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Apple & Amazon rated at bottom of climate change scorecard (and what about ebooks?)
July 9, 2009 | 2:18 pm
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By Robert Nagle
In the last few months I have been reading about human-accelerated warming and how to understand the impact of our purchasing decisions.
I stumbled upon ClimateCounts, an environmental scorecard site. This site tracks a company’s commitment to reducing their carbon footprint. 
In the computer/electronics category, the highest rated companies were IBM and Canon; the lowest rated company was Apple. Among Internet companies, Google was ranked the highest while Amazon.com and Ebay were ranked the lowest. (Read more about Google’s effort to remain carbon neutral). The company profile pages give a few sentences to explain the score. Note: To see the complete report about the company, you need to download the scorecard PDF (on the right side of the company’s profile). This scorecard goes into greater detail about how Climate Counts arrived at the number for the score.
Here is a description of the methodology to produce the climate change scorecard. The site produces individual reports about each company it reviews. Other interesting scores: GE/NBC ranks as the most climate friendly media company, while Viacom ranks dead last). Climatecounts also has a downloadable pocket guide (PDF) .
How carbon-friendly is this pesky ebook habit which afflict TeleReaders? Some things to think about:
- Dead-tree books require cutting down trees. (Duh!). Dan Shapley writes, "The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon emissions." Allen Hershkowitz from the National Resource Defense Council agrees, saying, “The paper industry is the No. 1 industrial pressure on forests."
- Umbra Fisk summarizes the research so far into books vs. ebooks:
A MS candidate named Greg Kozak pitted textbooks against e-book devices [PDF] in 2003. He found that paper production, electricity of printing operations, and personal transportation were the main factors affecting the book footprint, while electricity was the main issue for e-readers; and that books were responsible for four times the greenhouse emissions as e-readers. In ’04, two UC-Berkeley students evaluated newspaper vs PDA-based e-newspapers [PDF], and decided that a newspaper released 32-140 times the amount of CO2, and used 26-185 times the amount of water. A 2007 study in Sweden (here is the abstract) also looked at newspaper and found that newspaper’s biggest impact was in the paper production, while energy was the big impact for reading on the internet; for e-devices (the Kindle, etc.), production of the e-object is the biggest impact. The study concluded that reading e-newspapers had less impact than an actual newspaper.
- The current book ordering system encourages bookstores to order more books than they can reasonably sell. That increases the number of published copies and consequently the number of returns (and the amount of shipping costs).
- A number of print books which are bought are not read. In other words, books are produced with the goal to be sold, regardless of whether it is actually read. One cannot blame the publishing industry if people fail to read the books they buy; but with digital books, energy or resources are being consumed only if the ebook is actually being read.
- E-ink readers are the ultimate low-energy devices. Charges last for weeks or sometimes longer than a month. The only additional step they can take is to make the devices run by solar energy (sigh!).
On a more hopeful note, Fisk mentions in a recent green Q&A column that Penguin has set up a Green Penguin initiative to focus on reducing carbon footprint. About 60% of its paper derives from recycled sources. She also writes that Random House is committed to increase its percentage of recycled paper in the near future.
Green Web-hosting
Here in Houston where I live, the cost of electricity for renewable energy is about the same as cost for nonrenewable energy. I can’t say if this is a nationwide phenomena. But my current hosting service (which hosted Teleread between 2006 and 2008) uses a data center which had no information about whether its energy was generated by renewable resources. When I emailed my hosting service about whether its data center were green, they said they had no idea.
Umbra Fisk recently wrote about the idea of green hosting, referring readers to this list of recommended green hosting. Here is an fascinating piece by Jonathan Leake and Richard Woods about what kind of carbon footprint a normal Google search leaves.
Climate Change Books, Ebooks and Online Books
- Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. This government report was released 2 weeks ago and synthesizes lots of scientific information as it pertains to the US. (Download PDF). On the same page is a fascinating 45 minute video by the authors of the report.
- Sustainable Energy without Hot Air is a free ebook which is fully online by David JC McKay (PDF is here), but the online HTML is good too.
- McKinsey Policy Institute issued a PDF report last year about how the world can move towards emitting greenhouse gases without damaging the economy. (free, but registration is required).
- The 2009 Climate Change Synthesis Report (PDF) provides a succinct update to the 2007 IPCC report, with summaries of lots of research which have emerged since then.
- This free Lancet report details the effects of global warming on mortality (free, but registration is required).
- Leading climate scientist James Hansen has published some influential policy documents about climate change. Mainly advocacy pieces. (All PDF).
- Discovery of Global Warming – free online book. (Mercifully, HTML!) Here’s a zipped file of the entire html site.
- Global Warming and Climate Change Demystified is a good print book (available at half.com for $2 + shipping). It looks and reads like a good (but boring) high school science textbook. But that is precisely the point. Climate change is about science, not about parroting petroleum industry falsehoods. This book waded through the issues very clearly.
- Skeptical Science is a fascinating distributed project. Many climate change news sources and blogs become bogged down by the same denialist arguments. Every time I post something remotely about global warming on my personal blog, I’ll receive random uneducated remarks attacking my position. Although I try to stay informed, it can be easy for even knowledgeable people to have a hard time refuting denialist talking points. Citing the famous words of a tobacco lobbyist, Joe Romm writes of the modus operandi of denialists: “I don’t have to be right. I just have to prove you might be wrong.”
- Climateprogress is a well-known blog about climate change policy by national expert Joe Romm (He is a scientist, policy analyst and author of Hell and High Water). Well worth reading. I wanted to point out how over the time the blog is emerging as another kind of permanent online book. The blog has two or three posts a day, and then certain posts contain an index to related topics. This introduction to the impact of global warming gives new readers a way to delve into the topic. Another post on achieving 450 ppm is another index page. Otherwise, this weblog is a happy mess of news and arguments.
Climate Change: The Ultimate Ebook Challenge
When discussing issues as important as climate change, it seems relatively trivial to complain about ebook formatting on government reports. Yet I cannot resist.
I have downloaded most of the PDFs listed above. Most were huge file which could not be easily be opened up in a browser.
Unfortunately, because many big climate change reports use lots of graphics, they are big and cumbersome PDFs that look crappy when converted to my Sony PRS 505.
I understand that scientists use lots of graphics and charts. But if the purpose of writing these reports is to get them disseminated, why not create documents in a way that lend itself to html output or portability into other formats? For one of the most important graphics on the Global Climate Change Impacts report, I ended up just using a screen capture program to insert it onto my blog. Surely there is a better way. Recognizing the problem, the IPCC has put up a separate web page consisting only of graphics from the 2007 PDF document; too bad the team of leading scientists couldn’t figure out a way to make the document easily viewable inside a web browser.
Some of these excellent reports don’t have a TOC even in the PDF version. It is extremely cumbersome to navigate through these things.
PDFs have a lot of usability problems (as Mike Hughes observed). My main complaint is that it is time-consuming to page through 200 pages using Adobe Reader. I’m not saying .epub or .prc are significantly better. But after you open a PDF, you constantly need to use the Zoom feature and click the next/back buttons to get the Reader to look as it should. Contrast that to hypertext like wikipedia or Discovery of Global Warming which invite you to browse inside and explore the document more deeply. When you explore a PDF, you are progressing in a linear fashion instead of jumping around. Maybe for other scientists (who are motivated to read the whole thing regardless of format), this is not an issue. But a web surfer used to clicking on links will have problems staying within a single document without clicking around.
I suspect that accessibility guidelines might determine the preference of government bodies for PDF formatting. PDFs are generally considered to be more accessible (especially for the vision-impaired). The problem is that to fully digest the information from the report, you have to print it out (and I know that is the last thing climate scientists want readers to do). These sort of government reports are therefore cumbersome to read. Good for finding specific information or going to a specific chapter, but awkward and sluggish for normal reading.
I will be the first to admit that the scientists who wrote this report have more pressing things on their minds than document formats. But producing these large PDF files without having a strategy to make them readable online only ensures that their impact on the public will be limited.
Question: If the US government were to issue guidelines about document formatting to facilitate reading on ebook devices, what should these guidelines be?
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Comments:
Interesting post Robert.
Not to start an anti climate change diatribe here (and I am not a climate change denialist) but I must say that the Climate Counts methodology is one of the silliest I have seen in some time.
Since you mentioned Amazons ranking I thought I would see why they ranked so low. Here is one item that cracked me up:
Policy Stance: 0/10 points. Climate Counts found no public information to suggest that Amazon.com supports public policy that addresses climate change.
Looking at a different category I see that the top ranked company (Deutsche Post World Net/DHL) had this as its score in the same element:
Policy Stance: 7/10 points. Climate Counts has found no public information to suggest that DPWN/DHL supports public policy consistent with climate protection.
So two companies with the exact same “policy stance” can be given such divergent scores as 0% and 70%. WTF?!?!?!?
Apart from the above mentioned inconsistency Climate Counts methodology is really only their judgement of public statements by all the companies it reviewed – it really does nothing to actually measure the actual footprint of a companies operations.
HeavyG, you raise a valid and very important concern.
Accountability is a real problem with these green measures. Right now, standards about what constitutes a “carbon offset” for example are still nebulous and undefined. To my knowledge, there are not laws mandating this kind of eco-reporting.
A consumer group like climate counts doesn’t have the ability to demand documentation or accountability. All they can really do is to set uniform standards and use this as a basis to judge a company’s performance and hope that the companies involved make it easy to find this information.
BTW, there is a 22 point Climate Change PDF that is downloadable from each company’s profile. It goes into much greater detail that the summary you read.
With regard to your specific example about Amazon and DPWN, the text you read is from the HTML, not from the PDF. In the case of DPWN, on question 19 on the scorecard PDF, Climate counts says DPWN “Yes, supports non-voluntary federal- or international-level initiatives. Points awarded within each specified range for demonstrated depth of support in company materials (website, publications), via a public forum (press, speeches, advertising), and active lobbying”. On that same question #19, the Amazon position is marked as “No”. Really, the PDF scorecard explains things more thoroughly.
Let me say that when I first looked at the site, I made the same mistake of assuming that the brief remarks on the company profile page was the extent of Climate Counts’ analysis. This PDF scorecard is extremely easy to miss and requires that you fill out a captcha to download. Once again, the evil PDF strikes again!
Down with PDF! Long live the almighty HTML!
Seriously I don’t mean to beat up on PDF, but it’s interesting how often important information is hidden away on the PDF page. The best way to ensure some information won’t be read is to stick it on page 18 of some PDF page. (I know google indexes PDFs, but that doesn’t address the larger problem of browsability).
I have edited the original article to emphasize how to view the full report (and not just the abbreviated summary).
Thanks for the heads up on the pdf. I originally started to snag the pdf but they want to harvest an email address every time you want to get a report so I just punted and didn’t bother.
I just now did go back and get their complete scorecard and a company report (again, it appears that you have to download a separate pdf for each and every company – blech!!).
I agree that all this info would/should be more readily available via html pages and ONE pdf that has all the detailed company reports.
“Many climate change news sources and blogs become bogged down by the same denialist arguments.”
By ‘bogged down’ do you mean refuted?
For a balanced approach to the AGW controversy see
http://climatedebatedaily.com/
See if you can spot which side is using the ad hominem arguments…
Jon, if you want to debate whether AGW is a scientific consensus, do it here .
I am vaguely familiar with Climate Change Daily, another site by Denis Dutton (of A&L Daily fame). It’s a strange aggregator site; its blogroll mixes legitimate news sources with lots of unreliable sources. It attempts to “teach the controversy” by presenting two equal columns of pro and con. This is a false equivalency. I am no scientist but have a good idea of what kinds of sites are producing what kinds of information. The fact that CCD presents Realclimate.org (a prestigious science blog) in the same blogroll with Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Jr., Heartland Institute and famous denialist Sen Inhofe suggests an inability to understand the scientific reliability of these sources. Instead of going to sites with a high signal to noise ratio, I would recommend choosing a site that vets its content more carefully. CCD is not such a site. It’s one thing to link to economists who disagree about the best mechanism to reduce GHG. It’s another thing to give credibility to “balanced approaches” that are repeated ad nauseum by corporate lobbyists.
Robert,
I think we are disagreeing here on what is ‘signal’ and what is ‘noise’. I believe the ‘pro AGW’ contributors for Climate Change Daily are sincerely doing their best; it’s not their fault that they can find so little credible material. What they tend to find in its place is – ironically – denial: ‘Take those nasty facts away! We don’t want to hear any more of them!’
It’s sad, though, that you have to resort to the familiar and false ad hominem claims that AGW sceptics are all ‘corporate lobbyists’ rather than attempting to deal with the facts they present. ‘Guilt by association’ is hardly an objective judgement. And when did ‘famous’ become a perjorative?
For the record, I AM a scientist — at least, I have two degrees with ‘science’ in their titles — which has no bearing whatever on my ability to evaluate good and bad arguments. The facts are reasonably clear, and any bright person should be able to make up their minds on the issue with no more than a little research and a modicum of common sense.
But this is getting off topic.
Debating climate change on Teleread is probably a futile task. (That is why I pointed you to skepticalscience.com to do it there instead).
From my perspective, a climate change news aggregator that has permanent links to Sen. Inhofe’s office and Anthony Watts and others is akin in my mind to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League home page containing prominent links to neo-Nazi websites. Yes, from a purely academic point of view, it may be necessary to reference such a site on occasion, but to have prominent permanent links to these sites implies that they have legitimate contributions to make to the debate. These two people certainly do not. I know Professor Dutton and his colleagues are thoughtful people; maybe they are unaware of how poor quality some of their blogroll links are? (Dutton teaches in New Zealand). I’ve seen serious charges of misrepresentation of evidence about both those people, in addition to probably several others on the blogroll. Several of these sites linked to have zero credibility in the debate in the United States.
If you want to expose people to policy questions about time tables or solutions or economic impact, fine… CCD can serve that worthy purpose. As mentioned, many of Climate Change Daily’s links are simply about economic policy issues, not basic science).
As I said, it’s really easy for a denialist to throw all sorts of random links to cast doubt on established science. It’s far harder for a denialist to show that there is no risk of global warming or that the harmful effects are unlikely. Again, I’ll refer you to my previous link about whether there is a consensus, especially the the Naomi Oreskes survey . Outside the arena of peer-reviewed journals, mainstream media frequently gives the impression that AGW is “controversial” or “unproven.”
Although consensus exists for the basic science, climate change solutions are highly controversial, and climate change predictive models are still highly controversial. But a good third of CCD’s blogroll links (in my rough estimate) are misinformation factories instead of being focused on legitimate areas of debate. Climateprogress.org and realclimate.org spend a lot of time pointing out the inaccuracies in many of these sources listed on their blogroll.