Seattle.BloggersPub

Check this out. Google has something called SearchMash which as far as I can tell is just a way for them to mess around with different interfaces/options for their search technology. So this isn’t going to the home page or anything, but today they rolled out a Flash-based version.
Google using Flash isn’t groundbreaking because they […]

On a hot day this summer, Chinese President Hu Jintao and a group of state leaders appeared at a public function wearing short-sleeved shirts, rather than their normal business suits (not pictured here). According to the state press, the casual attire wasn’t just a new fashion statement: China’s top brass were leading by example, encouraging Chinese workers to dress in light clothing in order to reduce the use of air conditioners in office buildings.

Fashions do change. Outright denial of global warming is out of vogue. Instead, the climate change do-nothing set is sporting this season’s new line: “Why should we bother trying to fight climate change when China won’t do anything to reduce its emissions?” (Conservative communications consultant Frank Luntz even insists that the “’international fairness’ issue is an emotional home run.” Emotional home run? One might ask what a win looks like in his game?)

How to counter this flawed logic? Hu Jintao’s climate-fighting wardrobe choices aside, here are three ways:

1. Since when have we
looked to China for leadership – moral, technological, fashionable, or
otherwise?

Or, to avoid any taint of xenophobia, you can frame this a little more positively: We need to lead, and do what’s right –
and help other countries to follow us, not wait for them to lead. Al Gore has pioneered this sentiment:

We in the United States of America have a particularly important
responsibility, after all, because the world still regards us as the
natural leader of the community of nations. Simply put, in order for
the world to respond urgently to the climate crisis, the United States
must lead the way. No other nation can.

Add to that Rep. Jay Inslee’s constant refrain: “it should be America’s destiny to lead the world in fighting climate change.”

See also: John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Gordon Campbell, and Rudy Giuliani.

It’s not just talk. US sluggishness is a roadblock to meaningful progress worldwide. As Rob Watson, the C.E.O. of EcoTech International,
which works on environmental issues in China put it: “The Chinese are
not going to take anything we say seriously if we don’t set an example
ourselves.”

2. Right now, we are leading China — but in the wrong direction!

The growing middle class in China and other budding economies around
the world are looking to the US and Europe to figure out how to live
with their newfound prosperity. Thomas L. Friedman calls it a global explosion of “new Americans” – millions of carbon copies of ourselves. Adopting
western lifestyles and consumer behavior, these “new Americans” are
imitating our clothes, cars, houses, toys, and tastes – and our energy
habits.

What if we offered them an alternative, more efficient model to imitate? Sounds like a win-win to me.

3. Sure Chinese emissions are growing — but they’re already seizing opportunities that we aren’t.

Yes, China’s rapid growth is quickly making it the
world’s largest carbon-dioxide emitter; but the country’s leadership
has also unveiled a set of aggressive emissions reduction policies to
counter the impacts of its rapid growth.

New Chinese passenger car
efficiency standards, for example, are expected to result in one of the most
fuel-efficient passenger vehicle fleets in the world – with estimated averages of 34 miles per gallon in 2005 and 37 mpg in 2008. In
contrast, this year, the U.S. Senate agreed to mandate an increase in
fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon — by 2020.

In fact, China’s reforms — in transportation and major industries — are on track to cut 168 million tons of greenhouse gases annually by 2010, according to the Center for Clean Air Policy (CCAP). It’s not much compared with the 6 billion tons of
carbon-dioxide China emits each year. But it comes close to the
Bush administration’s goal of reducing US emissions, voluntarily, by
183 million tons a year by 2010. CCAP has a good myth-busting overview of the measures China is taking here (pdf).

China is also finding
prosperous new niche markets, selling clean-energy technologies to the
rest of the world. From the Christian Science Monitor:

In a bid to cut energy costs, boost energy security, and reduce air pollution, [China] could be
essentially creating the largest greenhouse-gas-reduction plan on the
planet. Indeed, if the nation’s leaders follow through, it may be the
US playing catch-up with China – not the other way around.

And the Chinese are no dummies when it comes to smart business opportunities. From Pew:

…China is seizing the economic opportunities of the clean
energy sector. In one example, by 2005, China had the world’s
third-largest solar cell production capacity, with 30 major Chinese
solar cell manufacturers comprising about 30 percent of global market
share and employing some 250,000 people.

In short — when the do-nothing set tries to use China as an excuse for inaction, don’t let them get away with it. The game of follow the leader requires a leader. We’re not providing that leadership now — which means that we’ve got the responsibility to step it up a notch or two.

(P.S. More China myth-busting from NRDC here ; Grist here ; and Pew Climate here.)

I caught this in the latest Pearl Jam newsletter:

Hello, my name is Adrienne and I live in Washington and am in the fifth grade. I know I am just a kid but I think your music is extremely amazing. I have all your songs you wrote on my ipod, I know that it’s compressed but it’s all I have. My mom and I can’t wait until you guys come to Washington because we love your music and we love your shows. It’s taking me all my guts to write you guys, but I like you so much I’m not scared. Pearl Jam is my favorite band in the whole universe. I have never hated one of your songs, I love every single one. I have almost every cd. I have one question, can you come to the Gorge or The Key Arena sometime in the Spring? I really want to see you again. Lots of my friends wouldn’t understand because they make fun of what I listen to because I listen to Rock, but I say “Well you listen to crap”.

From: Adrienne
Pearl Jam rocks

Priceless.

As I’m going through my feeds I always see pretty interesting posts from Channel 9, Microsoft’s Forum-based community for a lot of their developer stuff. I’m always impressed by the number of active users and the breadth of what they talk about. Sometimes it’s us (Adobe), sometimes it’s technical support for Silverlight and sometimes it’s […]

There’s a post over on Duane’s blog that talks about how rich Internet applications fit into the world of Web 2.0. Put aside your Web 2.0 hype-o-meter for a second. I’d never actually stopped to think about it but I really like the idea of RIAs as a specific design pattern of Web 2.0. Some […]

Braiiinsssss!

I don’t always balance my checkbook (ok, almost never, only when there is a problem). I only check my investments a couple of times a year, often when there has been a big market swing. And, call me small minded, but I also don’t always take into account in the long-term economic effects of my energy use. Like many people, to focus in on the big-picture in my day- to-day, I have to be reminded.

I happen to see Sightline’s energy counter almost every day, and it has made me think, very actively, about how spending on oil and gas is affecting the regional economy. Imagine the boost we’d give our economy if we didn’t pump $53 million out of our region every day to pay for oil and gas.

Now you can help remind northwesterners of just what that oil addiction means for our economy by putting the energy counter on your website or blog. You can download it for free, just go to this page to select the state you want (OR, ID, WA, sorry we don’t have accurate data for BC yet) or the full energy counter.

Download your free energy counter here.

Much thanks to Callie Jordan for volunteering to create the downloadable widgets of our energy counter for everyone to use!

Awesome.

There’s a bit of a dust up over on Techmeme about Google reducing the PageRank of some popular sites (like Engadget and TUWA). I don’t even pretend to understand the black voodo magic that is search engine optimization, but I do know that I show up high on quite a few (often random) Google searches […]

Yesterday, I had a couple of interesting conversations about fairness and climate change. One of the problems is that in order to reduce climate pollution, society will probably have to put a price on emissions. The price could come in the form of a carbon tax or a carbon permit or something else entirely. But the basic idea is that to reduce pollution, we’ll have to charge for the privelege of emitting carbon.

So far so good? Not really, because putting a price on emissions means that energy costs go up. That’s regressive — it hits poor folks hardest — because lower income people spend a greater share of their income on energy than do higher income people. But what can we do?

The good news — and I take this to be very good news indeed — is that it’s possible to distribute revenue (from a carbon tax or auctioned permit) to solve the regressivity problem. Toward that end, I wanted to share with readers an excellent position paper from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It lays out clearly how one could address regressivity in climate pricing.

Even better, perhaps, is that it’s possible to make strategic investments of the revenue that could benefit lower income families and the climate simultaneously. Imagine, for example, upgrading all the inefficient furnaces and water heaters overnight with super-efficient replacements: consumer energy spending could go down (because people would need to buy less energy) even while prices are rising.

Finally, there’s another point that sometimes gets overlooked. Arresting climate change is not mostly an environmental issue, at least not in the way that word has often been construed in the past. It’s a question of justice. As recent research from the IPCC reveals, climate change is likely to hit the poor hardest. So while protecting low income consumers from price increases is important, protecting the world’s poorest from losing their homes and livelihoods is paramount.

Obviously, there’s lots more to say about this; and today’s post is just the tip of the iceberg. But stay tuned: Sightline’s going to be diving into these questions in the coming months. In the meantime, we’d welcome your comments and thoughts.