Networking Things: How the Internet Is Redefining Environmentalism

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 • But the Rhetoric of Conservation Hasn’t Worked Less Resources! – 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… Changing average Earth uber Alles 1-2% consumer behavior People Who Really Care 5% is tough. 15% It requires disruptive People Who Care Sometimes 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 system- wide attention to the problem.” Timothy Gutowski, MIT professor.

Slide 15: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK Resources / What You Want The Our Only Hope Scenario: • Is Necessary • Requires the Internet to drive novel interactions with Resources products and environments y om on • Is not classic conservation. Ec nt rre Cu n atio serv Con Cla ssic Our Only Hope What You Want

Slide 16: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK Increasing Energy Productivity Current economy: 12,600 BTUs/3.2 million calories per dollar of GDP McKinsey calls this Resources scenario, “increased y om energy productivity.” on Ec nt They think it could cut rre Cu growth in energy demand n Con serv atio in half by 2020, saving Cla ssic Our Only Hope the equivalent of 64 million barrels of oil a What You Want day.

Slide 17: MORE GOOD, LESS WORK The Internet’s Role in Environmentalism For Consumer-Citizens: For Engineers-Builders-Planners: • A Tool • A Tool • A Set of Ideas • A Model Get more of what they Increase the efficiency of: want for and with less in: • Making/delivering power • Consumer Acts • Water use in farming • Politics • Preserving ecologies • Life • 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: “[In 2020, the Internet] will be indistinguishable from the physical world. • Pervasive networks Everything and everyone you see around you will have a simultaneous physical and digital • Pervasive sensors instantiations.” Jamais Cascio, futurist. • Cheap mobile computers “So, 2020: … At a glance, I can see • Geolocation environmental information. Oh, it's raining? • Mapping/matching How much has it rained? What's the pollen count? What's the forecast? All of these bits • Visualization software 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 Creating Wikipedia CLAY SHIRKY: 200,000,000,000 The normal case of social 180,000,000,000 software is still failure; most of 160,000,000,000 these experiments don't pan out. 140,000,000,000 But the ones that do are quite 120,000,000,000 incredible… someone working alone, with really cheap tools, 100,000,000,000 has a reasonable hope of 80,000,000,000 carving out enough of the 60,000,000,000 cognitive surplus, enough of the 40,000,000,000 desire to participate, enough of 20,000,000,000 the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource 0 Hours Spent you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

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 The Internet enables Buy Less Stuff 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 • Online organizing has the potential to transform political processes at scale. Do protests have to • See: Barack Obama. enter geographic space to be useful? “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 service- systems to replace products. SONY runs a “Remix is the link between consumer refuse and take-back manufacturing material streams. By creating a program. 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 Estonian entrepreneurs used Pick Up Litter 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-of- concept 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 S OL UTI ONS TO: LI GHTI NG No t e c h : Op e n t h e c u r t a i n s Lo w- t e c h : Tu r n o f f l i g h t s Hi g h - t e c h : Do i n g i t f r o m y o u r l a p t o p Re a l l y h i g h t e c h : Ha v i n g y o u r l a p t o p d o i t f o r y o u S OL UTI ONS TO: GADGET POW ER No t e c h : Un p l u g y o u r d e v i c e s Lo w- t e c h : Ch o o s e e n e r g y e f f i c i e n t o p t i o n s Hi g h - t e c h : Ge t a n a d a p t o r t h a t s h u t s t h e m o f f Re a l l y h i g h t e c h : Ma k e p o we r y o u r s e l f S OL UTI ONS TO: GADGET ENDLI FE No t e c h : Do n ' t b u y g a d g e t s Lo w- t e c h : Re c y c l e Hi g h - t e c h : De a l wi t h y o u r e - wa s t e Re a l l y h i g h - t e c h : Mo d u l a r e l e c t r o n i c s S OL UTI ONS TO: REDUCI NG CARBON EM SSI ONS I No - t e c h : Ma k e f o o t p r i n t s o u t s i d e Lo w- t e c h : Ca l c u l a t e y o u r c a r b o n f o o t p r i n t Hi g h - t e c h : Ne t wo r k y o u r c a r b o n f o o t p r i n t Re a l l y h i g h - t e c h : Bu i l d wi d g e t s t o p r o mo t e b e t t e r h a b i t s

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.