Save Our Songbirds

Ciocarlia is a songbird found in many places in Romania. Here is a short video capturing its beautiful song.



It is also a famous Romanian song which was played by artists like George Enescu on the violin or Gheorghe Zamfir on the pan flute.





If you liked what you saw so far, here comes the bad news: too many (hundreds of thousands) of these songbirds are hunted every year and a new law was passed that will make even easier to hunt these birds (check some more details here). Some people started a campaign to stop this law. They made a powerful spot and initiated a petition that can be signed here.

Global Warming and the One Percent Doctrine

You know how the weather goes: sometimes is sunny, sometimes it rains and sometimes you have extreme weather like heat waves or snow storms. What puzzles me is that even educated people (who understand what statistics means) keep saying that global warming is a hoax and they give as examples a cold snap or a rainy week in Bucharest. Well, a few days ago NASA published their annual report about global temperatures which states that 2014 was the warmest year on record.
In the book I read recently "That Used to Be U.S." (see my earlier post) the author talks about the 1% doctrine elaborated by Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the United States. This was in the context of preventing terrorist activities in the aftermath of 9/11 and is sounds like this: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' … Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
It is debatable if this is a reasonable way to act when arresting or killing people, but the analogy that Thomas Friedman makes is that we should apply this doctrine when dealing with global warming and climate change: if there is even a 1% probability that climate change will drastically affect our life and society then we should act as if this is a certainty. This is what all naysayers on this subject should understand. This will make much easier our collective action.

Where Do the Ducks Go?

If you read The Catcher in The Rye by Salinger you may remember the question that one of the characters asks himself:

"I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. … I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."

Since this is a famous book, the administration of Central Park felt compelled to offer an explanation here. I can confirm from my visits in IOR park from Titan that the ducks on the lake don't migrate in the winter, they are always there.

But other birds do migrate, so the question is legitimate in their case: where do they go when they go? Luckily, the modern technology is helping again, so by attaching a transmitter to a small eagle's leg a team managed to track the exact migration pattern of the bird for a couple of years. You can see in these maps how the eagle (called Narcis) flew each autumn over 10.000 kilometers from Sibiu county in Romania to Turkey, Egypt and all the way down to South Africa. And back in the spring. Isn't that amazing?

Is one hour enough?

Today it's Earth Hour, that one day when people around the world turn the lights off for an hour, showing their respect for the planet Earth. The cynics say that one hour in a year of turning off your lights makes no difference in the end, but this event is about much more than that. Not only that WWF (the NGO that had this idea in the first place) organizes many other events related to this day (like the contest for the official Earth Hour city which was organized in Romania and which resulted in collecting over 9 tonnes of plastics, or the pledges I will if you will), but more important, Earth Hour is about changing people's attitudes towards our environment. If that hour in the dark will make you think before you print the next day, or about the products you consume the next week, or about the water you waste every day, or about how to recycle all the plastics that you through away then the effects will be bigger and everlasting the few watt hours that you save in that hour. So go on and enjoy tonight's "dark" hour!

Another type of marketing

In my opinion, consumerism is one of the main factors which took us in the double crisis where we stand today: economical and environmental. Did you ever hear about a company which told you that you should buy their stuff only if you really need it?! And that takes a pledge to design and manufacture their products so that they last for a long time (as opposed to those who design products so that in 2-3 years they feel out of fashion)? That encourages you so sell or donate their used products on eBay if you no longer need them (thus cannibalizing some of their sales)? That, although not forced by some law, takes back their products that cannot be used anymore for recycling? That donate 1% of their sales to environmental projects? How is that for a business plan? Do you think is doable? Well, here, at Common Threads Initiative (I wonder if they got the idea from the "thread pool" concept of efficiently utilizing system threads for computing :) ) they think they can. Let's wish them good luck!

The Economist on carbon tax

I wrote a while ago here about a paper with various proposals to put a cost on CO2 emissions and how I like the idea of a carbon added tax. This evening I read the first complete endorsement of a carbon tax in The Economist. The blog post dismantles various arguments against such a tax and explains the incentives it will bring about. It's worth reading it on Free Exchange.
So if most economists agree on this issue, why is it not happening, what is politician's position on this issue? One the one hand the likes of the tea party don't wont any kind of tax whatsoever and another big group would prefer to spend money on their pet green projects, than to have a generic tax that would make the good and cheap technologies winners. Apart from being captive to special interests, their chronic lack of vision in handling various aspects of current economic challenges is disappointing.

Carbon tax proposed in Australia

Australian government proposed a carbon tax that will be paid by all companies emitting CO2. If this will be devised this kind of tax has the potential to drive a "green" behaviour from all sides, since a reduction of VAT is also proposed in order to offset the total amount of collected taxes. For example, let's say a KW of energy costs 10 dollars, the VAT will be reduced by 1 dollar, but the energy produced from coal will be taxed supplementary by 2 dollars, as opposed to wind energy which will not be carbon taxed. So the coal energy will end up costing 11 dollars, but the wind one will cost 9 dollars (this is a pure imaginary example, I don't know the exact amount of VAT and the proposed tax, or the cost of energy). So greener products will become cheaper, thus the incentive to consume those ones. Note that Australia is one of the developed countries that didn't sign the Kyoto treaty (they consume a lot of coal), so the change in policy is significant. In my opinion, taxing all the types of pollution is the best way to obtain a reduction in the ecological pressure we put on the planet.

The original news can be read here.

The story of a tree

I have few memories with my grandfather from my father's side, as he died when I was 8 years old, but one I remember clear is when he took me and my cousin to plant a walnut tree in front of his house. Years after, in the freedom induced madness from Romania people starting cutting down the trees in the streets. I don't know the exact reason, maybe they were making room for parking their cars, or they were annoyed they had to clean the leaves, but I could see it on many streets in my home town and elsewhere. One day my uncle said that he also plans to cut the walnut tree in front of my grandma's house giving me some stupid reason. I told him to don't even think about it as that is me and my cousin's tree and we want that tree to stay there. He eventually gave up and you can still see this beautiful walnut tree if you go in Constanta on Razoare street.

Having this story in mind and countless more about the massive deforestation that takes place in Romania I was very glad when I discovered the Tree-Nation community. They are dedicated to planting trees, as this is the most effective way to have a sound ecosystem on our planet. Forests prevent desertification and soil erosion, enhance bio-diversity, reduce CO2 and thus global warming and also provide important economical resources if managed wise. Tree-Nation organization has three big projects: one in Niger where they plant a huge forest aimed at stopping desertification and two others in Columbia and Nicaragua where they are doing re-forestation of some areas in order to stop the soil erosion and conserve the local flora and fauna.

So next time you have the opportunity to plant a tree don't miss it. Remember that is one of the three things a man has to do in his life.

Earth Hour - 2010

This year even more cities, countries and ordinary people participated at the Earth Hour event. Year after year we become more and more dependent on electricity. This year I turned off everything in the house except for the fridge. I also didn't cheated by using the laptop or mobile phone which run on batteries. A counter movement called Edison Hour (see details here) was started in order to stress that electricity is good and we shouldn't go back to the dark ages, but instead we should try to solve the environmental problems by discovering some new technology. I think these guys are missing the point of the Earth Hour campaign. It is about waste, consumerism and selfishness. And I also see it as a reality check: how dependent are we on all these tools powered by electricity? What happens if someday an accident will leave us with no electricity for a day or a week? Are we even going to survive?

Future cars

Today we have diesel and petrol cars and a few hybrids, the most successful being Toyota Prius. As this industry is build on inoculation of the idea of having a personal vehicle, unless some catastrophic event (natural or economical) happens I don't see that many people giving up their beloved cars no matter how good the public transport will be.
So what will be the future of cars? Among the alternatives to oil based propelled cars the hype is nowadays on electric cars. Some estimates are saying that by 2020 10% of new sales will be electric cars, others estimate the adoption rate will be much slower to only 1-2% of new sales. At least one big company (Renault) is betting on the first estimate and plans to launch a full range of electric cars in a few years. The main drawbacks for electric cars at this moment are the cost of batteries (most of them use lithium which is not that abundant) and the infrastructure for recharging them. See the full story here.
As for myself, I hope the next car I buy will be at least a hybrid one.

Space garbage

In the last 50 years the space exploration changed our lives: think only about GPS and satellite communications. But what happens with the satellites that are no longer in use? Some of them (the bigger ones) are driven back towards Earth and they burn in the atmosphere. But most of them are just left orbiting around the Earth. Thus the new place where garbage accumulates is in the space around our planet. This is more and more a concern because this kind of garbage can hit at any time a functional satellite or the ISS producing significant damage as satellites are designed to be as lite as possible, not resistant at impact with other objects. So now DARPA started to investigate ways to remove this garbage. Some more details here.

Garbage collection in the countryside

So this is not about garbage collection in Java, but in the countryside of Romania. Large parts of Romania looks still like an old style programming language where no garbage collection takes place. People in the countryside are still throwing the garbage in some improvised landfills at the end of the village, or by the local river. But the garbage that used to be mostly biodegradable tens of years ago now consists mainly of plastics, cans, metals and whatever else you could imagine. No wonder many river banks look like this:




This is the first project I heard of where the garbage collection in the countryside is being greatly improved. It's in the Dolj county and 9 villages are involved. This is a tiny number from the over 2000 villages in Romania, but at least it's a start. Now I'll go back to Java and its automatic garbage collection.

Dream vacation

For those who are craving for a vacation on a remote island (see one of the earlier posts) should also consider the Garbage Island from Pacific Ocean. It's the newest island on Earth, it's bigger than Texas, so there should be plenty of room for many people. And if you are a scientist maybe you can join the expedition to study it. More information can be found here and here.

No more bottled water

A town in Australia has voted to ban the sale of bottled water. The issue arose after a company proposed to extract some water from an underground reservoir in the region, ship it to Sydney to be bottled and then bring it back for selling it. This shows just what a waste of resources we are doing every day. The full story is here.

Destroying the planet

We are doing it every day: when we drive our cars, buy that stuff we don't really need, eat too much and then go to gym to keep us fit, wander around the planet to see it with our own eyes. We do it time and again until nothing will be left, or it will be too late to bring it back. Until we will make the Earth so hot, or so cold, or so dry, or so wet, or so acid that we will not be able to live here anymore. Some insects and plants will maybe still be able to live around and maybe it's better this way. We are the people that rule the world and know everything about it, too bad we are that blind.

Or we can try to save it, but that takes a lot of effort, perseverance and relinquishment. Will I do it, will you do it my friend, will all of us do it?

Doesn't this bother you?

Earth Hour

A couple of weeks ago a global action called Earth Hour took place around the world. The idea was to turn off the lights for an hour between 8 and 9 in the evening. This year I was not at home at that time, so I couldn't take part, but I took part at this event two years ago. One of my colleagues at work argued this event is useless and even damaging as the electricity was still produced and wasted since you cannot stop an electrical generation facility for just an hour to make up for the lower demand. And since electricity cannot be stored it ends up wasted somehow in the system. I know this might be true from a technical point of view, although I might imagine somebody else (like a processing plant) could have scheduled some activity at that point to use the excess electricity, but the real meaning of this event is to make all of us aware of how much electricity we consume and many times just waste. For example, I know the TV consumes quite a lot of electricity while in stand-by mode and I started a while ago turning off the TV from "the button" (not by remote control) when I leave in the morning. So all of us should start thinking how to lower our electricity consumption. And that hour when you were supposed to sit in the dark was a good time to think about such things.

Carbon added tax

This year the countries around the world are supposed to reach an agreement for the next treaty on preventing global warming. This new treaty will replace the current Kyoto treaty and it is hoped it will have bigger targets and involve most of the big polluters countries (one of the shortcomings of Kyoto treaty was that big countries like U.S., China and India didn't sign it). So there is much discussion about what this treaty should stipulate and how it will be enforced. I don't follow all the news on this subject, but in general (main stream media) I didn't see articles written by economists about how to handle global warming. And this is an economic matter after all, since we will have to pay somehow to protect the environment. I thought of the economists I read and I imagined Stiglitz should have written something about how to tackle global warming. And indeed, I found this interesting paper on his site. It discusses various proposals on how to tax CO2 emissions and how the implementation might work or not. The most fair solution in my opinion is the "carbon added tax" which is similar in concept with the VAT: each part of the production chain is taxed according to the emissions it produces for the goods and service he delivers. The total tax in fact is paid by the consumer, which thus has two incentives: to consume less and to consume "greener" products (that carry a smaller tax). For sure it's not trivial to enforce such a tax world wide, but this is a sound solution from the economic point of view.

Green Day

Green Day (Ziua Verde) is not the rock band, but a series of events organized in various cities of Romania to encourage people recycle more, especially electrical devices. Last Saturday it was in Bucharest as a concert with some rock and ethnic bands. I liked very much the old Timpuri Noi (the best Romanian rock band from my high-school years) and Zdob si Zdub which I saw live for the first time. As for recycling, I hope they open many more recycling corners, so I don't have to go half of Bucharest to recycle a light bulb (I already recycle plastic bottles and paper at the containers next to my house). The best moment of the evening was when they were showing samples of electrical devices brought by people for recycling and they showed a HC85 computer! :) I guess I have my HC91 computer somewhere in Constanta, I should proudly dispose of it at a recycling corner for the sake of the planet.

The cost of wind energy

I read a very interesting analysis regarding the total cost of using wind power to generate electricity on The Register. Basically, the idea is that since wind is not guaranteed to blow all the time, you need to have back-up energy generating capacity to keep the energetic system in balance. There are various theories and proposals to fix this problem like: wind doesn't blow in one region/country but might blow in another one so the spread of wind mills will create a balance, or when you have excess wind you can use a part of the energy to pump some water uphill and use hydro-energy as back-up when the wind doesn't blow. This study demonstrates that in the case of UK these solutions are not feasible (using statistics regarding the wind intensity patterns), so in the end you need to have gas/coal back-up power plants. This leads to a total different cost of wind energy. It's interesting to see who will pay this cost. Normally the ones who install wind mills should be asked to pay for the back-up capacity too.

Consume less instead of consuming green

Today I read an article that says it all regarding consumption in our society. Basically, the author argues that it is not enough to start consuming greener products (like using economical light bulbs, hybrid cars) but we need to decrease our consumption altogether. If this would happen we would end up with more time for contemplating the world around us and more money in our pockets. Isn't this good for us after all? Of course, we would want to do this mainly to still have a planet to live on :)