Letters

Innovation with that ‘wow’ factor

I couldn’t agree more with Chris Sherwin. In my experience, regardless of the focus of the innovation process (sustainable products or not), most organisations strugle to innovate. They lack the ability to do so, and tend to rely on ad-hoc success led by visionary, energetic and focused individuals willing to overcome the internal inertia and fight all the necessary battles, often alone. The opportunities and demand for sustainable products and processes simply increases the pressure to get a ‘sustainable innovation process’ together in order to compete.

– Brendan Dunphy

The carbon cost of web-based services

In response to your article [‘Web based services have got me thinking’], are there not also environmental consequences of further ICT? For every watt of power used by ICT equipment another watt is used to cool it. We are putting more and more data on equipment, all requiring power virtually 24/7. Has anybody worked out whether email or post is the most sustainable?

– Alastair Mumford

Market interference

Instead of going to the wall, banks can have a bail-out from the Bank of England. There’ll never be a more blatant example to show that, when needs must, it’s OK to put to one side all that guff about governments not interfering in the market. So could we please interfere just a little bit and ban the new coal-fired power stations? Please, just a little carbon tax? Just enough to tip the balance in favour, on a purely cost basis, of clean power technologies?

– Hamish C

Virgin biofuels

Barclays Capital Commodities research has calculated that, if Virgin Atlantic’s recent biofuel experiment was replicated more widely, it would take the entire global annual coconut crop just to keep Heathrow alone operating – for just 18 days!

– Rupert Fausset, Forum for the Future

A limit on choice?

What percentage of people does Mr Lowcock believe would support his overall speed limit proposal voluntarily, and accept such dramatic and wholly artificial limits on their personal mobility?

– Phil Brown

The British Gas Zero Carbon tariff [GF68 p22] is very much a renewable tariff, backed by LECs, REGOs and 12% ROC retirement above obligation. It also offsets all electricity and gas emissions and provides help with reducing energy usage. It is the confusion that reigns in green power communications, and the lack of any Advertising Standards rules, that led tothe claim against British Gas [for calling it “the greenest tariff on the market”] being upheld. A standard is absolutely vital now, and it needs to go much further than just the 'minimum legal requirement'.

– A representative of together.com who worked with British Gas on developing this tariff

In the previous issue’s Briefings [GF68 p4] we mistakenly said: 1 kg – the amount of carbon dioxide one mature beech tree can process in one minute. That's about as much as is emitted by driving a car 5km.

Peter from oneclimate.net wrote to query this. As he said: “We’ve been working hard to reduce our footprint as a family, from 10 tonnes a year to around 5 tonnes. However, we are lucky enough to live in a wood with around 100 mature beech trees. If your figures are right, then they dwarf all our efforts. Our 100 trees would, on these figures, save us 144 tonnes of CO2 a day or 52,560 tonnes a year. This can’t be right, can it?”

No, it can’t. It’s wrong by a factor of 30. The original calculation, by Aloys Bernatzky in his 1973 book Baum und Mensch (Tree and Man), was 28.2 kg in 12 hours. A simplified figure, of 1kg every half hour, has been circulating recently. We picked that up, but unaccountably scrambled it somehow and got 1kg per minute. Apologies, and thanks for pointing it out.

30 June 2008