For some years now, we have used Galvanina mineral water, an Italian product. While as a rule I am against bottled water, few things beat good sparkling mineral water as a refreshment over dinner. And the glass bottle is recyclable. Anyway, it’s not considered a luxury brand and we buy it from Coles, the other participant in the local supermarket duopoly, at an affordable price. I liked the product, but wasn’t an advocate by any means. If asked, I probably would not have even remembered the brand, I just knew what the bottle looked like. In other words, it was all a very ordinary consumer-product/brand relationship.

Until one day, when opening one of the – physically intact – bottles, the glass thread disintegrated; there were small pieces of glass everywhere, including in the water. Not very appealing.

I basically had three options; 1) forget about it as it’s a minor thing and $h!t happens, 2) complain to Coles – where I would most likely get a refund but that’s it – or 3) contact the manufacturer. I couldn’t be bothered to drive to Coles for a small refund, so I took a picture of the thread and, not thinking, tossed the bottle into the recycling bin and shot off a quick email with the product codes & a photo to Galvanina, expecting little in return.

To my great positive surprise, what happened after that exceeded all my expectations. A day or two later I received a very nice official and profuse apology letter (email) about the situation and a request for the bottle which, alas, I no longer had. Nevertheless, they requested my address and some 24 hours later gave me a tracking number for a shipment.

They had sent me this – via FedEx, from Italy – that arrived five days later:

What can I say? My expectations might or might not have been higher than those I would have had for going to Coles, but they certainly were not high; and whatever they were, they were exceeded by a mile and then some. It’s great to see people proud of their product and willing to go the extra mile – or 10,000 miles as in this case – to keep a customer happy. As I thanked them for all this, they replied “Thank you for your kind feedback. This is because we care and we love what we do!”. I would not typically be inclined to believe something like that, but I did this time.

Aside from the obvious lessons here, there’s a hidden one as well: as far as I know, Galvanina does not run an NPS measurement or tracking system. And guess what? Good on them. You don’t need a measurement system – you just need to have a good product, be engaged, care and even love what you do – and then I think doing what’s right comes naturally.

Oh, and another lesson: try the Galvanina waters. They deserve it

In order to help whoever is vying for funding via these channels, I offer the following advice. Please note that this is my individual view, not explicitly or implicitly condoned by the European Commission in any way, shape or form. Also note there are several experts independently reviewing every single proposal, so just writing it so that I like it will not get you any money. In other words, this advise comes with no warranty whatsoever, YMMV and all the relevant disclaimers. But here goes:

Cut the complicated language. One often wishes the writers would just get the basics of good writing right. Writing in a complicated way and using a wide range of meaningless buzzwords is not a sign that you know your domain, nor it is a sign of intelligence. At best it’s a sign of laziness, at worst it’s an attempt to cover up the lack of any real substance. Write simply. Do not try to complicate things unnecessarily; most of the time what you’re doing is completely feasible to present in very simple terms – dump the buzzwords and the pretend-intellectualism. And, please, check that the sentences you write make sense. Because sometimes they make no sense whatsoever, or do not mean anything.

Be realistic on impacts. Too many times the applicants completely forget they are operating with finite time and resources. I know the EC asks for impact assessments, but this needs to be realistic. Any talk of “saving Europe” or similar grandiose statements through just this one research project is just unrealistic and will be treated as such.

Focus; don’t try to achieve too much. It may seem that the more goals you have in a project and that the wider they are, the better it must be. It’s not. Have a clear focus, because that’s the only way to achieve something. If you focus on everything, you’re not focusing on anything and will accomplish exactly that. This is particularly important for STREP proposals. You do NOT need to address every single element in the call.

Don’t do research for research’s sake. Anything that you attempt to do that goes beyond state-of-the-art must have an application or use somewhere. It’s not good enough to say that after you research topic X for three years, you’ll have good grounds to continue the research.

Don’t waste money – get onto the ‘lean’ boat. Just having multi-year funding from the EC doesn’t mean you can use outdated project methodologies. Two iterations over three years is not “agile”. There is also no reason for you not to borrow a page or two from the Lean Startup. The EC – really the European taxpayers – don’t like to see their money wasted any more than a VC would. Keep in mind that most of the time part of the funding comes out of your tax dollars – would you invest in your project?

Don’t waste money, part II. 15% of project funding to management overhead is unacceptable. So is proposing to buy loads of gear or services at unreasonable prices.

Learn to pitch. Something you should learn from the startups; make sure you develop a compelling pitch – why should your project be funded? Don’t bury the lead on page 78, by when the reviewers will have lost any faith in you coming up with something good. It’s essential for the abstract to be compelling and engaging.

Learn to write (English). I bet you were taught to write essays in school, and scientific articles at the university. Try to remember those lessons: Use clear layout. Break into appropriate sentences and paragraphs. Reference concisely, i.e. in a way that doesn’t interfere with reading (superscripted [21] is good, [Lastname 1, Lastname 2, publication XYZ, page B, 2010] is not.). Use graphics, but make them clear. Check the spelling. Check the grammar. Write clearly. Avoid sentences that are like 100 words long. Avoid paragraphs spanning half a page. Pay attention to layout and pagination. Check the spelling and grammar again. Make sure the sentences make sense.

Did I mention you need to check the spelling and grammar? Surprising as it may be, it turns out we can’t read minds.

If, btw, your writing or scientific writing courses did _not_ teach you these things, take a better one that does.

Be specific. Particularly when discussing what it is that you’re going to be doing beyond state-of-the-art, it’s essential that you say something more than “research” this and that. And don’t forget to be realistic, too; don’t say you’re going to achieve something awesome which is clearly unrealistic. It is, however, fine to say you will try to do something.

Don’t forget business fundamentals. You need to have a story on how your thing could be used in the “real” world; often this means involving one or more business entities that somehow need to make money. Having a pure research-platform is fine, too, if it’s justified – but “build it and they will come” usually does not go down well as a strategy. Remember to engage the relevant industry in your project.

Innovate, sometimes radically. Don’t be afraid to propose something completely different as opposed to just progressing some field in an expected, linear fashion. If you think the call has inappropriate elements – because sometimes they do – don’t be afraid to criticize them and propose alternatives.

Don’t fall for neomania, i.e. making something new just for the sake of it being new. Not everything new or even innovative is worth doing – show that your use cases are actually useful and have demand, not merely “novel”. Novelty in and of itself is valueless; don’t fall for technological solutionism either.

Test your assumptions. Another concept from the Lean Startup; too many proposals list as some their core thesis assumptions that are entirely untested. At worst they are the result of groupthink of a very unrepresentative group of researchers along the lines of “We’d love this so why wouldn’t everyone?!”. If you base your project on assumptions, you need to test and validate those assumptions early. Oh, and on a related note: Gartner or some other analyst company saying so doesn’t make it so.

Get the right team; trying to make advances in areas where the members are amateurs in and not even engaging the parties with the actual state-of-the-art technology guarantees you will not get anywhere. These are not funds purely for your internal competence development.

Don’t get stuck on the Europe bit; don’t hesitate to bring in non-European partners if you can; not all SOA is of European origin and engaging organizations outside Europe can bring substantial benefits.

Manage the management right. Think about using more modern project management tools than email and Word documents.

Keep the big picture in mind. Having experts onboard is good. Having experts who can see beyond their little domain and into the macro-level developments and understand their significance is better; you need to have an understanding of the macro-environment and trends and how they might affect what you are going to do.

Finally, don’t submit a bad proposal. It just isn’t worth it. It will not get funded and you will have caused reputational damage to all participating organizations and the people identified by submitting stupid things.

A lot of people – usually people who don’t actually know me – think I’m a pessimist. There are some things that even readers of this blog will know I believe in; things like inevitable catastrophic climate change, end of growth & having to come to terms with hard resource limits.

To tackle these issues, I call for – among other things – adaptation, resilience and antifragility (see footnote) because I think we’re way past the point of no return on many disasters; on climate change, remaining under +2C warming this century – or even under +4C or probably +6C – is wishful thinking, and hope alone is a very bad strategy. Yet, many expect some as yet undiscovered technology to save our collective asses. But that is hope as a strategy, or actually even worse because it lulls us to inaction while we wait for that technological saviour who in all likelihood will never come.

It’s a tragedy because that hypothetical future technology is unnecessary – or, rather, it’s only necessary if we are hell-bent on maintaining status quo on all fronts. Climate change was never a technological problem; from the moment we knew it was a problem, we knew how to solve it. And we could’ve. But we didn’t. And now it’s too late; it’s a predicament we have to deal with, not a problem we can solve.

Naturally these are not the kind of things most people enjoy hearing or even thinking about, hence the branding as a pessimist – at least I think that’s why.

I am, however, actually not a pessimist; rather, I am very optimistic by nature. You may or may not agree with even the broad strokes of my world view, and hence the basis of any actions I take; it became apparent in the previous post that a lot of people confuse “can do”, especially when combined with a “should do” with “will do”, as if the world operated in a long-term-logical manner.

But how did my view of things get to where it is today? A question I’m sure none of you particularly want an answer to, but one I will still partially answer – if for no other reasons, for my own records

The following are what I’d say are maybe the Top ten(ish) relatively recent books (in no particular order, and books because they’re the easiest resources to list here, not because they’d be the only ones) that have shaped my macro-level world view in these domains:

• Richard Heinberg: The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
• Chris Martenson: The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment
• Andrew Zolli: Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
• Richard Heinberg et al:The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises
• Fred Pearce: With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
• John Michael Greer: The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• John Michael Greer: The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered
• Tim Jackson: Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet
• Rob Dietz: Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources

I have yet to see any of those convincingly debunked. However, understanding the macro trends and how things will roughly play out in the global scale and in the long term is one thing; attempting to weave that knowledge as a part of ones daily life and personal planning over shorter timeframes is a whole different ballgame, and I would say a much more difficult one. But it’s a necessary one; at least if you don’t want your kids asking why you didn’t do anything about it even though you very well knew what was going on.

I know I don’t. While there are relevant actions that can be taken with just the macro-level knowledge – like part of the reason why we’re in Australia is to provide at least two geographical options for us and our children, should either the North or the South go, so to say, south – there is more actual value in doing something that helps locally. Whether it is helping you as an individual, as a family, a community, business or even a country to prepare for the disruptions upon us and ahead of us, it’s work that should be done. Previously I’ve said I’ve “chosen” permaculture and the Transition movement, both of which are applicable at both the individual/family and community-levels, and I strive to bring business awareness & action onto these challenges and opportunities as well.

So what, exactly, should one do?

That is, of course, an impossible question to answer and not many have seriously attempted to tackle it because the answer is always “it depends“. Richard Heinberg is one of the few authors with a good macro-level grasp who has not shied away from providing some great points about about personal preparedness as well (see here). The entire Transition movement is also geared towards building resilience in communities. Permaculturalists everywhere are striving towards much of the same goals; these and other groups have networks and organizations in many areas, but it’s fair to say that in most localities they’re still far from mainstream. In Australia, we are lucky to have probably the most active permaculture networks in the world (check out the Melbourne branch here).

So after the macro trends were clear to me, I dug into resilience/’sustainable’ development with a smaller-scale view. Shelter and food form the basics of human life, so understanding how they can be accomplished in a more resilient and sustainable way was the natural next step. Many sources played a role here, including countless online sources – but let me again list my favorite books:

On Housing:

• Michael Mobbs: Sustainable House
• John Krigger et al: The Homeowners Handbook to Energy Efficiency
• Bruce Harley: Insulate and weatherize
• Myron E. Ferguson: Better Houses, Better Living
• Amy Johnston: What Your Contractor Can’t Tell You
• Commonwealth of Australia: Your Home Technical Manual
• David Johnston et al: Green from the Ground Up: A Builders Guide
• Michael Boxwell: Solar Electricity Handbook

On Permaculture and agriculture:

• Bill Mollison: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
• David Holmgren: Permaculture: Prinicples and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
• Dave Jacke et al: Edible Forest Gardens
• Toby Hemenway: Gaia’s Garden
• Rachel Kaplan et al: Urban Homesteading
• Chris Stokes et al: Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change
• Albert Howard: Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture
• Masanobu Fukuoka: The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming
• Rob Hopkins: The Transition Companion
• Carleen Madigan: The Backyard Homestead
• Eliot Coleman: The Winter Harvest Handbook
• Niall Dunne: Healthy Soils for Sustainable Gardens
• Fabian Capomolla and Mat Pember: The Little Veggie Patch Co: How to grow food in small spaces

Other resilience-related books:

• Arthur T Bradley: Handbook to Practical Disaster Preparedness for the Family
• David Werner et al: Where There is No Doctor
• Carol Deppe: The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times

All these have been tremendously valuable and interesting in their own right. I will not review these here; I invite you to read others’ reviews on Amazon instead. Doubtless there are others I have missed and equally doubtless many more that would be valuable to read – and I will continue to read around these topics and keep myself up-to-date. But as I quite knowingly (hah) suffer from the knowing-doing gap, I have to draw the line of inaction and “more study required” somewhere – and for the most part this is where it will be drawn.

Now that I consider my groundwork to be mostly done, then what? We’ll find out how the plans develop and unfold. One good thing about collapse is that even if it happens quickly in a historical perspective, it doesn’t happen literally overnight in the day-to-day lives of people. So stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath

Footnote: many systems we have today have been made fragile in the name of efficiency. The opposite of fragile, however, is antifragile, not resilience as often thought. With that in mind, we should be driving the systems – as far as possible – towards being antifragile, not merely resilient. Antifragile things benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil (up to a point). However, becoming antifragile is not always straightforward or even possible, so I see significant value in resilient systems. This is even more so because many systems we have today are not even fragile (ie. break easily under stress), they are worse than that – they are brittle, ie. they break in an unelegant and sometimes disastrous fashion. In other words, they not only fail easily, but they don’t fail gracefully. Going straight from brittle to antifragile is a tall order for most things; resilience would improve things a lot.

Now, even while increasing amounts of coal is being burned, some people argue renewables could and should save us from the energy crisis. Others, like myself, think there is no way to stave off a crisis but that renewables play a role in mitigating the migration to what will be a fundamentally lower-energy future. Still other people argue that nuclear power will play a key role in the future energy landscape – partly because it’s relatively clean, cheap, abundant, efficient, safe – and predictable in a way wind and solar may not be.

One of those people arguing for nuclear renaissance, if you will, is Rod Adams. I got into a Twitter debate with him earlier about the potential of various energy sources. He thinks nuclear is poised to be much bigger than it is today. I disagreed. So we agreed to disagree (which is already a more civilized way of dealing with differences of opinion than happens in 99% of the cases), wrote down our respective opinions and made a prediction:

Rod predicts that nuclear energy will supply 25% of the world’s electricity and more than 12% of its primary energy within the next 20 years (as measured from Jan 1st, 2013). Sami’s position is that nuclear energy will fall short of these numbers.

For reference figures we agreed to rely on IEA which currently puts the nuclear share at ~6% of world total primary energy and ~13% of the world electricity production. So Rod expects nuclear’s share to roughly double in both categories in 20 years. I don’t.

To have some skin in the game – because, as also NN Taleb has pointed out, making predictions without having any skin in the game can be anything from lame & useless to downright dangerous – we agreed that the one guesstimating the development wrong will serve the other a dinner and act as a tour guide over a week.

Let me go on record to say that if the rise of nuclear comes at the cost of (i.e. replacing) oil, gas and most of all coal, I am all for it and I hope I will be wrong with this prediction. I have no doubt nuclear energy will play an important role in the energy mix going forward; I simply do not believe it will be feasible to have nuclear energy go up that significantly in that “short” timeframe of 20 years.

I won’t go too deep into details why here, but aspects like policy environments, long plant build lead times, limited skill base, waste fuel problems, susceptibility to climate change (primarily from water being used as a coolant), surprisingly low EROEI, high initial costs and energy expenditure as well as questions on the sufficiency of fuel supply all played a role in me coming to this conclusion. A widespread roll-out of thorium reactors and other “unconventional” solutions improve the situation in theory, but I don’t believe they can or will be ramped up in the time period in question.

YMMV and I welcome opinions for or against or entirely alternative views.

On the level of individual companies, there is something there. But on a system-level, like for a country let alone globally, it makes little sense – because much of innovation today reduces GDP instead of increasing it.

Wait, what?

Let’s take a step back. Some, viewed as heretics by many, have pointed out that economic growth is slowing and will eventually come to an end and that there’s little innovation per se can do to prevent that; the end of growth comes from fundamentals. Other folks have posited that the rate of innovation itself is slowing down – recently, The Economist took on some of these claims on innovation slowing down and, while raising a number of valid points, dismissed the concerns in an atypically unconvincing manner.

To get some fundamentals straight; as long as economic growth remains coupled to resource and energy usage, infinite growth is a mathematical impossibility on a finite planet. Few people deny that, but to counter it some say economic growth has decoupled from resource usage. It hasn’t. There has been some modest relative decoupling – the global energy intensity is 33% lower than it was 40 years ago – but that’s nowhere near enough. To continue economic growth in a finite world, we would need absolute decoupling – and that simply has not happened anywhere on a system-wide level, nor are there any signs of it being realistic in time frames that matter. On the contrary, factors like the decreasing EROEI (Energy Returns Over Energy Invested) of the most important energy sources can cause even the modest relative decoupling to reverse itself.

With that, let’s get back to to point that on a macro-level, innovation often has a negative impact on the economy as a whole. How is that?

Take demateralization for one, a huge innovation domain over the past decade. As the books, music and movie businesses become increasingly digital, the effect this dematerialization shift has on the economy as a whole is negative. Cutting out the middlemen like bookstores enables lower prices and better efficiency – and running the industry with fewer people and less money.

There are many more GDP-reducing innovations that everyone is – with or without understanding what their full impact is – rooting for; take working remotely for example. There is nary a person who thinks it’s a bad idea to have knowledge workers work from home or closer to their home rather than jump in their cars and waste untold hours of time and money commuting to the CBD. Remote satellite offices, spread in the suburbia, for example, would be a win-win for both employees and employers – employees would save time and money from the skipped commute, employers would get more productive people, save on expensive CBD office costs etc. But overall, the impact to the economy as a whole, could easily be negative as people would need fewer cars, there’d be less need to build roads, less office rent paid, even fewer public transport tickets etc. More telecom services required, yes, but by not nearly enough to offset all the cost savings.

In short, innovation will not be the salvation that brings unending economic growth. Nothing will.

This naturally doesn’t mean innovation is bad; innovation is about so much more than stimulating economic growth. It just means it’s important for different reasons than for what people often think. Like adapting to ongoing changes and saving the planet. We desperately need innovation in helping businesses and communities become more resilient and hopefully even antifragile. We need innovative solutions to help us reduce carbon emissions at a rapid pace; we need innovations to maintain social stability in an era of decline. And so on, ad infinitum.

Importantly, though, the innovation we now need is not all technological innovation. Technology plays a role, but what we really need is innovation that must identify, accept and integrate lessons from history and natural systems, include social aspects and dial back on the pure fragility-inducing efficiency-mantra. It is not like the most visible innovation today that focuses on some new technology, often for the sake of neomania.

Let’s innovate on things that really matter.

References & resources

• The Economist: Has the ideas machine broken down?
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Tim Jackson: Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet
• Richard Heinberg: The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
• Chris Martenson: The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment
• Mats Larsson: The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth: Why Business Will Need to Invest Less in the Future

January evenings are often spent on the beach; the relatively cool water (it never gets above +22C or so) is great on a hot day. These colourful “bathing boxes” – which are actually one of the hottest pieces of real estate in the area, selling at around cool $200k each in the rare occasion they’re on the market – are a defining feature of our favourite local beach. While the bay beaches are perfect for kids to play in, it is a bit of a shame that ocean beaches (and hence, proper surfing conditions) are an hour’s drive away.

There is always something new happening at Federation Square in the city; in February, Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests were there – along with a mini-version for the kids to push around. Aside from some special events, I don’t usually even bother to look up ahead of time what’s going on at the Fed Square – there’s enough things happening all year.

In March I managed to tag a short stop-over in Finland on my work trip to Brussels – and they had snow. Heaps of snow. The short 24hr get-together with my siblings was excellent and having gone back to Finland twice now, it’s about time for some of them to haul their butts over here, I think..

Before impending family changes later in the year, we took a last road trip in April to Adelaide, via Grampians and Great Ocean Road. I love the backroads in Australia; they’re simply beautiful. They are two-way roads with roughly one lane of pavement, meaning it’s off to the shoulder and lots of dust if a car happens to come the other way – but that rarely happens.

Not specific to May, possums are one of our resident wild animals you can see practically every day; often considered a nuisance (but protected by law), we haven’t had any issues with them since they got blocked from our roof space. And they’re cute.

June, even though technically just about mid-winter, is the month that mostly resembles fall here – the trees that change colour, change colour, and in select locations you would think you’re somewhere very different than Australia. June also marks the end of autumn, meaning < +20C daytime temps and a shift from the usually consistently beautiful autumn to more rainy and windy winter. And, this year, a shockingly bad winter with the whole household taking turns being sick. Not much good to remember of that period, except...

.. the birth of another family member in July, which was a wonderful experience at a hospital’s birth centre. So July, and also ..

.. August went partly getting used to the fact that there are five of us now, and partly trying to get everyone healthy. I don’t remember – nor care to remember – much of August, but looking back at the pictures it seems some signs of spring were already there.

By September we began to be mostly alive again, which was good timing because Royal Melbourne Show was in town again. Beyond the usual plethora of animals to pet, hug and catch, this year the (older) kids got to milk a cow, which was pretty cool.

In October, I participated in on Aussie tradition – a sausage sizzle fundraising for one of our kids’ kindergarten. We had a good location in front of a local Bunnings on a beautiful weekend day, and I was really surprised how well the things sold. A nice experience overall, but I’m still not a fan of sausages

In November, I had the opportunity to help organize the Global Sustainability Jam Melbourne, which was another great positive experience. This picture, however, is from Fitzroy Gardens which is a great lunch-walk destination right next to the office – a refreshing change of scenery.

December was special in that I had five weeks of leave, the longest stretch in many years (see the previous post for more about that). Much of the time was spent focusing on the most important things, like the kids doing what kids should be doing; exploring, getting dirty and wet. There simply is no better place for that than summer in Australia.

Towards the end of the month we also welcomed some relatives from Finland – for some strange reason it proved to be impossible to show them all the interesting stuff we’ve uncovered over the past 3+ years in three weeks. We managed lots, though, which probably left both parties exhausted – but hopefully happy and many experiences richer, too. All in all, a perfect ending for an eventful year.

2013, on the other hand, has kicked off with some record-breaking heat-waves showing what climate change means for Australia. Personally it’s likely to be another interesting year, but how exactly that will unfold remains to be seen.. Some self-imposed deadlines are looming but there are options that haven’t been decided on yet.

Missing the thing most people hate

One of the first things that I noticed was that initially life at home didn’t really feel like a vacation at all – with three kids, there are few moments of peace and quiet. So in a somewhat ironic way, the thing I missed at first was my commute; strange as it may sound, my train commute is clearly the best time for me to read things without interruptions. Soon, however, that gave way to enjoying all the action and taking the quiet time where and when you could.

Reconnections to things I love

The real revelations – or more reinforcements than revelations – were related to things I love. On the top of that list is my family and feeling grateful for it, and grateful for having had even more time to spend with them. I don’t understand people with family who vacation only alone; why have kids – or a spouse – if you don’t intend to be with them? I also spent a lot of time on two of my longest-standing hobbies, cooking and photography; with about 5,000 photos over 5 weeks I’ve got some sorting to do and some pretty decent shots.

And then there was nature. I love the outdoors in Australia. There is nothing quite like admiring the starry sky while being surrounded by kangaroos munching on grass, or having the Kookaburra laughter as the only sound as you head off for a bushwalk up a mountain in the cool morning air, or having a perfect ocean beach practically to yourself even at the height of the tourist season.

But the flip side of that coin – the city – has heaps to offer, too. Melbourne truly is a wonderful city to live in. With relatives visiting us for three short weeks, it soon became apparent that it simply is impossible to show them more than a tiny fraction of all the awesome things here. We’ve been here for over three years now and there are still many, many exciting places left to explore.

It is a rare occasion, but I happen to agree with this promotional piece.

Other discoveries

During the leave, I also added another year to my age. It is becoming impossible to pretend I am physically young, but I am young at heart – to the extent that I’m starting to believe I will never actually grow up. Now I just need to convince myself that that is a good thing.

I managed one interesting literary discovery by reading some things; most importantly, I was really impressed by Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, which was an awesome read – very influential and fascinating, if at times a little challenging. Highly recommended, and it certainly shifted some of my views and opinions.

Importantly, I spent most of my time offline. I wasn’t religious about being offline but I didn’t read any news, nor any of my hundreds of RSS feeds and I mostly stayed off Facebook and Twitter. And guess what? I didn’t feel like I missed anything. The vast majority of daily “news” is noise anyway, and I found the social-media-less existence so liberating that I’m seriously questioning its value altogether.

All good things must come to an end

On return to work yesterday I found myself thinking I’d much rather slap on sunscreen as I used to than slip into a suit in the morning. But all good things must come to an end – hopefully replaced by other good things, so it will be very interesting to see how 2013 shapes up after a great finish to 2012. And at least summer is still here for months and there are the evenings and weekends to take that in.

Due next is an overdue photo recap of last year as per tradition.

Considering the facts that;

• Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a far more rapid pace than predicted by the models [1]

• The sea levels are rising faster than predicted by the models [2]

• Even IEA says time is running out to avoid catastrophic climate change [3]

• The climate is loaded with all kinds of tipping points, and we would not very wise to empirically go try and find out what happens if we trigger (even more of) them [4]

• Our emissions are currently exceeding the worst projections of the IPCC scenarios [5]

• The fossil fuel developments already being developed & planned by the oil & gas industry practically guarantee an epic disaster [6], [7]

• Crops are typically grown at or near their optimum temperatures currently, but even minor temperature changes and heat stress from heat waves lead to massive reductions in yield [8], [9], [10]

.. I find it nothing short of appalling that people are still talking about “sustainability” as if it’s something of a quaint topic, as a nice-to-have, something to strive for sometime in the future or at most – like in the Finnish government’s new “Blue Book” report [11] (in Finnish) – borrowing the concept to drive the oxymoron of “sustainable growth”.

There are a few aspects to sustainability most people miss;

• Next to nothing that’s currently billed as sustainable really is.

• We will have a sustainable society; it’s a simple matter of definitions (as in unsustainable being, as per definition, not sustainable).

• We have no idea what that sustainable society looks like; to borrow John Greer;

  “Nobody alive today knows what a truly sustainable technic society would look like, much less how to build one. The only form of technic society human beings have yet experienced is the industrialism of the last 300 years, and nearly everything that made that system work will be gone once the age of cheap abundant energy ends. The time of contraction ahead of us is, among other things, an opportunity for social evolution, in which various populations will try out many different forms of technical, economic and social organizations, some of which will turn out to be more successful than others.”

• While the crisis necessitating the change are hitting us today, the transition into a sustainable world will take place over generations.

• That transition may involve a (more or less uncontrolled) human population crash.

• It’s clear major and sudden shifts are required, in the financial and physical worlds as well as psychologically [12], [13].

• None of the above is a good excuse for giving up and doing nothing.

I think it’s been shown beyond doubt that there will not be a globally united front on how to get there. And frankly there shouldn’t be – it’s time to experiment with sustainability, and to build resilience in order to face the challenges we can clearly see are ahead of us. As Greer pointed out, some experiments will turn out to be more successful than others – the best we can do is try to identify, as one would in a Lean Startup, which approaches work best as early as possible and tweak them as necessary.

Just think of systems, organizations and policies driving sustainability in one form or another rather than companies. Pick some – for example I’ve picked the Transition Movement and Permaculture – and advocate and implement them to the best of your abilities. If it looks like it’ll work, great. If not, pivot. Just try something, because status quo is not an option – the current way of doing things are what got us into this mess to begin with.

I recently had the pleasure to contribute a little to organizing the Global Sustainability Jam in Melbourne that took place last weekend; it was also a great opportunity to meet some positive people and witness positive energy in action. Such events are always good in helping restore bits of faith in humanity.

Addition: a few hours after I posted this, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a study [16] noting that the world is on track for +6C of warming by the end of the century. Leaving aside the fact that all talk of “decarbonisation” is pretty hypocritical in a world with increasing emissions, the story got a fair share of press; most articles conveniently forgot to point out that +6C doesn’t mean balmy summers and less snow in winters. It means a near-extinction event for the human race. Those (including myself) who call for increased resilience and adaptation would do well to remember that billions of human beings will not have the time or the resources to survive that rapid a change.

References:

• [1]: Arctic Sea Ice Blog: Models are improving, but can they catch up?
• [2]: Science Daily: Why Seas Are Rising Ahead of Predictions: Estimates of Rate of Future Sea-Level Rise May Be Too Low
• [3]: National Geographic: IEA Outlook: Time Running Out on Climate Change
• [4]: Fred Pearce: With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
• [5]: Associated Press: Greenhouse emissions exceed worst case scenario
• [6]: Rolling Stone: Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
• [7]: Think Progress: One Chart Says It All: Why Oil’s New Supply Boom Is A Bust For The Climate
• [8]: Earth Policy Institute: Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization: Chapter 3. Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas: The Crop Yield Effect
• [9]: CSIRO: Effects of drought and high temperature stress on synthetic hexaploid wheat
• [10]: Australian Society of Agronomy: Heat waves and wheat growth under a future climate
• [11]: Finnish Government / Pekka Himanen et al: Sininen kirja: Suomen kestävän kasvun malli – Luonnos kansalliseksi tulevaisuushankkeeksi [pdf, in Finnish]
• [12]: Psychology Today: How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
• [13]: Tullett Prebon / Tim Morgan: End Game: The Denouement of Exponentials
• [14]: Wikipedia: Transition movement
• [15]: Wikipedia: Permaculture
• [16]: PwC: Current Rates of Decarbonisation Pointing to 6oC of Warming

Here’s typical imagery of a telecommuter, the kind that can be found from a plethora of presentations and articles about telecommuting (this particular image coming from here):

There are so many things wrong with that picture that it’s hard to know where to start. For example, why does the guy wear pants & a tie? He’s at the beach with nobody else in sight; I can imagine one or two more comfortable outfits. Why doesn’t he have sunglasses on a sunny day? Why is he pretending to work on the laptop, because you wouldn’t be able to do that in bright sunlight anyway? But for the sake of the argument, let’s assume he can get actual work done as a mobile telecommuter at the beach.

What isn’t apparent from the picture is that he’s also likely polluting the environment. A lot. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

This matters, because environmental benefits have been touted as one important benefit of telecommuting at least since 1994 [3]; yet it turns out that the carbon footprint of mobile data is 34g of CO2 per transmitted megabyte [1]. But just how much is that?

Let me use myself as an example. We have a beach a short bike ride away, so let’s say I decide to work from there instead of taking the 15km train ride to the city. The carbon emissions from electric rail are around 30-100g of CO2 per passenger kilometer [4, 5]; using an estimate of 75g/km the emissions from my normal commute would therefore be about 2,250g, or a little over 2kg of CO2.

I’ve logged my normal network usage during a typical workday, and it’s around 750-1,500 MB/day; say I use a gigabyte per day. To get a conservative estimate, let’s also say the wireless network emissions are “only” 30g/MB instead of the 34g from the above-mentioned paper. Here’s what it looks like, with a commute by car (a regular car with CO2 emissions of 200g/km) thrown in for good measure:

Yes there are a bunch of disclaimers here; 1) there will be emissions from data used at work, too, but the mobile network estimate is only of the mobile leg – not the fixed part, which essentially remains the same so I’ve excluded that, 2) this does not include building maintenance/HVAC/possibly increased electricity usage emissions at the office, 3) telecommuting from a fixed-Internet connection produces a vastly better result and 4) many other things – but I still think it serves as a useful way to highlight the fact that your mobile data is not actually very clean.

So next time you skip the trip to the office and instead work from a beach, a park or a cafe and let your 3G/4G connection scream away freely, keep in mind that you’re not saving the environment. You’re destroying it.

There has recently been considerable chatter about the cleanliness of our ever-growing ICT infrastructure, whether it is NY Times [7] or Greenpeace [2] criticizing our cloud infrastructure (and rightly so) or the service providers highlighting every effort (again, rightly so) they make to improve things, from Apple’s solar electricity generation to HP’s net zero energy data centers [6]. The fact, however, remains that pretty much nobody in the industry has cleaned up their business even close to the required levels – especially since demateralization and virtualization enabled by ICT is used as an environmental argument, I think our industry is morally obligated to lead the change into renewables. This applies to all polluters-by-proxy, from global service providers to network providers and everyone in between.

Let me emphasize that I am in no way, shape or form against telecommuting or even mobile telecommuting for that matter. Quite the opposite. I merely want to highlight that until the telecommunication industry cleans up their (our?) act, you should be aware that that gigabyte of data you so easily chew through on your smartphone is creating emissions that can be equivalent to driving hundreds of kilometers.

Time for the industry to clean up their act or stop pretending it’s helping the environment. I would prefer the former, because done properly, we could really become a net-positive-impact industry in an environmental sense as well.

References:

[1] Schoenen et al: Green communications by demand shaping and user-in-the-loop tariff-based control

[2] Greenpeace: Clean our Cloud

[3] Richard Johnson: Ten Advantages to Telecommuting

[4] Transport Direct

[5] NSW Transport City Rail: Carbon emissions

[6] HP: HP Unveils Architecture for First Net Zero Energy Data Center

[7] NY Times: Power, Pollution and the Internet

The tragic part is that I believe it is too late; catastrophic climate change is now the track we’re on, and one which there is little hope of deviating from (hence this post).

However, as with any shift of system states, there will be winners and losers – at least in relative terms. For unsurprisingly personal reasons, I care more about the fate of three places than others; Australia, Finland and USA. You may selfishly, like me, want to think what place would have the best long-term potential (acknowledging fully well that climate is just one part of the whole). Your options may cover the globe, or they may cover one country. You may only care about the macro-level impacts, not so much your personal choices. You may want to invest in the winners and reap the benefits. Regardless, for any number of reasons, it’d be very useful to know which countries will end up “winning” in climate change – and up until recently, that seemed like a simple enough task.

Back when people thought only about the warming aspect and not so much the extreme weather driven by the warming, it was relatively easy to conclude that cold countries like Canada and Finland would be winners – they could soon grow stuff like corn in vast quantities and other crops previously unthinkable; something like outlined in this, one possible depiction of the world +4C warmer. In this scenario, clearly the countries up north are winners – as well as Tasmania and New Zealand down south. Other than that, pretty much everyone else loses. Some projections called (and call) for Sydney to become uninhabitable by 2050.

But then the Arctic happened. Turns out that the Arctic sea ice is melting far, far faster than anyone dared predict just a few years ago. Summer ice in the Arctic is now going to be completely gone in just a few years. None of the climate models predicted anything like that, which tells me they, in technical terms, suck at predicting feedback loops. The Arctic has hit its tipping point, and it’s just one of many the climate is loaded with; there is little reason to believe the models would predict them any better than the Arctic sea ice.

And those – the Arctic event itself and the realization the predictive models are useless – made the whole equation much more difficult. As the models fail, it’s uncharted territory to even the scientists – and trust me, they dislike nothing more than not having a clue on what’s going to happen next. It’s already becoming evident that the disappearing Arctic sea ice causes significant modifications to the jet-stream configuration; in short, it causes weather patterns to get more “stuck” for weeks or months on end – and they can get stuck at either end of the spectrum. Unprecedented droughts – or floods -, prolonged cold spells – or heat waves that refuse to die and give rise to massive wildfires; sound familiar to anyone? Expect more of where that came from. [See e.g. this].

As the weather patterns change and become ironically both more extreme and more stable at the same time, it’s suddenly not so easy to call places like Finland a “winner” in climate change. For one, this could mean that both the winters AND summers end up sucking in Finland (above-freezing, wet winters with no snow, paired with cold summers) if you get a bad hand in the jet-stream poker.

On the other hand, things aren’t great the other way around either. If you end up having a long, dry summer in Finland the people may like it – until it turns out that the forests there are not equipped to cope with that kind of extremes and either just die out of water stress or burn. Here in Australia, bushfires are a fact of life and considered more or less a normal part of a forest life – the trees often recover remarkably quickly. In Finland, if your forest burns, it’s dead. You start from scratch. If it burns every 20 years, you will never have a forest.

And then you add the uncertainty of the Gulf Stream and its potential slowdown and you really don’t know what’s going to happen. Or all the other climate tipping points I alluded to, covered well in this book.

And that brings us to the core of the problem; while places like New Zealand & Tasmania may be relatively safe bets as habitable places in the long run, overall the changes are coming too fast and are too unpredictable to be able to pick winners and losers – both anymore and possibly yet, until the models can catch up to reality (if they ever will).

The lesson? The lesson is to do what you can to make wherever you happen to live more resilient. You’re going to need it. Picking winners and losers is, aside from a few obvious bad choices, suddenly more like Russian roulette than a matter of analysis.

In the long term – and I’m talking ten generations down the road-long-term, if we make it that far – everyone will be losers. Melt the Antarctica ice sheets, raise the sea levels by a cool 200m and you can kiss the majority of the 7B population goodbye. After all, a mere 200 years ago there were approximately one billion humans; I have yet to hear a compelling argument why we couldn’t return to those levels.