[I highly recommend a report by Confederation of British Industry titled "Climate Change: Everyone's Business". There is a number of excellent statistics and charts on GHG (Green House Gas) emissions. But the one that struck me the most significant is the fact that consumers control or influence 60% of CO2 emissions. Emissions under direct consumer control such as home heating, private car transportation and personal electric consumption constitute 35%. Consumer influenced sectors such as retail, food and drink, agriculture etc constitute another 25%.
Finding ways to encourage consumers to reduce their carbon footprint will have a dramatic impact on overall global GHG emissions. Past attempts at such a strategy have focused on efforts like smart meters, tele-commuting or tele-presence. Although these continue to be worthwhile initiatives, they suffer in their appeal due to externalities such as basic inconvenience, insufficient broadband bandwidth and lack of incentive to counter the clearly inferior technique of interacting with colleagues and workers.
On the other hand, one of the outstanding success of the Internet over the past decade has been the growth in electronic products and services such as music, film, advertising , photography on line searches and so on. Many business processes are also moving to the Internet through such applications as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 applications. The portion of the economy dedicated to e-products and e-services is expected to grow significantly over the coming years. Already multi-billion companies have been built around this business model such as Google, Apple iTunes, etc
Therefore, as I have argued in the past, one area of possible innovation and economic opportunity is to "mash up" these two separate economies and business models to see if new applications and services can be developed to encourage consumers to reduce their own GHG emissions. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Amazon, and eBay, with their close consumer relationships could possibly have a significant impact on CO2 emissions through exchanging their e-products and e-services for consumer reduction in carbon. This is not "pie in the sky" thinking but a common marketing tool that already exists with resale gas and electric companies. But surprisingly the concept has not been taken up or implemented by the Internet industry. -- BSA]
Climate Change: Everyone's Business http://www.avtclient.co.uk/climatereport/
This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles
Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview
Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.
Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37
Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG
High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP
Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g
How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd