Originally posted on 12/3/2007
Last week, I attended a symposium, conference, whatever called “The Positive Impact of ICT on the Environment and Climate Change” hosted by AIT at the UN Headquarters in New York City.
In “Floss Your Mind” fashion, I would like to put out some thoughts.
There were several items that I would like to mention that bothered me. The “meetings” as the UN calls them were nothing more than lectures and ambassadors and other dignitaries came up to speak they all talked about the time to discuss and research was over and it was time to act and how the progress made by the economic superpowers are causing undo harm to those that can do little (i.e. hurricanes hitting Caribbean Islands caused by U.S. Industry) . It seems that the politicization of science is causing the bastardization of the scientific method. My understanding as engineers, we built upon the solid work of scientists and proven scientific theory. If the scientific method is misused and its process cannot be trusted, how can we move forward as a society. All people that eat apples die, but we cannot conclude that apples cause death. There are fundamentally too many variables that our current models do not take into consideration.
I’m not saying that we should be irresponsible with the environment or look the other way to polluters, but we do more in the U.S. and the Western World to clean up our own messes and the messes of others. I can probably go on and on about the hypocracy of the Environmental Movement. Reduction of waste products, reuse, and alternative energy are all worthwhile pursuits. The Environmental movement does nothing more than keep those who are less fortunate down. Economic and Industrial progress will fuel the standard of living for the impoverished nations of the world and today’s technology without the negative affects that were felt by the West during the Industrial Revolution.
The Emcee from AIT joked regarding one of the dignitaries about the number of airline miles that person had racked up flying around the world for “meetings.” The next of these meetings is in Bali. Apparently, the Bali airport does not have the space to house all of the private jets that will be flying in and will be flown to another island without passengers for parking during the conference. With technology like video conferencing, is this needed in light of this “threat.” Of course not. I’m not negative on their use of jets to fly around. Any one volcano eruption produces more pollution and carbon dioxide than all of the jets flying into Bali, but it does seem hypocritical. It’s apparently ok for them because of their good intentions. The rest of us are polluters.
Some of the corporate vendors and sponsors had some interesting presentations regarding the work they are doing regarding energy use, reduction of waste toxic materials in manufacturing, etc. A rep from xerox talked about the reduction of paper (if you can believe it) and their modifications to manufacturing of toner, and other methods of printing such as solid ink technology. IBM talked about their datacenter designs in order to reduce energy usage. And others.
One vendor was a software company made of mathematicians. They used their higher math to create solutions that allow their clients realize a commercial benefit from environmentally friendly methods. Wow, looking at the commercial benefit as a means to sell your wares, what a concept. Of course any of us in the security field have been doing this for years whether it’s to clients or to our internal executives. The real surprise was that this guy was raked over the coals for actually saying this rather than doing it for the “greater good.” Guess what people, companies are out there to make a profit in order to serve their stakeholders. This company was providing a service to serve its customers by saving them money, making them a profit, and helping out the environment. This is win/win/win…It wasn’t even his motivation but rather his selling method that caused the lashing. The detractor said that using this method to sell the service was not beneficial because the client would only be motivated by cost and money. Duh! If you can show a client that you can save him money and be environmentally positive, how awesome is that?
My hope is that folks in technology can see past the pseudo-science and hype and can bring real environmental change, unlike the carbon credit junk (now there is a racket). Ultimately we’re the most grounded folks that could bring about positive affects on all industries.
I understand that some of this might be incongruent or even incomprehensible and that is my engineering peering out from the back of the English class. For that I apologize. Hopefully over time, I will do better.
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