19th Annual Angel Forum came to a successful close this afternoon. Thirty-six companies in the software, manufacturing, communications, internet, and medical device sectors presented to 70+ investors over the course of a full day of sessions.

Each presenting company was given 10 minutes to pitch their company, market, team, market problem, solution, and investment needs to a group of prospective investors. Then the investors had a Q&A period with the entrepreneurs.

In addition, we had some excellent presentations:

* Bull Housser Tupper spoke on Intellectual property protection, employment issues, and term sheet negotiation;
* PriceWaterhouseCoopers spoke on Top 10 tax issues for startups
* The TSX Venture Exchange spoke on how to go public

Thanks everybody for a great day and we look forward to seeing you all back here in Fall!

I really should just syndicate Morford’s column straight into my blog: Mark comments on the insanely huge progress we have made in fuel efficient vehicles this past 30 years

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 11:44:00 +0000

Here are some of the gems from this week’s excellent article:

My mother, she had this car. It was a 1974 VW Dasher …it had this tough brown vinyl interior and brutally antagonistic manual steering and rock-hard suspension, and it went from zero to 60 in about three days, and the engine sounded like a single-stroke lawn mower choking on a pillow…But here’s the great thing: This Dasher, it got at least 30 miles per gallon. Maybe more. Maybe more like 40.

…

And now, here we are. It is 30 years later. It is the age of the Internet and the iPod and Botox and laser hair removal and anti-allergy vacuum cleaners. It is the time of nanotechnology and microsurgery and quantum physics and “Extreme Makeover” and horrible leadership…Check out my Black Eyed Peas ring tone on my shiny tiny Nokia. Look at my lousy, imbecilic president. Check out my SUV’s bitchin’ DVD nav system…Are we not gods?

…

I have recently purchased a new car, my first in a decade. It is the deliciously hot little Audi A3 hatchback, just in from Europe, and its engine is simply a wonder and the car is fast and tight and agile and sexy and clean, and the fit and finish are German-fetish beautiful, and I love it like saliva loves chocolate. But one of the best aspects of the car, I thought, proudly, as I purchased it, as I compared dozens of similar cars in this class, was the top-notch mpg rating, and the ultralow emissions (for a gas engine). Oh, my new Audi’s mpg rating? It’s 25 city, 31 highway.

Here is the funny thing. Here is the pathetic thing. In 2005, this is considered very good mileage. This is considered efficient and admirable, even though it’s not, even though it’s far, far from it, even though you look at those numbers and you think, Oh holy hell, we have, in many ways, progressed not at all. We have progressed exactly zero.

Let’s be honest: This gas mileage is abominable. So is, I guarantee you, the mpg your car gets. In fact, when adjusted for overall technological advancement and where we should be with engine efficiency, every car produced in the past two decades gets worse mileage than my mom’s 30-year-old Dasher and that includes the Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid, because the appalling fact is, gas mileage has remained essentially constant for over 30 years, if not worsened, across the board, despite astounding technological progress in nearly every other category of life.

…

We have the technology. We have the brainpower. We could, if there were any real incentive to do so, if the government had done its job and if they had pushed forth with anything resembling social responsibility, and if the populace had been educated enough to care, we could easily have fast sexy well-built cars that get 100 mpg, right now, today, cars that give off nearly zero emissions, and we could be giving the finger to Saudi Arabia and we might not be losing a brutal war in Iraq and thousands of undereducated U.S. soldiers wouldn’t be dead and we might, in fact, be headed toward a much greener, lighter, less warlike future than the one BushCo has mapped out for us. An oversimplification? Maybe. But not by much.

…

Make no mistake. We invaded Iraq, by and large, to protect our strategic oil interests, to lock down that desperately needed 10 percent of the world’s supply by whatever violence and blood and dead disposable U.S. soldiers necessary. And as a vicious adjunct, Bush recently signed the worst energy bill you will ever see in your lifetime: $12 billion worth of the most disgusting pork you ever laid eyes on, billions for oil and useless bridges and nauseating pet projects, and barely a penny of it goes toward renewable energy technologies or alternative fuels or conservation, and almost all goes toward BushCo’s profiteering thugs in the corporate marketplace. Go, USA!

…

I love my new car. I enjoy the fact that, by choosing this model, I tried to minimize its impact on the world, short of giving up driving entirely and getting a bike. But I hate that it is, in the most vital way, no better than my mom’s Dasher, 30 years ago. I hate the fact that, despite all our protests, despite all our gizmos and high-tech dazzle, the Powers That Be still don’t seem to care.

Skipping photovoltaic cells and converting solar power directly into hydrogen will be another path to alternative energy

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 08:27:59 +0000

Here is an interesting article from Wired Magazine about a company called Hydrogen Solar that can convert solar energy to hydrogen at about 8% efficiency. They are currently undergoing trials in Guildford, England.

Build your building like a termite mound for lower capital cost, lower running costs and therefore lower rents

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 13:11:14 +0000

Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a normal HVAC system. (That last bit is an assumption – the article does not explicitly state the next door building’s heating cooling system mechanism.)

Farming for gold: Using plant crops to remediate soil, remove contaminants, harvest gold, and keep ex-miners employed (UPDATED)

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:47:00 +0000

I love stories like this one at the Christian Science Monitor about Chris Anderson, a New Zealand scientist using crops to clean up contaminated mines. (Thanks Z+Partners for the link.)

In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants decontaminate the soil), make money (enough to pay for the process AND make a profit), and also keep small artisan miners in business, although now they are watching over crops instead of pouring chemicals into the old mines.

UPDATE: Closer to home, Matt brought my attention to a successful joint effort between Teck-Cominco, Western Bioresources Consulting, and Celgar Pulp Mill. Thanks Matt!

These are great examples of triple-bottom-line thinking.

Massive Change – the future of global design

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:35:00 +0000

This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.

QUOTE

Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected. In order to understand these emerging forces, there is an urgent need to articulate precisely what we are doing to ourselves and to our world. This is the ambition of Massive Change.

For many of us, design is invisible. We live in a world that is so thoroughly configured by human effort that design has become second nature – ever-present, inevitable, taken for granted.

And yet, the power of design to transform and affect every aspect of daily life is gaining widespread public awareness. No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.

Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design. We will explore paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image and information.

Massive Change will be a celebration of our global capacities but also a cautious look at our limitations. We will present the utopian and dystopian possibilities of this emerging world, in which even nature is no longer outside the reach of our manipulation.

We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves:

Now that we can do anything what will we do?

UNQUOTE

The Massive Change project encompasses a variety of media including a book, an international exhibition, public events, a radio program. The online forum and film are in the process of being created.

I had the good fortune to be given, as a present for completing my 35th year outside of the womb, a ticket to attend a day long series of panel discussions with some very brilliant minds of the day including such visionaries as Esther Dyson (Chairman of EDVenture Holdings – a venture capital firm, and author of Release 1.0), and Dean Kamen (creator of the Segway.)

The day was broken up into five separate conversations on a theme with a moderator and two panelists. The subject matter included the continued exponential expansion of the “global mind”; wealth & politics; evolution’s designs (biology as template); urban design, space, and transportation; and finally military applications of design and the transfer of technology from the military to the public sector and also in reverse.

I did not take a lot of notes as I did not have a laptop with me so this posting contains some overall impressions, a few specific notes, and a few of my own thoughts on some of the discussion points.

Session 1: Information and Image: Building the Global Mind
With: Bill Buxton: human/computer interface researcher and designer and Esther Dyson: venture capitalist, and general techno-diva.

Interestingly Esther has no phone at home, nor does she drive a car. I figured that if she doesn’t drive a car, she must live in New York. I checked the address of EDventure holdings and sure enough, that’s where it is. I’m not sure that’s where she lives, but where else could somebody with her schedule get by without a car?

I was really expecting a lot from this session but Esther couldn’t seem to connect to Bill’s conversation at all. Bill on the other hand was engaging, energetic, and driven. I could have listened to or talked with him for hours.

Esther gave the audience a long explanation of her work with ICANN over the past couple of years and if I may be so bold as to summarize it, it was this:

ICANN should simply be a mechanism for controlling the DNS. That’s IT. But because it smells like an opportunity to build a world government, everybody and their dog wants to be involved for the wrong reasons to build ICANN into a pseudo global governmental framework instead of simply a group of people whose job it is to make sure the routers stay on and the packets get to their endpoints.

It sounded like she had been through a war.

Bill Buxton, having for the most part, his own conversation on his side of the stage waxed poetic about why Alvin Toffler’s ideas were wrong the night before, how humans can’t think on large timescales (or was that Dyson?), and how it is impossible to be a renaissance person but that the way to handle that is to build renaissance teams.

One of the interesting points of his conversation was where he talked about James Murray, one of the key editors of the Oxford dictionary, perhaps the single largest open-source off-line project in the world, where every word in every book in the history of the English language had to be found, traced, and documented. A fascinating history can be found over here at Wikipedia. According to Buxton, this type of document exists in no other language in the world.

Unfortunately for this session and two others, Bruce Mau moderated it and while I think he did a superlative job with organizing the whole Massive Change project, he is not a moderator and that role should have been handled all day by somebody like Charlie Rose who moderated sessions 2 and 4. Without a strong moderator, the conversations did not connect, the panelists were often left trying to fill the space on their own, and a lot less real content was delivered in the end.

Session 2: Wealth and Politics: Is the World Getting Better?
With: Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners, specializing in analyzing cultural and economic shifts, design innovations and strategies for ethical leadership and Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, worldwide syndicated columnist and sustainable development consultant.

My take-away from Andrew was that there are serious demographic changes that will drive severe global economic changes and that those forces are different in different countries. He gave a brief tutorial on the work that he does with the Demographics Society, showing the various demographic bell-curves of various countries. He showed a normal curve (looks like a bell); the U.S. curve (lots of kids at the bottom makes it like bell-bottomed pants); and terrorist states (lots of young men, no economic middle class, very few old people to lead the society).

The fundamental message from Hazel and from the work that she has been so passionately involved in for many years was that the currently used metrics of capitalist economies around the world, are wrong. GDP and GNP are measuring the wrong thing. What gets measured (pure economic output), improves. Therefore we increase efficiency to bump up the numbers but we end up with high outputs and a lousy society. So her goal is to build a new set of measurements and then disseminate those far and wide in the hope that if countries were measuring quality of life rather than just pure economic outputs, they would at least have a useful measuring stick.

This was a topic of frequent conversation when I attended the Environmental Studies department at UVic a decade ago. For example, if you introduce a set of policies and environmental carcinogens that end up causing a higher incidence of cancer, which in turn requires more expensive doctor visits….voilá…higher GDP. Often, extremely negative real-world results translate into higher GDP rankings.

One of the new measurement systems that Hazel discussed is the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators:

QUOTE

…a contribution to the worldwide effort to develop comprehensive statistics of national well-being that go beyond traditional macroeconomic indicators. A systems approach is used to illustrate the dynamic state of our social, economic and environmental quality of life. The dimensions of life examined include: education, employment, energy, environment, health, human rights, income, infrastructure, national security, public safety, re-creation and shelter.

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Helen managed to bring up a few more issues noted here:

• Her friend Jeremy Rifkin has just launched his new book titled The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.

[I have another of Jeremy Rifkin's books titled The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World and it is an incredible read. I am also interested in his book The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth but have not yet had a chance to read it.]

• Another interesting website/project that is currently underway is Freecycle.org, an international free + recycling project where people can give and receive things that they have to other people in their local community. So rather than keeping that old box of cables, many of which you probably paid $10-30 for, you can list them on Freecycle. Then somebody else who happens to need that thing can come by and get it from you – for free. There is no bartering, all of the items listed must be given free of charge.

[I subscribed to their site which actually runs the listings using Yahoo Groups with notifications that come into your mailbox of your mail client which you can set up a rule for to siphon off into a Freecycle folder. I would prefer to see it done via something like Craigslist and using RSS feeds, but hopefully they'll get there.]

Session 3: Designing Evolution
With: Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry and advocate of nature based design innovation and John Todd, biologist and designer of Eco Machines for the treatment of waste, food production, generation of fuel and water treatment.

Janine began the session with an overview of biomimetic design principles by examining the stage furniture (chair, table, water jug) and explained the differences between how nature would make a material and how we make that same material using toxic, ecologically wasteful processes.

Then John Todd discussed his eco-machines, large greenhouses that contain a few thousand species of creatures and plants from all five bio-kingdoms – monera, protista, plantae, fungi, animalia – a classification that has recently been usurped by a three domain model.

Some notes from his waste-water Eco-machine:

• to build an eco-machine, you combine ecologies and direct them towards a goal; to do this, he combines ecologies in order to solve particular problems;

• he can build systems that require only 1/10 of the inputs of a traditional man-made system;

• his sewage treatment Eco-Machine treats 100,000 gallons / day of sewage and outputs perfectly clean water. The input speed has no effect on the output quality.

• in order to build something of this complexity, he can’t plan it. He can only build them by combining several thousand species from all five kingdoms and then let them self-select out until they find their balance equilibrium at which point there are usually still around 300 unique species left in the Eco-Machine.

Back to Janine Benyus, she discussed her new project called “Google for Biodiversity.”

She started by getting a bunch of biologists together with a bunch of industrial designers. She then had the designers say things like, “I would like to build a pump.” Then the biologists would go away, compile all the information on the 24 pumps found across 68 creatures (I made those numbers up) and then present that to the designer. The designer would find the one that was the best fit, replicate it using other materials, and then voila – biomimetically inspired pump design! However, this was very labour intensive. The biologists and designers didn’t speak the same language. And the biological data was not organized by function, but by animal. So, “Google for Biodiversity” was formed.

The goal of this project is to catalog all biological data by function rather than by animal and then to build a translator between the biology world and the design world, such that a designer working on a project can say, “I need a solar desalinization device” and then the website will identify all of the potential possibilities that exist in the world’s creatures and allow the designer to pick and choose from that of the mango for example, and try to replicate the function in his design.

The problem is a difficult one. The two ontologies do not connect and have to be mapped to each other. The biological data is currently referenced by creature, not by function. And having biologists and designers sit side by side is expensive and not very scaleable.

Janine and her students are currently building a proof of concept of this system where they have tagged 12 species of creature appropriately and can now search the animals using designer language.

I asked Janine whether or not she was using Semantic Web tools to build her system, and surprisingly she wasn’t and in fact, had never heard of the semantic web at all. I suggested to her that she should look into it as it would help her with the ontological mapping and tagging. It would also be interesting to see if you could deploy something like Axonwave ‘s NLP-based tools to assist the humans by applying the semantic tags or else aiding in the re-categorization of biological data by function.

My favourite quote of Janine’s was: “Limits [of resources] should be considered by designers as a design contest – an opportunity to exercise their skill in designing efficient mechanisms.”

However, I personally believe that the best way to ensure that this happens in any particular area is for constraints to be quantified, clarified, and made explicit. And in those cases where they don’t exist, make them up if you have to. Humans rarely if ever design efficiently for the sheer challenge of it. Design is hard enough as it is. They wait until they are pushed into it. That is why the best thing that could happen to alternative energy development would be for something horrendous to occur that jacks oil up to $500/barrel – a 10x multiple over its current Fall 2004 price. THAT would boost spending and ingenuity in the energy/transportation sector like nothing else. Designers the world over would engage their efficiency creativity and you can be darned sure that automobiles would be getting 100mph in about 12 months.

Session 4: Urban Space, Movement, and Energy
With: Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, entrepreneur, founder of DEKA Research that builds the stair-climbing wheelchair; and Jaime Lerner, architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, where he revolutionized transit and recycling programs.

Lerner spoke on the history of Curitiba, Brazil and his mayoralty there. When he first became mayor and the city was at 600,000 people and approaching a million, he was advised by mayors of all of the other major cities of the world that he absolutely HAD to build a light rail transit system. Fortunately for Curitiba, they did not have the money to do so. So he built a bus system that ended up surpassing most if not all LRT systems in the world, that is self-funding (it pays for itself and requires no subsidies) and that moves more people than LRT systems at 1/8 of the cost. It has been hailed the world over as a transportation model to be applied to many of the world’s cities as they face increased density, and mounting LRT construction and legal costs and timelines.

He talked about how New York has been talking for FIFTY years about putting an LRT line on 2nd Avenue. They have finally approved it. But it will take twenty years to build. Seventy years of not moving people because the solution is so drastically expensive and difficult to execute!!

Here were some of Lerner’s notes:

• live work and play in one part of the city. Separating functions is an economic and ecological disaster in the making.

• when you build transit, stay on the surface – don’t tunnel and don’t go above ground – both are expensive in terms of land-buy-backs and both are slow in terms of actual people moved across distances because of having to go underground and then above. Most of all, stay on the surface to minimize the costs of building underground or above ground on raised platforms.

• Ignore the peer pressure that says you need an LRT. You don’t. No city does.

• Curitiba moves 2 million people per day by bus. It pays for itself from ticket revenue.

• if a regular bus can move X people per day through the city, there are a couple of things you can do to get higher multiples. If you have a dedicated lane, that bus can move 2x the people. If that bus is articulated, then you can move another 1.7x the people. If that bus is a double-bus, it can move 2.5x the people. Add that all up and they are getting an 8.5x multiple over using a regular stand-alone bus! Because they are using double-decker articulated buses that get their own dedicated bus lanes all through the city. BRILLIANT.

• another awesome part of their buses is that to get on a bus you enter a bus-tube that is a tube-shaped building at the bus-stop. You pay to go into the tube, and then when the bus arrives five sets of doors on the bus open into the tube platform. It’s like an LRT but only two bus-lengths long. So the people can move in/out of the bus in 5 or 10 seconds and then all of the doors shut and the bus moves off again. When you leave the bus, you then exit the tube from the opposite end you entered from. This tube-platform minimizes idle time and keeps the passengers sheltered from the weather.

• Their buses arrive at the tube every 30 seconds. As he noted, many people do not like taking the bus because they have to learn the routes and the timing or they waste a lot of time. Well, if a bus is coming by every 30 seconds, that’s not an issue!

• Recycling is handled by exchanging items of value for the goods that need to be recycled. Even the poorest squatters are paid for their garbage with tickets for the buses, or food from outlying farms. Curitiba recycles 2/3 of its garbage, one of the highest urban recycling rates in the world.

• Even the fishermen are paid to clean up the ocean. They are paid if they catch fish, and they are paid by the city if they catch garbage like tires or car parts.

My favourite quote of Lerner’s was: “The city is not a problem; it is a solution.”

I loved this guy. He laughed quickly and easily and it was obvious that he was extremely passionate about the principles that they had used to build Curitiba. He was also pleased that at last count, 87 more cities had begun to build using these same principles. But it had taken 20 years for that to happen!

–

Dean Kamen spoke about his motivation to build the Segway 2 wheeled device.

• When Ford built the car, 9% of people lived in cities.

• As of 2000, >50% of the global population lived in cities (>3.2B of 6.4B).

• the average speed of the automobile in most cities is 9mph, the same speed of the Segway.

• he feels that the car is designed for the freeway and should absolutely be used to drive on the freeway, but then it should be left at the city gates in much the way that horses and carts were also left outside the ancient cities. We should be using other forms of transportation from the outer ring to the inner core of the city.

I have to say that as much as I like Dean Kamen and as cool as the Segway is, even I wouldn’t run around on one because they’re just so….geeky(?) I’m not sure what it is but something bugs me about them. Maybe it’s just the dorkiness factor. I can’t quite pin it down.

Also, bikes widely distributed by the city and covered bike routes would do more for commuters than expensive electric Segways everywhere, although Paris is trying an experiment with them.

I think the biggest difference between the panelists was the following. One had built an incredible city of 1.6 million people on ecological principles and the values of simple, cheap, and quick. Kamen was trying to solve the commute problem by adding a heavy, electricity-using scooter that was difficult to get up and down stairs and that would pretty much require putting a rack onto your vehicle in order to carry. It is the solution for cities that we don’t actually have. I mean, I give the guy points for long term fifty year vision, but I still don’t get it. And there are a lot of other things we can do that are cheap, quick, and simple like Lerner has done.

(To be continued…)

20% of U.S. cars will be hybrids by 2010….and 80% by 2015. Now if we can just make them bio-diesel/hybrids, I’ll get really excited.

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 02:39:10 +0000

Wired talks about the demand outstripping supply for both diesel vehicles and hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and how that will likely lead to diesel/hybrid vehicles. The problem is that diesel is still fossil-fuel based, stinky, sooty, and toxic.

VW has also publicly declared that they are reversing their stand on hybrid cars and will be releasing a hybrid very soon although they are unsure if it will be gas or diesel based.

And a Booz Allen Hamilton report claims that 20 percent of U.S. buyers may convert to hybrids by 2010…and 80 percent by 2015.

Hopefully, we will put bio-diesel into those diesel/hybrid cars (something that you can do without modifying the engines.) Sure, bio-diesel costs a few cents more but if your car is getting 85mpg (like the SMART car), who cares?