World is Green

MIT Class Calculates Carbon Footprint of “The Man” | Wired Science from Wired.com

The MIT class, in a paper (pdf) to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, estimated that no American, even the homeless and itinerant Buddhist monks, could get their total “share” of energy usage below 130 gigajoules, which is more than twice the global average, and directly correlated with carbon footprint.

That’s because the basic infrastructure of the United States including police, roads, libraries, courts and the military were allocated equally to all citizens of the country. Thus, even if one’s personal consumption in terms of purchased products and lifestyle were minimal, he or she would still bear their share of the systemic carbon load, according to the methodology of this study. In common terms, each and every U.S. resident is carbon-heavier other countries’ citizens.

This is the real issue that needs to be addressed.

Only Peter Drucker can provide this level of clarity.

Three roles of Management

Drucker teaches us three roles of management. The first role is to accomplish the function that is specific to each organization; in other words, to contribute to society through its business. If it is a newspaper company, it is to publish the best paper. If it is a greengrocery store, it is to supply the best vegetables. It is only a monastery deep in the mountains that does not have to contribute to society directly. It is only a gangster connection that does not have any intention to contribute to society. All other organizations must contribute to society, because they are allowed to exist, occupy, and hire the most valuable in society.

The second role is to make work productive and people achieving. Man as a social existence seeks to exert his ability fully, to fulfill his potential, and contribute to society. Especially from now on, we will enter an age when people will leave an organization that cannot make work productive, and satisfy them in achieving through their strengths.

The third role is not to give any negative impact on society, and to contribute society in solving its problems. This is so-called the social responsibilities of the organization.

The social responsibility of organization

The first social responsibility of organizations is to eliminate any negative impact to society caused by its existence and activities, or at least to minimize it. If a noise is produced during the process of production, it has to be reduced as much as possible. Traffic stagnation might be caused in neighborhood. It has to be eliminated. Drucker says the organization has to eliminate or at least to reduce these nuisances as much as possible.

Furthermore, the responsibility of organizations is to solve social problems by mobilizing its strengths. And, to make the problem- solving into a business if possible. In any industries such as power companies, automobile companies, convenience stores, hospitals, etc., the business itself started fulfilling social needs. It is true to any business. These two responsibilities make up the social responsibility of organizations.

Drucker affirms strongly that there are not any special responsibilities, called the social responsibility of business. It is politically wrong to give any special responsibility to anyone, or to any organization. In Europe, such an idea was discarded a long time ago, even before modern industry was born. Pascal, well known by his “Penses” (1670), pointed this out. If special responsibilities were laid on, special powers would be given. As powers are accompanied by responsibilities, responsibilities are accompanied by powers.

For management, profit is a requirement to achieve these three roles. At the same time, it is a scale to measure its achievement. It is not a purpose. A requirement is harder than a purpose. A scale is also harder than a purpose. During my thirty years in Keidanren, so called the headquarters of the Japanese business, I have never met a single CEO who said he worked for purpose of moneymaking. Drucker says there is no such thing as profit motivation. Profit is a cost that a company as a public institution needs to achieve its roles. It is a requirement. It is a standard to judge its achievement.

Changing people’s behaviour is tough. Or you can be cynical like Dr. House and believe that “People don’t change. They may want to. They may need to.” but they never change. If you do want to however, sell something or manage a change program; you do need to believe that people will and can change and it is important to persuade them.

Seth Godin writes about the many ways of doing it:

Here’s the thing: unlike every other species, human beings make decisions differently from one another. And the thing that persuades you is unlikely to be the thing that persuades the next guy. Our personal outlook is a lousy indicator of what works for anyone else.

Some of us want to write well. Atanu has some pointers.

That is all: Good writing is the product of some very hard thinking. Lazy thinkers cannot be good writers. Know a bit, know that you know it, know logic, read great writers, do some hard thinking, learn vocabulary, and practice writing. Repeat until desired results are obtained.

I learned many years ago this lesson from Atanu that to write well, we need to first start writing and blogging helped me learn to write. I was a pathetic writer before that and now I think I am decent writer. Long way to go before being good, but now I can express an idea or comment upon a situation and create reports at work.

But all this does serve to flag up one classic dilemma of sustainable development: namely, what happens when an initiative aimed at meeting people’s aspirations and improving their quality of life runs slap bang into environmental limits? When the social and economic pillars of sustainability, in other words, come crashing down onto the environmental one?

Source: Green Futures Blog

Few people have influenced me like Atanu Dey and Rajesh Jain when I worked with them at Deeshaa Ventures. I consider the 1+ year that I have spent with them as  a “black swan” moment.

According to the Wikipedia:

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s definition, a black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.

Rajesh writes in his blog on Turning 40 and his goals for India and Atanu’s influence on him. An inspiring read.

Three Goals

Here are three things I’d like to do in the rest of my life and which will require investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not about philanthropy, but about building the right systems and foundation - in a sort-of self-generating way. Ideally, the Indian government should have been the enabler - but I don’t see that happening with the politicians we have. Indian business has started taking the lead but is not doing this fast enough - and in some cases, is not even doing it right.

First, ensuring access to quality education for hundreds of millions of Indians. Education is a life-enhancer - and nothing comes close. My father was helped by his education to get out of the village he grew up in and created opportunities for himself. How can we do the same for millions in India who are otherwise resigned to a life devoid of opportunity? This is not about trying to build the world’s best school or college, but ensuring that a sustainable and scalable system to provide quality education for everyone in India. For more, read Atanu Dey’s series on Doing Education Right.

Second, we need to build hundreds of new cities to house the hundreds of millions of people who we need to get out from the villages. Our current cities are bursting at the seams. Creating urban slums in not the answer. We need 600 new cities of a million each or 6,000 towns of 100,000 each - or a mix of both. But there is no way we can provide any reasonable future to pockets of 1,000 people living in 600,000 villages. In other words, India cannot afford its villages - and needs to urbanise fast. Else, the demographic dividend will turn out to a big nightmare. Creating these new cities right - in a clean, green, and self-sustainable way - is what I’d like to see us do. For more, read Atanu Dey’s series on Creating India’s New Cities.

Finally, I want to create a Santa Fe-like institution in India. It should be a place where multi-disciplinary thinking is the norm. It should be a magnet for smart people to spend time interacting with the best in different areas so they can forge multiple mental models which can then go out and solve problems right. We go wrong in solutions because we have partial knowledge and so we do not understand the real problem. This leads to what I call brain-dead decisions. An institution like this will ensure that we make the right decisions for the future. It will create a platform for the innovations we will continue to need.

The day after we had sold IndiaWorld for $115 million in November 1999, my wife, Bhavana, told me: “We are custodians of God’s money. If God has given us money at such an early age, there must be something He has in mind for us. We have to utilise this wealth for the greater good.” These are words which have formed the bedrock of my life since then. Till then, I was an entrepreneur trying to prove that I could, even after repeated failures, be successful at least once. Since then, I have come to believe that what good we need to do, we have to do in our present life - while we still have the physical and mental energies.

Apart from his vision, his and Bhavana’s belief that whatever good that needs to be done is now, when they are at their prime of their life is the most inspiring and the right thing to do.

Today I received this e-mail in my Inbox about a planned petrol price protest on the Feb 22nd in Australia. Real funny e-mail. Irrespective of the claims of the protest and its possibility lets look at the lack of economic thinking which has led to the creation of this mail.

The mail starts with this:

IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE IN AUSTRALIA DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF PETROL FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OIL COMPANIES WOULD CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES.

Well, in fact it will tougher if there is more demand than supply than the other way round. They got this one wrong.

AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSS OVER 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL COMPANIES.

It’s beyond me how you can go from low demand to a net loss and that for one day. The pent up demand will come back the next day. In fact, the most hit may be the distribution companies. Anyways, Australia is too small a player to make any difference. In fact, South Australia gets its oil from a refinery in Singapore. That low in demand!

THEREFORE FRIDAYFEBRUARY 22nd HAS BEEN FORMALLY
DECLARED STICK IT UP THEIR ASS’ DAY AND THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION SHOULD NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF PETROL THAT DAY. THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE DONE IS IF YOU FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN AND AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD OUT.

Try your luck…

WAITING FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO STEP IN AND CONTROL THE PRICES? IT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REDUCTION AND CONTROL IN PRICES THE ARAB NATIONS PROMISEDLONG AGO?

THE PRICES JUST KEEP GOING UP AND WE NEED TO STOP IT

PETROL PRICES ARE CAUSING OTHER EFFECTS; AIRLINES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES, AS ARE TRUCKING COMPANIES . THIS INCREASES PRICES ON EVERYTHING THAT IS SHIPPED. THINGS LIKE FOOD, CLOTHING, BUILDING SUPPLIES MEDICAL SUPPLIES ETC. WHO PAYS IN THE END? WE DO! WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. IF THEY DON’T GET THE MESSAGE AFTER ONE DAY,WE WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN. SO DO YOUR PART AND SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND MAKE FEBRUARY22nd THE DAY CITIZENS OF AUSTRALIA SAY ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH’

Well, the connection of petrol prices to food and clothing is right. However, if we look at this from a carbon point of view in fact, we need to increase the price of petrol in order to curb its demand. Simple economics, price goes up and the demand should go down. This week’s BRW magazine (no online linking possible) has an article on how Australia has least expensive petrol after the US and China. That doesn’t help.

The interesting thing is that people do not understand simple economics and try to solve the big problems of the world.

Ramesh Ramanathan writes in The Mint about the ingenuity of the new car from Tata and how those same principles can be used to meet some of the challenges in health care, housing and public transportation in India.

 But the larger point is the inspirational lamp that the Tata Nano story lights. There are hundreds of challenges in India where the lessons of the Tata Nano can be applied—design innovation, scale efficiency, vendor networking and so on. I want to talk about three illustrative examples.

[...]

Imagine if we could get a CT scan cost down to Rs500, offer a heart surgery for a few thousand rupees or a gall bladder surgery for under a thousand. This requires a fundamental redesign of all the parts of the health- care delivery system—from re-engineering individual components such as the CT scan, to embedding these into scaled health “cities” that can get a critical mass of 10,000 outpatients a day.

[...]

Imagine the kind of demand that can open up if we can change the engineering specifications, reduce the cost-per-unit by scale economies, improve the construction process, and deliver a product that might not have marble floors, but doesn’t compromise on quality.

[...]

I think of the public bus system in our cities. If the experience is bad for passengers, it’s worse for the bus drivers, having to navigate these Noah’s arks through the narrow Indian streets. We need buses designed for Indian conditions: our roads, our traffic, our people. With environmental challenges thrown in, we are looking at a fundamental redesign of the Indian bus. Can we create an icon like the London Routemaster?

Last month I quoted an article by Michael Backman writing about population and emissions. Backman assets that population is the major contributor to emissions growth.

Two commentators on the article did not agree with Backman.  John Brisbin comments that  ”The only obvious thing about sustainability is the per capita resource usage”. He wants to believe in a world where “20 billion living in peaceful resonance with the planet and requiring only the simplest of material inputs?”

I think that is next to impossible. The past has shown that people cannot be expected to behave like that.
It is tough, I know that from personal experience.

The consumer culture is all fine to moan about however, we need to remember that it is the present culture. There is a limit to what you can expect people to change. We need to work with what we have…and what we have is an increasing consumer culture all around the world.

Also, we need to remember that population as such creates problems in other areas - public health, infrastructure, provision of other services, standard of living etc.

And the second comment from Dani where he angrily writes that “Getting rid of all americans will drop carbon emissions far more quickly than all the population control in South Asia.”

What we need to think about is the future. I think we should not take Backman’s analysis personal. I am an Indian and I do know where you would come from.

We cannot change the past. Can we rid of all the Americans? Totally not possible and not ethical. We need to work with what is possible. Controlling population in South Asia is a very good thing in many ways.

Atanu helped me understand the consequences of population growth many years back. Lets read what Atanu Dey has to say on this:

In 1965, about 40 years ago, there were less than 500 million of us. By 2004, the population of India has more than doubled. The effect of this incredible increase has been a falling standard of living in general, shortages, untold misery and conflict. It is foolish to expect that we can provide a decent standard of living to so many in such a short time. The vast majority of us do not have adequate drinking water, sanitation, health care, education and job opportunities. The preceding statement does not even begin to indicate the amount of human misery and sorrow which it implies. It hides within it the teeming millions who suffer without the slightest hope of ever seeing a future remotely human.

Read the entire article. Atanu talks about the limited time available to create a standard of living for a huge population. In another post he quotes Joel Cohen’s book How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1995). Here Cohen explains the finiteness of time.

The finiteness of time, the second thread in the book, limit’s the abilities of individuals and of societies to solve problems. For each human being, time is finite. I want to eat and drink today. As a privileged inhabitant of a wealthy country, I can postpone buying a new car for several years, but the requirements of poor people for subsistence are not so elastic in time. Those who want firewood to cook a meal today will break branches from the last tree standing if they believe that otherwise their children may not surive to lament the absence of trees 20 years hence. In the American legal system, the finiteness of time to satisfy basic human wants is recognized in a phrase: justice delayed is justice denied.

Efforts to satisfy human wants require time, and the time required may be longer than the finite time available to individuals. There is a race between the complexity of the problems that are generated by increasing human numbers and the ability of humans to comprehend and solve those problems. Educating people to solve problems takes time. Developing traditions of stable, productive cooperation takes time. Building institutions with the resources to make educated people into productive problem-solvers takes time. Even with educated, cooperative people and appropriate institutions at hand, understanding and solving problems take still more time.

Re-read the paragraph above twice. The difference between the commentators and Cohen’s and Atanu’s arguments  is that they accept human wants as a given. And secondly, they work with current statistics and situation in many parts of the world. This is not a Malthusian type of argument for sure. It is far bigger than that.