EcoNuz

Recently on a flight, I was reading the Continental Airlines magazine’s Green Edition.  I do believe Continental to be one of the greener airlines because of its efforts in biofuels (jathropa links), as well as some of the measures taken, which are outlined in some of the articles (wing tips saving fuel, meal packaging, etc).  However, I did see quite a bit of greenwashing, as well as messaging that I believe is harmful to green causes.

In more than one place in the green edition, resorts, restaurants, and other things were referred to as “tree hugging.”  I have the same complaint about TreeHugger.com, which I believe to be the best gree site on the web (if you think something is better, please post it in the comments, I’d like to read it too).  The problem with “tree hugging” and that concept was that it was used as a derrogatory term for so long.  The baby boomer generation, which is has been one of the most wasteful in history (references), interprets a tree hugger as a “dirty hippie.”

By using “tree hugger” in articles targeted to the masses, the authors alienate the readers.  Usage of the phrase immediately dissociates the reader because the message to the reader becomes something <i>they</i> are doing, not something <i>you</i> should be doing.  What makes the problem worse in the case of Continental is their default audience.  Continental’s hubs are in Newark (major New York City entry point), Houston (worst air quality and high energy sector concentration), and Cleveland (midwest rust belt and coal consumers).  While hubs are often just layovers for a lot of consumers, many professionals try to take direct flights, and when the end points are locations with industries and demographics unfriendly to the green movement, any messaging that causes the readers to further dissociate themselves is counterproductive.

What really makes this bad is the fact that baby boomers are currently in power, in both industry and politics.  Advocating green policies and practices to this demographic is difficult enough, and starting off by putting a negative image in the mind of decision makers is a bad idea.

With the target audience for sites like TreeHugger.com, the readers are already convinced of the merits of the green movement.  What we need to do is convince the ones that are actually making the decisions that can change both policy and industry investment.  The image needed to change minds is one of wise investment and the long term payoff.  Green for the sake of green alone will not convince those that have not already drank the kool-aid.

Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin Support CC with $500,000 Gift.

Since I’d written about Science Commons in a previous post about the importance of sharing research, I thought it was worthy of a quick follow up.

I received a comment from a reader that they didn’t necessarily agree with the premise that information sharing is a big problem.  I still believe lack of information is a problem, but I would have been best to explain the premise in a little more depth.  I admit that there was some oversimplification in my last post.

The reason I believe information sharing to be a problem is not because of things like tips for saving energy, how to recycle more effectively, hypermiling, or what I would lump into the category of what people can do every day.  Resources for this type of information are everywhere.  What we are really lacking in is openness of in depth scientific research and data.  A great deal of data and groundbreaking research are not exposed to the general public because it either is locked up in paid subscription academic publications before fully passing peer review, patented, or never sees the light of day because the researchers original hypothesis was wrong.

One part of the problem is the information that is intentionally locked up, and another is the information that is just never exposed.  Even bad data and failed experiments can be useful to the scientific community as a whole.  I do believe that there is value in repeating previously failed experiments, but only to a point.  Hypothetically speaking, if an experiment failed a few times, it’s worth someone else trying again.  However, if it failed a thousand times, but people kept repeating it because they didn’t know about previous experiments, then it would be a waste of time.

I will intentionally avoid going in depth on patent issues with pharmaceuticals, but they are one of the most prominent examples of how locked up information could benefit society when opened.  (WARNING: Upcoming Oversimplification)  The motivation behind locking up the data is different than the problem GreenXchange is trying to solve, but the net effect is the same.

Society benefits when drugs fall out of patent and generic drugs are created.  Information on a drug’s effects are available before patents expire, but other manufacturers are prevented from acting upon it, having the same net effect of nothing being shared.  Locking up information, or preventing others from acting upon it because of patents, does more harm than good.  Not only is this a problem with the products of research like drugs, it is a problem with the data itself.

Patents on gene sequences that were *discovered* rather than created, are patented, and commercial medical tests for these sequences require payments to the people that discovered them first.  A specific example that I won’t fully explain myself, is that patents on the human genome are making tests for breast cancer increasingly more expensive.  How much harder would it be to move to clean energy if manufacturers were prevented from producing wind turbines or photovoltaic solar panels?

Fortunately, these technologies are not locked up, but a big part of the Science Commons initiative is allowing discoveries and data both to remain open and accessible to the world. The openness and data sharing is relevant to my Biodiesel Series posts because without the previous work of the US DOE Aquatic Species Program, I wouldn’t have been able to go nearly as deep. Had their work been intentionally locked up with patents, or just not published because there was no platform, many of the existing biotech companies working on algae based biodiesel would not be as close to a marketable solution as they are today.

Update:  Additional reason it’s relevant to Green Tech, Oil Companies buying up battery patents.

One part of the green movement that doesn’t get enough attention is the need to share information, research, inventions, tips for greener living, or anything else that will benefit the world.  This topic is particularly important to me, and it’s part of the reason I started this blog.  The Biodiesel Series posts were actually sections from my graduate research paper in Environmental Management.  I don’t believe anything I did was groundbreaking, but sharing and summarizing what I found in my own research has the potential to inspire others to do something similar, or possibly just save someone time in locating previous work for their own research.

The work itself took a great deal of time, but it would have gone to waste if the TA was the only one to read it.  The act of breaking up the sections and posting to this blog took less than 1% of my total time in the project.  The extra 1% it takes to share research makes a HUGE difference.

The world would be much worse off if inventors, scientists and researchers chose to keep their work secret.  There are so many other examples, but what if Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla chose not to share their work about electricity?  One could argue that someone else would have come along to do the same thing, which I believe to be the case, but it would not have been until much later, and the progress of humanity would have been delayed by years.

Among many other things, Tesla’s inventions and research led to the technology used to generate electricity in most power plants and wind turbines today.  Holding back information from the world only serves to impede progress.  The lack of a platform to distribute the same information can be just as bad.

The Science Commons project’s main focus is to encourage the sharing of information, and to provide a platform to do it.  Recently they launched GreenXchange, a sub-section with the goal of sharing green innovations.  We would progress without projects like GreenXchange, but information sharing initiatives like these drastically accelerate the pace at which we can do it.