2.83/2.813 Project Description for 2008 The Green Baloney Detection Kit T.G. Gutowski 2/26/08 The Problem Concern about sustainability, the environment and global warming is growing. Some people want to make changes and to improve this situation. This leads to claims and counter claims concerning how certain actions will lead to a sustainable society, or an improvement for the environment. People need guidance on what to believe and how to act. Goal of this Project The purpose of this project is to come up with a way to assess these claims, or more broadly to assess the potential environmental benefit of any action. We will develop a framework for quantitatively evaluating the potential effects of any human action based upon a resource accounting framework. This approach builds from Life Cycle Analysis. The goal of this class project then is to test and modify our evaluation methodology with a series of case studies. The case studies will be conducted by all students. The evaluation methodologies will be developed by the graduate students*. All studies will be written up as technical paper quality reports for publication, possibly on the web or at a technical conference or both. Your results may be communicated to the claimant. What You Need to do to Start. 1) Form a team (or not) 2) Select a problem 3) Prepare a two page proposal. Include a description of the problem. Who made the claim? Give a reference. What you guess is the actual effect and why. How you are going to test this? Where are you going to get your data on this problem? List at least five sources of information on this problem. Use different sources of information. i.e. News, Scientific Journals, Webpages, Interviews, Company Literature. Do you foresee any problems calculating various metrics? Provide a time table and list of tasks. Give the proposal to me as soft and hard copy. I will write comments on the hardcopy and return it to you. Evaluation Methodology Our methodology rests upon the point of view that significant improvements that move us toward a sustainable society and make a difference in our environmental footprintmust show how they depart from the business as usual (BAU) scenario. See for example Pacala and Socolow (2004) who have outlined this approach for worldwide carbon emissions. The main points are these: 1) history is important, 2) there is a difference between an apparent improvement and an improvement that really makes a difference, 3) discerning these differences requires looking at quite large system boundaries, and 4) we seek quantitative assessment tools. List of Tentative Questions 1. Is this different from Business as Usual? 2. *From a Production point of view, is this improvement offset by increased production? i.e. ∆e/e ≥ ∆P/P 3. *From a consumption point of view, will this difference make a difference in your Environmental Footprint? i.e., ∆ELSA/ELSA ≤ ∆Expenditures/Expenditures 4. Do the boundaries go back to the environment? 5. Does the analysis include how people will respond? 6. What would an economist say about this? Are there any price effects? 7. What would an ecologist say about this? 8. Who did the calculations? Where they subject to Third Party Verification? Due dates Proposal March 10 Preliminary report April 4 Presentation April 30 Report May 9 . Ref 1) Pacala and Socolow, Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies Science 13 August 2004: Vol. 305. no. 5686, pp. 968 – 972, 2) ELSA/IEEE paper, 3) JIE
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