Archive for July, 2009
Have you ever heard about the plumber and his pipes or the mechanic and his car? That’s right — someone with a great skill who never seems to use it to look after their own stuff. Well at Greensense we are not like that — we are good at helping companies adapt to climate change and we are good at doing it in our own business. Ultimately we believe the environmental impacts that we are causing should compel us to action. Our actions match our words.
Now there are lots of initiatives we could talk about — and likely future blog posts — but for today it is our virtual office. We often get asked whether we have offices and how we operate, so here is an insight into part of the working life at Greensense.
Firstly we don’t have our own facilities — part of trying to minimise our environmental impact and save emissions. We meet as a team once a week in a hired room in the city close to public transport. As such we really need to rely on a robust, virtual office to allow us to operate during the course of the week. If you are interested in some of the energy and emission savings that are being forecasted from operating this way you can read more about it here.
We have made significant investment in finding the best Software As A Service (SaaS) solution for our business (which you may have also heard referred to as cloud computing or the virtual office). All our technology is run this way and yes — it really works — saving energy, saving emissions, building flexible work patterns and improving efficiencies. Our solutions are listed below so you can take a look. The caveat here is that we are not endorsing any of these solutions — they are suitable for us but you need to look at your own requirements before working out whether they are suitable for you.
Financials — for employee tracking, invoicing, accounts payable, order book tracking etc we use Saasu.
Knowledge Sharing — we have an internal blog site for knowledge sharing and use the same technology for our external website — WordPress.
Document Management — for file sharing, back up, versioning, synchronising etc we use Dropbox
CRM — for managing our sales and customer details we use PipelineDeals
Mail, Messaging and Calendars all comes from Google
and finally our timesheeting and resource allocation comes from ClickTime.
We all have the ability to change to make a difference. If you would like any help on practical things you can do within your organisation to minimise environmental impact then let us know.
Greensense will be exhibiting at the Local Government Convention at the Perth Exhibition Centre from Thursday 6th — Saturday 8th August. We will be completing a carbon audit for the event as well as having the Greensense Dashboard on display. Greensense is there as a WALGA preferred supplier for Local Government climate change consulting services.
If you are at the conference, we will be at stand 48 so come by and say hi.
Malcolm Turnbull has recently issued a statement of the Coalition’s support for the introduction of an emissions trading scheme.
This is probably more about avoiding an early election than a real change in the position of some views in the coalition. Bad politics aside, this is good news for moving forward on climate change.
In his statement, Turnbull set out nine issues he wants the government to address. One of his main concerns is that the scheme should provide more support to industry and should be more in line with legislation being introduced in the US (Waxman-Markey) — in fact he is calling for Australia to delay passing any legislation until Waxman-Markey has passed.
One specific amendment he asks for is that emissions intensive trade exposed industries should receive full compensation for the cost of carbon, saying:
“Emissions Intensive Trade Exposed industries (EITEs) should at least be on a level playing field with the United States and other advanced economies and should therefore receive full compensation [emphasis added] for higher energy costs until the bulk of their competitors (measured as in Waxman Markey by global market share) face a similar carbon cost.”
The affect of this would be to shift more of the burden of EITE emissions to other parts of the economy.
Turnbull’s concern with EITEs and the need to follow Waxman-Markey makes the timely comments from Dr Martin Parkinson, made the day before Turnbull’s statement was released, particularly interesting.
Dr Parkinson is the Secretary of the Department of Climate Change, who was addressing the Financial Review Carbon Reduction Conference. In his speech he made specific reference to comparisons between the CPRS and Waxman-Markey:
“[C]ontrary to some claims, neither the US proposal nor the EU Emissions Trading Scheme guarantees 100 per cent assistance to industries at risk of carbon leakage.
Both the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and Waxman-Markey set hard caps as a share of overall permits on the amount of support for EITEs. In both schemes, support will be pro-rated if total EITE emissions exceed the share of permits allocated, as seems quite possible.
It is a matter of mathematics in both schemes that the support for EITEs in total will then decline at the same rate as the national cap. And if total EITE emissions are growing on the back of output growth, the rate of support per unit of output will fall even faster.Because these claims continue to be made despite this information already being on the public record, let me say again that Waxman-Markey does not guarantee 100% assistance to industries at risk of carbon leakage [emphasis added].
The crucial point here is that we have designed the CPRS and the EITE provisions for Australia. Those who argue that we should instead simply adopt the Waxman-Markey model fail to recognise that it has been designed for the United States and does not necessarily suit the Australian situation. We need a scheme built for us and for our national interests.”
It’s unlikely that the government will make any changes to the CPRS legislation between now and August 13th, when it is due to be debated. The Coalition, the Greens, and Senator Fielding will all vote against the bill, with only Xenephon’s vote being uncertain. We can then expect the bill to be re-presented in November.
Between now and then you can expect more negotiations, more lobbying from industry and environmentalists and more political shenanigans, but one thing is certain, Australia will have an emissions trading scheme sooner or later.
Australia is betting big on carbon capture and storage (CCS). It’s a bet that Martin Ferguson is backing. The Federal Resources and Energy Minister recently opined against renewables in The Australian and said that “no serious response to climate change can ignore the need to clean up coal.”
The big question is how much will CCS cost? A recent report from Harvard found that ‘first-of-a-kind’ carbon capture and storage plants will cost approximately $150/tCO2 avoided.
Treasury’s modeling for the CPRS forecast that in 2050 — as far forward as they modeled — the cost of carbon would be $124.91 (2005 dollars — CPRS-15 scenario). So $150/tCO2 doesn’t look like a great investment at first glance. However, the Harvard report also found that as CCS technology matures and if construction costs reduce from 2008 levels then the costs could reduce to as low as $25/tCO2 avoided.
A primary reason for the emissions trading scheme is to encourage business to invest in abatement. Businesses that don’t reduce their emissions — that simply purchase permits at auction — risk becoming uncompetitive and unsustainable. So all businesses — not just electricity generators — have strategic investment decisions to make right now.
Vancouver City Council has recently passed new building regulations requiring developers to include charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) in at least 20 per cent of parking bays in new multi-dwelling buildings.
The Council have already established regulations requiring new homes to be pre-wired directly to the garage to make installing an electric vehicle charging system simpler in the future.
Vancouver is not alone. A lot of cities in North America including Chicago, San Francisco and Portland are putting in place new policies and new infrastructure to support EVs. The UK government is also rolling out charging stations.
The benefits of EVs are clear. When they are charged from renewable sources they produce no greenhouse gas emissions. When an EV is charged from a coal-fired power station it can still produce less emissions because traditional internal combustion engines are very inefficient. EVs can also benefit from load-shifting — charging at night when electricity is cheap.
EVs are also becoming mainstream very quickly. Better Place is rolling out large-scale infrastructure for charging EVs (including in Australia) and almost every major car manufacturer has plans to produce an EV (I have my eye on the new Mini E). It won’t be too long before they are available “drive away” from the showroom in Perth.
Local government has a very important role to play in helping EVs become mainstream in Australia. The key to success will be good public charging infrastructure supported by consistent and proactive government policies.
While Perth has an active Electric Vehicle Association, I’m not aware of any local government action on this front, yet, and I’d be keen to hear about any new initiatives.
A client recently asked me if using recycled paper and vegetable-based inks, really does make a difference to the environment. This question often comes up after a carbon inventory highlights the embedded energy and associated CO2e emissions in print materials, be it regular office paper or professional print jobs.
While my immediate response was “yes, recycled paper is less resource-intensive than using virgin forest”, I thought I would research this to see how the difference could be quantified.
Recycled paper
According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, producing one tonne of recycled paper saves an alarming:
- 31,780 litres of water;
- 4100 kilowatt/hours of electricity;
- 75 per cent of chlorinated bleach;
- 27 kilograms of air pollutants;
- 13 trees;
- 4 cubic metres of landfill; and
- 2.5 barrels of oil
The ACF also lists a number of Australian producers or stockists with office quality recycled paper. If you’re not already using recycled paper, you should look at the Little Paper Book.
Vegetable-based inks
So what about vegetable-based inks? Inks are made using a liquid base, and then adding a pigment and a bonding agent. It is the choice between a petroleum or vegetable base that is key here.
Petroleum based inks are less than ideal for a number of reasons:
- They continue our reliance on crude oil, a non-renewable resource
- Petrol and alcohol evaporate during the printing process, releasing Volatile Organic Compound (VOCs) and affecting air quality
- A harsh solvent is needed to clean printers which have used these inks, resulting in more VOCs
- Petroleum based inks are difficult to remove during recycling and results in a toxic waste product.
Alternatively, vegetable based inks are derived from renewable sources such as corn, linseed, canola etc. There are no VOCs released during its use or cleanup and no toxic waste is produced during recycling. More information on inks can be found here.
For those people and offices already using recycled paper and vegetable-based inks – well done. I hope this blog has hopefully provided some new information to support your decision. For those not using them, I would urge you to consider it. The statistics above are alarming and as the quality of recycled paper increases, it is difficult to see any reasons why you shouldn’t make the switch.
