Perpetual Innovation

Author: SustainMe

  • Biomagnification: Pollutants Found in Deep-Sea Animals

    Okay, we all know how biomagnification works. Pollutants including heavy metals such as mercury are absorbed at the bottom of the food chain, and then they are amplified all the way to the top of the food chain. at the top of the chain are such animals as sharks at sea and lions on land.
    In terms of mercury biomagnification (wikipedia) works like this. Organisms absorb mercury very efficiently, but it takes far longer to excrete. Algae absorb mercury from seawater readily, so even small amounts in the water are absorbed and retained. Fish eat the algae, bigger fish eat the smaller fish, and so on. At all levels the mercury is retained (in fatty tissues) at a far better rate then it is excreted. Ultimately it accumulates and amplifies in predator fish like swordfish and sharks as well as birds of prey like eagles and osprey.  And, of course, at the apex of the food chain is humans. A mother breast feeding would, of course, pass it on in concentration to her baby.
    See fish you should avoid eating (very much of) here.
    It turns out that we are building up pollutants at the bottom of the ocean at an ugly and alarming rate. This is emphatically demonstrated by a recent study in Nature. An easier short read is in the WSJ by Kincaid.  Animals at the bottom of the ocean (4 miles deep) had amazingly high concentrations of pollutants, 50 times more than one of the worst polluted rivers in the world (in China). The pollutants included chemicals that don’t naturally decay but have not been produced (much) in decades. These POPs should mostly be in landfills; they were largely used in electronics. But they will continue to reek havoc to the environment for centuries to come.
    With about 65% of POPs in landfills, there’s a huge amount out sloshing around in the environment, all the way from the North Pole to the Mariana Trench. Plus, as the landfills fail, as they always do, eventually, … That’s ugly… so very ugly…
    Sorry, no positive spin for this. Not enough lipstick to cover this ugly pig.

    Reference

    Jamieson,
    A. J., Malkocs, T., Piertney, S. B., Fujii, T., & Zhang, Z. (2017, February
    13). Bioaccumulation of persistent organic pollutants in the deepest ocean
    fauna. Nature Ecology & Evolution,
     1(51). doi:10.1038/s41559-016-0051 Retrieved
    from: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-016-0051

  • Finally, a great GOP plan to address climate change. Who’s Who

    The unbelievable list of Who’s-Who from the GOP world have joined together (Climate Leadership Council) to come up with a very workable, market-based, approach to address climate change. Schultz and Baker have been around since the Reagan era. One of their crowning achievements was related to getting the world to reduce all of fluorocarbons (like Freon) which was wiping out the protective ozone layer of our atmosphere. You rarely hear the discuss on the ozone layer, right? Schultz and Baker are a big part of the reason why. The world-wide agreement on fluorocarbons is know as the Montreal Protocol.

    Here is a great article by Schultz and Baker, both from Ronald Reagan era Republicans. A Conservative Answer to Climate Change.

    First, to address climate change, has some scary implications. It really is unnerving if there is no energy policy in the US. In this report, we may have the only energy policy forming since the attempt by President Carter to have an energy policy. Obama tried to use the EPA to regulate fossil fuels and more, which is no substitute for an actual energy policy that is congress/legislative based.

    For decades, economists have linked a market based approach to address the non-sustainable use of energy in the US and globally. One approach is to build a more complicated approach for putting a price on carbon, cap and trade (Emissions trading). A simple tax is so much more straight forward. In this case, they want to take the carbon tax and rebate it back to the population in the form of dividend rebates. The estimate is that the bottom 70% of the population, income-wise, will have a net benefit from this plan. Revenue neutral.

    From an international security issue, it reduces the money we send to other countries in order to use more fossil fuels ($1T over every couple years). The large producers of the world are not necessarily friendly to us: Russia, Venezuela, Saudi, Iran. Much of the terrorism of the world is also paid from from oil moneys (ISIS and the renegades in Nigeria).

    The beauty of this approach — above and beyond environmental benefits — is that people can take that dividend money and pay even more for gas and gas-guzzling vehicles. Or, even better, use if for something they value more.

    I’ve been very disappointed in the GOP; they have let the deniers drown out the engagement of addressing such the critical issue of the non-sustainability of fossil fuels. A smart market approach will work nicely and solve lots of problems simultaneously. This approach will apparently reduce carbon emissions by 2x from  Obama’s EPA approach to “clean energy”, and 3x what dumping the plan an reverting to business as usual (BAU).  As one of the authors and economist Greg Mankiw says, “this is pretty close to a panacea in the way that it solves lots of problems as once”. No need to subsidize renewable; let the best solutions rise and the worst dwindle.

    Consider this dividend-tax as insurance. You buy insurance to reduce future risks and costs. This plan starts to steadily reduce carbon emissions.

    Everyone wins with this plan. Well, except maybe coal, oil and gas companies and countries.

    Now these guys need to go convince Pres Trump and his merry band of fossil burners. Surprisingly, it might just work.

    Also see Amy Harder Feb 8 blog on the topic in WSJ. She discusses the meeting of the Climate Leadership Council with Pres Trump where they voiced that they were “cautiously optimistic”.

  • CO2 xGame Winners in Canada. Losers in USA?

    Wow. What do you do when the horses are already outta the gate?
    What do you do with the CO2 is already into the atmosphere? This is the idea of capturing that 400 parts per million of CO2 out of the atmosphere after it’s already, well, up in the error — oops… I mean — up in the air.
    Here are the winners of the XGames competition on CO2. This $20M competition is to figure out ways to carbon capture and sequester (CCS). Unlike some industrial byproducts, CO2 can have a value (bottling, for example, to give you that happy fizz in your pop).

    Here’s some info on this big competition in Canada: CBC News discusses competition sponsored by Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance and U.S. company NRG.

    One of the 9 finalist, Ingenuity Labs, emulates photosynthesis to remove carbon dioxide from smoke stacks and such. They use a photosynthesis-like process to extract the carbon and make several industrial products out of the extract. True, this is a lot like planting a tree, but you have to wait 20 years for the wood, vs the immediate gratification of industrial products.

    A very cool concept is by Carbicrete. Take out CO2 from an emissions source (say a smoke stack) and infuse it into concrete where the carbon is happily sequestered and it actually strengthens the concrete. (Note that concrete is a leading industrial source of CO2 emissions.)

    While Canada is moving full forward with sustainability initiatives, the US is set to make a major shift in the other direction. Trump’s Pruitt pick for the EPA might result in two departments of Energy. (Facts and miss-facts about Pruitt.)

    The US has never had an energy policy. Carter was the last to propose one. Obama kinda had one, but without any legislative support, he was force-feeding it through the EPA. No matter who you are, that’s not the right way. So the Clean Energy Plan, is about to get the can!…

    That means the the job of the CCS might turn out to be far, far bigger in the future, as we try to burn up the last century or so of fossil fuels over the next hundred years.

    We here at SustainZine consider “conservative” this way: The bestest, cheapest, cleanest gallon of gas is the one never extracted, never processed and never burned. The bestest, cheapest, cleanest tonne of coal is the one never extracted, never processed, and never burned (scrubbing or no scrubbing).

  • Sustainable Long-term good for R&D, Patents and Profits

    Here’s exerts from the blog over at IPzine, a sister blog spot.

    A recent study shows how long-term focus pays off. This study concentrated on switching the CEO compensation to longer-term. From that point forward, what happened, on average to several things related to the performance over time.

    Great study was by Flammer and Bansal (2016) and summarized in the WSJ, CEOs should focus on the long term, a study says. Although the study is coming out soon in the Strategic Management Journal, you can find it here.

    The researchers selected companies that were long-term focused based on those companies that had a long-term compensation package presented to the board that was narrowly approved. The narrowly approved implies that this was a bit of a surprise to the executives resulting, potentially, in a paradigm shift toward longer-term focus. The board voting was reviewed from 2005 through 2012 so that there would be room for performance analysis.

    There are many positives related to long-term focus all around. Companies with a long-term focus do better all around (profits, net profit margin, sales, stock price, etc.). Those long-term focus had a statistically significant improvement over the longer term (2 years and longer). Interestingly, they had a small dip insignificant dip in the short term.

    [Methodology and results related to patents is discussed here in the IPzine blog. There are lots of assumptions made about the close vote by the board to align compensation with long-term results in conjunction with the subsequent financial performance of these publicly traded firms. Patents were monitored to see how they cited past patents and the citations of the companies patents in the future. This gives a good proxy of the value of the patents and how revolutionary they are (to the firm).]

    Verdict. Boards should focus on long-term for compensation. This means that they have to be willing to take lesser profits in the short term.

    There are also very strong correlations to the KLD factors, collectively and all four components: employees, environment, consumers and society.
    Verdict. Corporations should focus on sustainable, long-term targets for goals and for compensation.

    They have some limitations to this study, but they also combine it with good literature support for long-term-centric management practices. And minimizing the principle-agent problem common to executive compensation.
    We want everyone highly motivated by the long-term, sustainable success of businesses (& not-for-profits & Gov)…
    Anything else is, well, short-sighted!

    References
    Azoulay P, Graff Zivin JS, Manso G (2011). Incentives and creativity: evidence from the academic life sciences. RAND Journal of Economics 42(3): 527–554.

    Flammer, C., & Bansal, P. (2016). Does a long-term orientation create value? Evidence from a regression discontinuity. Strategic Management Journal. doi:10.1002/smj.2629

  • World Soil Day the down-and-dirty on Ag

    When you eat, and as you eat today, give thanks to the soil that made it all possible.
    USDA on Soil Day. December 5th.

    Today is World Soil Day, and the the truth is in the soil. Neglect the soil long enough and all you have is depleted crops. AND no, it does not come in the usual 6-6-6 fertilizers that concentrate on only 3 components in the fertilizer while neglecting how the soil got depleted in the first place.

    It has to do with cycles. Farms were never meant to have all the crops hauled away to the cities, with no mechanism to return the nutrients. We experienced this during dust bowl of the great depression, where top soil had been depleted and the ag practices tilled the land so the remaining topsoil was readily blown away.

    We all need to think more about closed-loop ag systems. All crops begin with the nutrients and the soil. We neglect and deplete them at our own demise.

    Eat well today, and think about fertile soil and healthy food systems.

    Bon Appetite.