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Slide 1: Networking Things: HOW THE INTERNET IS REDEFINING ENVIRONMENTALISM WEBVISIONS PDX, OR 5.08 ALEXIS MADRIGAL
Slide 2: BASICS: ME • Staff Writer, WIRED.com – Cover science, energy/green tech • I’m interested in: – Clean power – Consumer behavior – DIY science, sensors, – The Grid, visualizations, automation – Money, oil, fertilizer, food, – The near future, hidden industrial processes • WIRED keeps me preaching to the street.
Slide 3: BASICS Defining Environmentalism • Classic environmentalism: – Preserve (pristine) Nature, who is a she. • WIRED Mag’s Take: – Cut carbon emissions, spotted owls be screwed. A NEW GOAL FOR 21st CENTURY ENVIRONMENTALISM: Provide universal access to resource efficiency by using technology, especially the Internet, to create novel interactions with products, environments, and other human beings.
Slide 4: BASICS Conclusion Upfront • Networking stuff can lead to massive efficiency gains in using resources. • The Internet is a radical environmental tool. – No, really. You’ll see examples. • You, in the audience, need to build the apps that are going to make a better world possible.
Slide 5: MO ENERGY, MO PROBLEMS The Resource Problem • Greenhouse Gas Emissions – The Anthropocene: • a new era for Earth • • – Biodiversity loss Demand Outpacing Energy Supply – Whole commercial networks pegged to liquid fuel prices • Food • Electricity • Chemicals We’re running out of species, water, soil, and oil.
Slide 6: MO ENERGY, MO PROBLEMS Global Systems Are Linked • There already is a de facto network of things… – I’m going to focus on energy. • Matter is energy waiting to happen. • It takes energy to make stuff.
Slide 7: WHERE DO ENERGIES COME FROM? Why Do We Use Fossil Fuels? 1. They are energy dense. One tank of gas contains as much energy as: 166,000 AA batteries 687 Big Macs 200 pounds of wood 4600 apples 2. They are their own storage. If people could eat gasoline, a single tank of gas would feed 185 people for a day!
Slide 8: WHERE DO ENERGIES COME FROM? • Burning Fossil Fuel: 85%+ of Energy Usage – Internal Combustion with gas/diesel – Steam Turbine with coal/natural gas • Splitting Atoms: 8% • Everything Else: 7% (Basically Hydroelectric)
Slide 9: THE COST OF A DUMB GRID Our energy infrastructure is ridiculously vulnerable. THIS ONE ROOM HELPS DIRECT 75% OF CALIFORNIA’S POWER: 200 BILLION KILOWATT HOURS Homes draw 30 kw/hr per month
Slide 10: THE COST OF A DUMB GRID We run the system with too much slack. WE BURN MORE FOSSIL FUEL THAN WE HAVE TO BECAUSE OUR ELECTRIC GRID INFO RESOLUTION IS TOO LOW.
Slide 11: THE COST OF A DUMB GRID We can’t easily use distributed, renewable energy. • Major grid improvements are necessary to support two-way access to the grid for smaller, intermittent power production.
Slide 12: PAINFUL REALIZATIONS We Need to Use Less Resources! • But the Rhetoric of Conservation Hasn’t Worked – Per Capita US Energy Use • 1949: 63,000 kilowatt hours • 2006: 98,000 kilowatt hours – Vehicles per Household • 1969: 1.16 • 2001: 1.90 – Average New Home Size • 1950: 983 sq ft • 2000: 2266 sq ft – Water Usage S.F. • 1950: 100 gallons/day • 1990: 150 gallons/day – Food Supply Per Capita • 1970: 3300 calories/day • 2000: 3900 calories/day – Coal Used for Electricity • 1950: 83.3 million tons • 2006: 951.2 million tons
Slide 13: PAINFUL REALIZATIONS And by We… Earth uber Alles 1-2% People Who Really Care 5% Changing average consumer behavior is tough. 15% People Who Care Sometimes It requires disruptive tech, financial incentives, and a decade+. Everyone Else
Slide 14: PAINFUL REALIZATIONS The Carbon Footprint of The Man The true believers can only do so much. Per capita CO2 emissions of The Man: 8.5 tons Lowest energy usage possible for an American: 130 gigajoules "There's a certain amount you can do as an individual, but if you recognize this is a system-wide problem, you need systemwide attention to the problem.” Timothy Gutowski, MIT professor.
Slide 15: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK Resources / What You Want The Our Only Hope Scenario: 1. Is Necessary Resources 2. Requires the Internet to drive novel interactions with products and environments 3. Is not classic conservation. Cu rre nt Co n atio erv ns Ec ssic Cla on om y Our Only Hope What You Want
Slide 16: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK Increasing Energy Productivity Current economy: 12,600 BTUs/3.2 million calories Resources per dollar of GDP on om y Cu rre nt Ec McKinsey calls this scenario, “increased energy productivity.” They think it could cut growth in energy demand in half by 2020, saving the equivalent of 64 million barrels of oil a day. ssic Cla Co n atio erv ns Our Only Hope What You Want
Slide 17: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK The Internet’s Role in Environmentalism For Consumer-Citizens: • A Tool • A Set of Ideas Get more of what they want for and with less in: • Consumer Acts • Politics • Life For Engineers-Builders-Planners: • A Tool • A Model Increase the efficiency of: • Making/delivering power • Water use in farming • Preserving ecologies • Designing better cities
Slide 18: DESIGNING THE GREEN INTERNETS The Internet with Things “We are … taking the network into every device around us, not just the data processing devices we are used to seeing as network devices.” Ken Orshan, CEO, Echelon •“…the IP network and open source computing are going to drive a different world where per capita energy usage can plummet.” Scott McNealy, Chairman, Sun Microsystems “At the end of the day, what I'm gonna provide is universal access to energy efficiency the way we provided universal access to electricity in the last century.” Jim Rogers, CEO, Duke Energy Vision: Every Thing of more than $1 of Value on the Network 
Slide 19: DESIGNING THE GREEN INTERNETS Awesome Challenge: Marrying Virtual and Physical Space The Toolkit: • Pervasive networks • Pervasive sensors • Cheap mobile computers • Geolocation • Mapping/matching • Visualization software “[In 2020, the Internet] will be indistinguishable from the physical world. Everything and everyone you see around you will have a simultaneous physical and digital instantiations.” Jamais Cascio, futurist. “So, 2020: … At a glance, I can see environmental information. Oh, it's raining? How much has it rained? What's the pollen count? What's the forecast? All of these bits and pieces of how we appreciate the world around us will be given greater specificity and made graspable.”
Slide 20: DESIGNING THE GREEN INTERNETS "I've heard of the internet of things… Isn't that like WalMart RFID tags or something? --The Crowd • Yes, but an outdated way of thinking about things. • The old Internet of things was more like a boring old database of geolocated things. • Still, it is a powerful idea: "Today, in the 2000s, we are heading into a new era of ubiquity, where the 'users' of the internet will be counted in billions and where humans may become the minority as generators and receivers of traffic.” UN Report, 2005
Slide 21: THE TUBES TO THE RESCUE The Internet as Environmental Tool • Can tap distributed cognitive surplus • Provides global, cheap communication – The ONLY communication infrastructure as global as the systems we need to change • Enables novel, more efficient interactions with the physical world – – – – Dematerialization (iTunes model) Organized sharing Visualization of resource use Networked automation
Slide 22: THE TUBES TO THE RESCUE Harnessing the Surplus Watching TV 200,000,000,000 180,000,000,000 160,000,000,000 140,000,000,000 120,000,000,000 100,000,000,000 80,000,000,000 60,000,000,000 40,000,000,000 20,000,000,000 0 Creating Wikipedia CLAY SHIRKY: The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible… someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago. Hours Spent
Slide 23: DIY ENVIRONMENTALISM We’re going to look at a series of projects and businesses that are harnessing the power of the Internet -- of networked nodes -- to tackle environmental problems. The Real World
Slide 24: UPDATED CLASSICS Turn Off the Lights Home improvement that’s Tim O’Reilly, not Tim Allen. • One house Twitters its energy usage • Another provides dozens of data streams. Simpler solutions are coming, like Greenbox from the creators of Flash.
Slide 25: UPDATED CLASSICS Install Solar Panels Sungevity uses satellite images from Live Earth to size and cost-out solar panels. It even Photoshops them onto your roof. Solar Network is an open-source project that aims to turn solar roofs across the world into one big energy co-op.
Slide 26: UPDATED CLASSICS Carpool Mobile, geolocated devices combine with social networks to allow for trusted ridesharing: Dodgeball + eBay + cars = iHitchhiking Combine with Zipcar and the Paris bicycle system Velolib or Intrago and you can get anywhere owning nothing.
Slide 27: UPDATED CLASSICS Go “Birdwatching” MIT Media lab project to use cell networks to call, listen to, record, and map owls in their native habitat. Crowdsourced birdlistening marries birdwatching culture with microphones stashed in the forest.
Slide 28: UPDATED CLASSICS Shame Your Friends Clive Thompson: "Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by a RSS feed.... You'd work harder to conserve so you don't look like a jackass in front of your peers." Carbon Hero uses your cell phone to calculate your real, daily emissions.
Slide 29: UPDATED CLASSICS Buy Less Stuff The Internet enables consumers to buy the experience without purchasing a piece of plastic. iTunes is projected to be 25% of the music business in 2012. That dematerializes 25% of these lame cases. “Years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous. We’ll tell our grandchildren we did that, and they’ll laugh at us.” Peter Moore, now of EA
Slide 30: UPDATED CLASSICS Save the Whales Hydrophones sense whales in the Cape Cod shipping channel. When they hear one, they phone home to Cornell. They generate a dynamic map for captains, and call if necessary.
Slide 31: UPDATED CLASSICS Save the Rainforest CO2 and other sensors let UCLA scientists track and visualize data in real time from La Selva in Costa Rica. The data will be used to calculate the ecological services of a rain forest -- it’s ability to eat CO2-allowing monetization of the carbon sink.
Slide 32: UPDATED CLASSICS Protest Do protests have to enter geographic space to be useful? • Online organizing has the potential to transform political processes at scale. • See: Barack Obama. “We do have one thing going for us -- the Web -which at least allows you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.” Bill McKibben in the LA Times
Slide 33: UPDATED CLASSICS Help the Developing World Kiva allows for microlending to 3rd world entrepreneurs. It’s easy to imagine similar sites for LED lighting, clean generators, wind turbines, and infotech Motorola has solar powered phone charging stations in Uganda. Engineers Without Borders used a Google Map to visualize local suppliers.
Slide 34: UPDATED CLASSICS Reuse, Reduce, Recycle The Internet allows servicesystems to replace products. SONY runs a take-back program. “Remix is the link between consumer refuse and manufacturing material streams. By creating a platform for new production you eliminate device specific waste and consumer dissatisfaction. The powers of consumption are now the powers service.”
Slide 35: UPDATED CLASSICS Boycott Products CarrotMob works like a “reverse boycott,” driving people and resources to good companies/things, instead of merely trying to punish the bad guys.
Slide 36: UPDATED CLASSICS Spare that Tree Green Dimes gets you off junk mail lists for $20, saving 41 pounds of paper.
Slide 37: UPDATED CLASSICS Manage Ecosystems “Ecological network analysis (ENA) is one of the hottest of the green sciences. It combines computer algorithms for analyzing carbon flow and graph theory. Basically, a computer is programmed to consider each species in an ecosystem as a node (the eco-IP address) and the flow of carbon to it and from it can be imagined as the bandwidth.” -- Joseph Luczkovich, East Carolina
Slide 38: UPDATED CLASSICS Adopt Electric Cars Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place has gotten $200 million to build out the electric car grid.
Slide 39: UPDATED CLASSICS Pick Up Litter Estonian entrepreneurs used Google Maps to plot out 10,000 illegal dumping sites, and organize their clean-up.
Slide 40: UPDATED CLASSICS Reduce Your Water Usage This DIY project allows you to take a soil moisture sensor and hook it up to a plant. The planet Twitters you when it needs to be watered. Overkill for oe plant, but a fun proof-ofconcept for agriculture, gardens.
Slide 41: UPDATED CLASSICS Downsides of Networking Things • Security: The loss of the “air gap” could open physical objects to hacks. • Privacy: Your snail trail will reach outside the interwebs. • Autonomy: Automation could remove some choices from consumers.
Slide 42: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK Conservation needs to appeal to all tech levels SOLUTIONS TO: LIGHTING No tech: Open the curtains Low-tech: Turn off lights High-tech: Doing it from your laptop Really high tech: Having your laptop do it for you SOLUTIONS TO: GADGET POWER No tech: Unplug your devices Low-tech: Choose energy efficient options High-tech: Get an adaptor that shuts them off Really high tech: Make power yourself SOLUTIONS TO: GADGET ENDLIFE No tech: Don't buy gadgets Low-tech: Recycle High-tech: Deal with your e-waste Really high-tech: Modular electronics SOLUTIONS TO: REDUCING CARBON EMISSIONS No-tech: Make footprints outside Low-tech: Calculate your carbon footprint High-tech: Network your carbon footprint Really high-tech: Build widgets to promote better habits
Slide 43: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK And the world needs your help… Dreaming up the biggest ideas Building the applications Solving the security and privacy issues Keeping political pressure up And, by the way, venture capital in green tech is outpacing the Internet: you can be in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram.