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What is sustainability?
Sustainable --
Is it this fire?
I think we understand that any one thing in isolation we could live
with. It could even be a good thing.
But sustainability, of course, is about what we all do,
the choices we all make, collectively.
It's about
how many Earths it would take if everybody
in North America-if everybody in the world -lived at the same standard of living
that I do
if everybody built a fire like this.
And that's what makes sustainability especially challenging.
It's about what we all do together
and it's about collective action.
So we talk about the challenges of sustainability, the challenges about us
all working together. What do we really mean? I think there's three
main points.
The first boils down
to value.
Look at this guitar over here --
what's its value?
what's its value to you? Maybe you don't play the guitar
so it has no value to you.
If you gave me a thousand dollars would I give you that guitar?
This guitar has been with me for about twenty years, so I'd probably keep the
guitar even if you give me a thousand dollars.
I paid four hundred dollars for that guitar back in 1991.
If you bought a similar guitar today
would it costs more? Would cost less?
Values change over time. Values are different
to different people.
You think about the difficulties valuing that guitar over here...
and let's
extend that analogy to what's around us. You know, what's the value of this
wood? What's the value of the trees?
What's the value of a stable climate? These are tricky questions.
And different people
are going to have different answers.
And if we think that maybe the air is not being taken care of, or the climate
isn't being taken care of, or
the water isn't being taken care of the way we want it to be,
then we can ask the question
why doesn't the market take care of it?
And, well, that's a
very common question to ask. Why doesn't the market take care of the environment?
Well, the market is just us.
It's a reflection of our values.
So the market sets prices
and people set values.
And the values we place on the environment are
something we learn about in school.
It's not the sort of everyday decision that we make that we don't think twice
about.
If I'm going to go out to dinner with my wife
and to take a night off we might decide to go to downtown Ann Arbor, go to a nice
restaurant. Maybe we're going to spend sixty dollars on dinner
Or on another night, we're in a hurry and we throw something in the
microwave and barely spend anything on dinner, maybe even skip the meal.
These types of decisions come very naturally, very instinctually.
But, if i'm going to
ride my bike to work for a commute, I'm going to live in a certain area that allows me
to do that...
well, these are very heady decisions.
There are trade-offs associated with those decisions
and decisions about carbon dioxide and climate, these are things you
learn about the school.
Who would have ever imagined being born and expecting that the gas you exhale,
CO2, would somehow lead
to a warmer planet?
Obviously it's not because of people exhaling -- it's about
fires like this and maybe nine billion people making fires like this
metaphorically of course, with their cars,
with the electricity they use, etc.
The values we place on the environment are something we learn about school. It's
something that we need to be educated about
and it means that
it's a challenge
to address these questions, these sustainability questions.
The third area is about the distribution of cost versus benefits.
When I decide to
build this fire
you can see the emissions
coming from the fire.
These are emissions that everybody shares.
Nobody's bottling these emissions up
and bringing them and putting them back in my house
for me and my wife and my children to enjoy all by ourselves. They're shared.
And we tend to act differently in groups when we share things
than when we own them individually.
So for instance, imagine yourself
being on a ranch --
you on a ranch.
And you have cattle on your ranch. Just picture for a moment
how many cattle are out there on your ranch.
Are there shoulder to shoulder to shoulder cattle?
Well if they could be, you'd make more money.
But of course you're imagining that they're spread out
because they each need pasture.
So you have in your mind automatically figured
the optimal number of cattle
for your ranch.
When now imagine, instead of that plot of land being just yours,
it's shared by ten neighbors.
Do you imagine the same amount of cattle being out there being shared?
Of course not. Everybody brings their own cattle
and next thing you know, the areas is over grazed.
This is what's called the tragedy of the commons.
We tend to act differently when we share things than when we own them
individually.
Imagine that you're going out to lunch with a group of people.
There are two things on the menu: There's hamburger
and there's pheasant.
Hamburger cost $5 and pheasant costs $105.
And
everybody's paying their own way
and
you know, if you're a college student, somebody fresh out of school,
you're probably getting the hamburger because you can't afford the pheasant.
Everybody's paying their own way.
Well let's
change the nature of the game a little bit: Let's add up the bill and divide
by the number of people there.
You think some people are getting pheasant now?
We tend to make different decisions in groups than we do as individuals.
Again, nobody's bottling up the emissions from this fire and just putting them
back into my house for me and my wife my children to enjoy later.
The emissions are being shared. So I maybe feel differently about this fire than I
would if this fire were in the house.
This is the challenge of sustainability. It's about what we do in groups relative
to what we do
as individuals.
So if we act differently in groups than we do as individuals
we have to question
how we treat things we might share --
the air, the water
the land. We share these resources.
Because we share them we may just like the pheasant, just like the cattle, we
may tend to over-consume them.
And that's the challenge of sustainability.
So while climate change was a story about
what we know and what we don't know,
air pollution is really a story about what we can see and what we can't see.
One of the big differences between climate change in air pollution in
general
is that, you
would be hard-pressed to imagine that
say fifty thousand people last year died prematurely from
climate change
in the U.S. Or
that in Europe, maybe three hundred thousand people died prematurely
due to climate change, or around the world, two million people die
prematurely due to climate change.
Hard to imagine that that actually happened but, with air pollution
that's actually the story.
And air pollution comes in many many different forms. Particulate matter is
one of the most obvious forms that we can actually see. The effects of particulate
matter may range from the benign to the dangerous.
From the benign side, you might notice a fresh layer of snow in your
backyard becomes dirty looking after a few days.
Or in this area you might notice
the ability after a few days to swipe your finger on a window
sill or on a railing and you notice
it's rather dusty and that
dust probably came from the air.
The effect of that might be asthma in kids. It might be premature mortality in
adults.
And these are things we can see. Smog is another form of pollution that we can
see.
You might think of a brown soupy air.
I'll never forget the first time I visited my folks after they
move to Orange county in California.
I looked around on the first day and I thought the surroundings just looked like
another suburban area.
Then it happened a rain that night, it was rather unusual for the area.
The next day, suddenly you can see Los Angeles and you can see the mountains.
That's obviously air pollution.
Smog is an air pollutant that comes from
tail pipes, it comes from re-fueling your car at the gas station
You might smell some of that
-- it's called volatile organic compounds -- as you fill up your tank.
Or lighter fluid from your barbeque or paint fumes. These fumes
combined with products of combustion, from industrial processes,
from traffic,
and create this smog.
A large component of that smog is ozone that actually something we can't see,
but also
photochemical oxidants, those are the
constituents of smog that we can see.
And smog can be very harmful as well. Some of the effects
might be benign. You go out for a run,
and you notice your chest is somewhat tight after you go for the run.
Of course, smog can lead to cardiovascular stress as well and premature mortality
So of course ozone is one of the constituents of smog we can't see.
There other pollutants we can't see. Carbon monoxide is one that we might be
familiar with. We all know not to run the engine of our car
in the garage with the door shut because carbon monoxide actually
competes with oxygen for sites and hemoglobin reducing oxygen distribution
in the body and can lead to a form of suffocation.
So we've talked about air pollutants that we can see and those we can't see.
It gets really interesting where the two come together. We could think about
sulfur dioxide. So sulfur being emitted from from combustion or industrial processes.
Sulfur dioxide is actually fairly toxic. It's toxic to people, it's toxic
to vegetation
When sulfur dioxide actually combines with particulate matter, you end up
seeing cardiovascular stress, you see hospital beds getting pretty
busy
when you get the combination of those two pollutants coming together.
So the typical solution to the sulfur dioxide issue is actually to raise
smokestacks. So you see very tall smokestacks.
The old phrase says 'dilution is the solution to pollution.' So if you raise
stacks high enough
you won't notice the sulfur dioxide on the ground, and that's true
But what happens over time is that sulfur dioxide
become sulfate, SO4, and sulphuric acid and that's where the acid
rain issue comes from.
So that acid rain is a little bit less of a human health issue than it is
an issue for agriculture, it's certainly an issue for forests,
it's an issue for for lake. Acid rain can travel over a very large distances
The sulfur emissions from detroit might affect lakes in the
northeast at reducing their ph and affecting fish life
in those regions.
So sulfur dioxide becomes acid rain due to these tall stacks. So the solution
the sulfur dioxide was to raise the stacks
and that obviously puts sulfur dioxide high in the atmosphere.
But you don't need tall stacks to get pollutants high up in the atmosphere. So
very stable molecules
CFC's, which you might have heard of, get high up into the
stratosphere even -- about forty thousand feet -- due to their stability.
CFC's come from refrigerants and they were actually
a solution to a problem as well.
Back in the 1930's refrigerants used to be explosive or
smelly, harmful, dangerous.
CFC's were a solution by being very stable, inexpensive, their molecules allowed
refrigeration to become far more widespread. But of course as these
molecules got into the sky it turned out to be so stable that they
would end up in the stratosphere.
There, they actually deplete
ozone. And the problem with that, of course,
while we don't like ozone on the ground is a constituent of smog -- it's
harmful to people, and to agriculture and forests -- up in the stratosphere
it actually protects us from UV rays protecting us from skin cancer
and protecting agriculture from UV as well
So CFC's are an example of the solution to one problem causing
another problem. Now there actually is a happy ending with CFC's. This is one of
the examples where society has gotten together
and has actually banned the use of CFC's and are a trajectory
to eliminate the emission of ozone-depleting chemicals.
And, it would be wonderful to imagine
another clean air act in the future that actually eliminates things like
smog, eliminates
sulfur compounds and the other air pollutants that we've talked about
carbon monoxide, etc.
Engineers can do a lot to eliminate air pollution
from engineering decisions from design as we're gonna talk about a
little bit later.
Air pollution is, thankfully, one of those problems that can largely be
reversible.
Air is very abundant, so if we simply stop emitting the pollutants, over time
the air will be clean again. And even that ozone hole, due to those
chlorofluorocarbons or CFC's, is beginning to
repair itself.
There are other issues like climate change that are much more difficult to
reverse or as we're going to see
when we go up river on the Huron
water pollution and water resources, this is a much more difficult problem to simply
reverse.
So we moved upstream from Detroit now to the banks of the beautiful Huron river.
A place adjacent to the Great Lakes that have twenty one percent of the
world's fresh water,
at least surface water.
And it's a place where we don't usually think about water scarcity
Even in North America we've got about
well let's say about eight percent of the world's population and we have about
say fifteen percent of the world's
freshwater that's both surface water
and groundwater
but I think we all know that the story isn't just about quantity
and we can think about whether we'd let our kids swim in this water
or
whether we'd let them drink it
or eat the fish out of it.
This begs some questions about what is the quality of our water.
It begs questions about what we're doing to protect our water resources for
today and for future generations. We think about sustainability
wasn't long ago when we talked about rivers being on fire in the nineteen-sixties
sewage in our Great Lakes and clearly we've come a long way in those dimensions.
But it's a question, you know, what quality of water do we need?
What quantity of water do we need and not every place in the world is as well-endowed
as we are with respect to the quantity of fresh water.
We don't have to go much farther than the Southwest where not long ago
they were talking up pumping water from the great Lakes
just to have the availability.
And there's a nexus between water quality
and quality, it doesn't take a lot of pollution to foul up
a water
that is scarce right? Dilution is the solution to pollution. We've got
pollution, just add water
and eventually it'll be dilute enough.
Well that's certainly not going to do in places where water is scarce and here in
the U.S. we have
technology in engineered systems
that are in place to protect our
water resources in the quality, but not everywhere in the world though.
And we can look at a place like Asia where maybe they have
thirty percent of the world's freshwater and sixty percent of people.
So
places of high population density,
places with
a lot of industrial development and without the engineered controls
that we might see here
in North America.
So what does sustainability mean for water?
It means access,
not just the physical availability
but high-quality water
and a water that people have economic access to.
And so we think about the water that's just around us
it's probably cheaper to simply protect what we have than to
develop new technologies to reclaim water that we've already spent
and polluted.
So materials are really a story about now versus later.
We have enough materials today to keep the economy running, as the population grows it might be a bit more of an issue.
But we have economics to take care of us in large measure.
As we run scarce on some materials we tend to look for more
sources of materials, we tend to find them. Even in the case of oil where we're consuming
so much oil everyday we tend to go explore and find some more of it.
So as the price goes up we go out, we look for
new sources, the price comes back down. Now
when things truly become scarce the price goes up stays up, then engineers are pretty
good at finding alternatives.
So sustainability
when it comes to materials isn't just about running out of stuff
actually the issue is much more
complex, it's about economics how much do the materials cost? It's about going out
and finding more materials.
And just because the material might be available on earth doesn't mean it's
available to us as engineers
It's maybe located in a part of the world where we don't have
access to it and we certainly know that materials have been
a source of conflict around the world whether it's oil in the Middle East
or it's
maybe it's water in Africa.
There have been conflicts over materials over the ages.
So we can talk about oil today or we could talk about conflicts over water
today,
lithium of the future, we talk about electric vehicles and there's a question about where the future of lithium is going to come from
and whether there might be conflicts over that.
So we can talk about now versus later, we can also talk about here versus there.
We can talk about the toxicology of materials as well.
We're surrounded by toxic materials even in our cars and
they've been reports on
lead, antimony, bromine
in our vehicles or
pesticides. There's a concept called body burden
where you can basically take a sample of your hair they can take
samples of breast milk they find all kinds of toxic materials
in the human body.
The question is whether that's going to be an issue or not. Known toxics, if you
take lead, of course we know that's
particularly toxic but the question is what are the effects and in what doses and
that's largely an unknown. So when we think about materials we can think about
their availability, we can think about their toxicology, we can think about
whether we have access to those materials, we can think about price
and we should also think about where where we put materials at the end of their life.
Nobody wants that landfill in their backyard.
So siting of new landfills is an issue.
We can't recycle everything, we can't remanufacturer everything today so
we have continuing needs for landfills.
Those landfills tend to be put in
those regions that tend to be economically disadvantaged.
Those areas that tend to be poor.
We think about recycling, a lot of the electronics recycling
we see circuit boards being shipped overseas
low-income countries where they actually need the money
a lot of those materials being recycled and then shipped back over to the
industrialized countries, are used over there.
So when it comes to materials it's not just about running out of stuff, there are all
these other issues that we need to consider.
So we started off talking about the challenge of sustainability when we have
shared resources.
We tend to
think differently in groups as we do
as individuals
and we went through some of the challenges. We talked about air pollution,
we talked about water pollution,
we talked about climate change, we talked about materials
and moving forward now
the good news is that we've got solutions to all of these problems.
Engineering, engineering design can address each one of these issues.
Materials, conservation, recycling, re-manufacturing,
solutions for air pollution, solutions for water pollution, hopefully
as we move forward we'll have a chance to
discuss these solutions that are going on in engineering colleges
all around the country and all around the globe.
So the challenge is less about the availability of technology to solve some
of the problems we talked about and a lot more to do with what happens when the rest of
the world
begins to develop in the way that we have here in the United States.
So if you ever stopped to wonder if everybody in the world lived at the standard of
living that we do here in the United States, how many planets of resources
that might take?
I stopped to do that about ten years ago and actually you can do that
yourself, there are websites where you can make these calculations
like myfootprint.org or what have you.
But when I went and did this calculation I was surprised to learn
that if everybody in the world lived at the standard of living that I do,
it would take about six planets of resources
and that's actually a pretty typical number. If you look at the average U.S.
citizen, that's about right.
So we took some action. We began to use less energy, turn the thermostat down,
drive less, maybe ride my bike to work,
eat less, etc.
And a few months ago I actually went and made that calculation again and I
was very pleased to find out that
that burden
if everybody in the world lived at our current
level of resource consumption would be about three planets so
we basically cut our burden or our footprint in half.
When I began to dig into the calculations,
why exactly that was, I was actually surprised to learn it had very little to do
with flying less and driving less, although those things helped.
What really made the difference is the fact that our family expanded.
We went from two people in our family to five people in family.
We now have two daughters a son that weren't in the previous calculation,
and so our load, our burden, our resource consumption hasn't increased
very much
but the family expanded and therefore we went from about six planets to under three.
Now naturally these kids are gonna grow up
they're gonna have footprints of their own
and that actually begs the question: what happens when the rest of the world
begins to develop? We've seen
population growth is actually rather robust right now.
When I was born there were about four billion people on the planet. Now there are
about seven billion.
And we're on our way to about nine billion.
In the mean time we see that not everybody of course lives at the
standard of living that we do here in the U.S.
So the last time the United Nations development program did an analysis,
about twenty percent of the world's population was found to use
about ninety percent of the resources.
The bottom ten, twenty percent of the economic ladder were actually using only
about one percent of the resources.
So when we think about it, the reason things are sustainable for the moment
are that not everybody in the world lives at the standard of living
that we do.
So the question is then
when the rest of the world develops and aims to achieve the
standard of living that we have here in the United States, what's gonna happen?
And we can do some simple math to show that actually
the current path that were on is not sustainable.
There are about three hundred million people in the United States.
Now if the average U.S. citizen requires six planets of resources,
if everybody lived at that standard of living,
we can do some simple math.
And instead of six planets let's just say it's three planets it'll make the
math a little bit easier. So there's three hundred million people in the U.S.
and if everybody lived at the U.S.
standard of living it would require three planets of resources so that's one
planet per hundred million people.
As we look at population growth, let's just look over the last year or so.
It's now two 2012, over the last year the world's population has
grown by about a hundred million people,
so clearly we're not on a sustainable trajectory.
Again we come back to the good news. We've got the technology to reduce our
resource consumption,
to reduce our pollution per unit of goods and services we produce.
So we can break down the sustainability challenge into this simple equation,
I equals P times A times T. So the I here is the environmental impact these
are the challenges we were talking about the air pollution, the water pollution,
climate change,
materials consumption, those are all impacts and it doesn't matter which
impact or all of them that we're talking about,
that impact is equal to the population
times affluence. Now affluence, we can talk about that in terms of being
gross domestic product per person. You see if I talk about gross domestic product
per person and multiply that by population,
I've essentially got gross domestic product there.
Now the third letter is technology,
and we can talk about that as being the environmental impact per unit of
goods and services that we produce. So we can talk about the
environmental impact per GDP, so if we multiply
population times gross domestic product per person
times environmental impact
per unit GDP
environmental impact equals environmental impact.
This is sometimes called the IPAT equation.
Now let's look at what this equation means.
We've talked about population and the fact that it's increasing,
and we've talked about the
affluence, not just today around the world
but in the future as well.
And this is a term obviously we would like to see increasing.
So we multiply p times a we know that we're going to have an
increasing
amount of impact.
So if we want to address these sustainability challenges, really it's about t.
It's about technology.
It's about the environmental impact per unit of goods and services we produce.
That's a technology question. We have technology to reduce those environmental impacts.
But it's not just a technology question, it is the degree to which that
technology is deployed. We have solar panels, we have windmills, we've got
electric cars, the question is really about
why we don't use them.
And so it's not just about designing the technology but getting that
technology into practice.
And getting that technology in practice is an economic question, it's a
social question and it's an environmental question, which is why we
often called this a triple bottom-line. It's about environment, it's about people,
and it's about the economy.
so we'll call that the triple bottom line.
You know back in the seventies and eighties who used to think well we've
got an environmental problem let's let
the environmental engineers take care of it. They will clean up the smokestacks
they'll clean up the pipes going into the river and everything will be
okay.
We realized in the nineties that
maybe ben franklin was right, you know, an ounce of prevention may be worth
a pound of cure.
So we thought about pollution prevention, let's get the manufacturing engineers
involved to prevent the pollution in the first place.
Then win the two thousands we realized, you know would be a lot easier
to prevent pollution if we designed the products
to avoid the pollution in the first place.
So we got into design for a time.
Here in two thousand ten and beyond we're thinking about sustainability, we're
thinking about sustainable enterprise not just the design of the technology
but the deployment of technology
and the regulatory systems and policies that can make that technology profitable.
So when we think about sustainable design we think about
enterprise, we are thinking about
triumphs.
Sustainable design triumphs.
Avoiding traps,
avoiding tradeoffs and working our way towards triumphs, as we're gonna talk
about here moving forward.
Traps, trade-offs, and triumphs are really all-around us. Let's start by talking
about what a trap is. A trap is a design or a system that is marketed or presented as being sustainable or good for the environment but it's not really good for the environment at all.
One example that comes to mind might be
the example of ethanol based fuels for vehicles.
Ethanol when it comes from corn actually requires as much energy
if not more to produce than
your gallon of gasoline and with respect to greenhouse gas emissions
it's basically a wash or it could even be more than a gallon gasoline.
So when it comes to ethanol it's all about where you get
that ethanol from.
So a triumph works for the triple bottom-line, so it's some
design, a product,
an innovation, a service that
works for business, it works for the environment, it works for people.
So examples of this might be
a flat screen monitor.
You may remember the old days when we had cathode-ray tubes on our desks with our
computers and nobody seemed to want them but there was no alternative.
When you actually look at that technology
it was very energy
consuming, it was
full of toxic materials.
Then these flat-panel displays came around
and suddenly these monitors had a lot lower burden with respect to their
toxics,
a lot less energy consumption,
and they took off in the market.
So it was a product that people actually wanted that was good
for the environment in so many ways.
Then of course we realized that they're affordable
and we could use more space on our computer desktops and next thing you
know,
there's two or three screens on our desks.
And that's actually the danger of a triumph,
is over-consumption.
So you've got a product, people want it, it's good for the environment,
and the next thing you know it's being over-consumed.
So
while we look for triumphs in sustainable design there's always that danger
that
it's over-consumed or it's
a victim of its own success.
So we think about other potential triumphs like LED lighting,
which is coming online. Today, an LED lightbulb
might cost you 20 dollars.
ten years maybe it costs less than a regular lightbulb
or at least in that ballpark.
When that happens given their efficiency
you'll have a solution that's good for economics, it would be good for
the environment due to its increased efficiency
its ability to light large spaces with very little energy
and it would be good for people too because people want lighting.
It's been said that we might have a lot more lighting
in the world if it were more efficient and more cost-effective.
So thinking about
triumphs then,
we could ask what other types of technologies would fit into that
category.
We talk about solar, we talk about wind,
today these aren't exactly triumphs, they certainly haven't replaced
fossil fuels to a great extent they've been heavily subsidized.
The hope is that as we use more of these technologies
they will become more affordable, they will take off.
We started off by
talking about ethanol as a trap
and as we think about solar, we think about wind we think about the need for
renewable electricity systems,
there's a question about whether cellulosic ethanol, a new form,
not ethanol based on corn but
ethanol based on
switchgrass or other
types of
*** products that are generally waste today.
And if we could develop that technology where these waste
biomass, cellulosic biomass could actually be
converted into electricity at an
affordable rate
we'd likely have a triumph coming down the road.
So cellulosic biomass is an example of a closed loop system, if you think
about growing switch grass, that switchgrass needs carbon from the atmosphere so it
pulls carbon
out of the atmosphere and
becomes a fuel and then we burn it and it goes back in the atmosphere.
Closed-loop
technologies actually have
significant promise as triumphs.
It's not just in the fuel sector, you think about closed-loop manufacturing,
remanufacturing, you think about cell phones from the 1990's,
they weren't quite cell phones, they were suitcase phones and brick phones and satellite phones,
and those technologies now have become so miniaturized
that they really can't get much smaller. You don't want a cell phone smaller than the
size of your hand for instance. What it does is create an opportunity
if the technology were there or the systems were there
if the supply chain incentives were there, you can imagine a phone that you actually
keep over multiple generations but after your contract expires
or even sooner if the technology is available. Just open it up
change the processor, maybe change the screen, maybe change the battery and you can
actually conserve a lot of material, a lot of the manufacturing
burden that went into that phone.
So closed-loop manufacturing is another example of a potential triumph down the road.
Thinking about materials,
it surprises people to think about
aluminum as not being as recycled as generally
perceived, so what I mean is, we think of our beverage cans as being made out of
aluminum, we recycle that.
But actually it turns out if you look at aluminum it's only used in the
economy about three times before it ends up in a landfill or somehow leaking
out of the economy.
So we can think about closed-loop material systems,
more advanced recycling, so
if we have a aluminum intensive vehicle that gets very good fuel economy because
it's light,
you know, today if you have an aluminum intensive and you
scrap it at the end of its life,
basically that aluminum is going to be downgraded, maybe it's going to become a casting for an
engine.
After that it might escape the economy or it might end up in a product before
it escapes the economy.
But in a future world where the incentives exist,
a triumph might be an example of being able to convert a body-light
aluminum intensive vehicle into another aluminum intensive vehicle.
Where the cost lines up,
the material lines up so of course aluminum has a very significant greenhouse gas
footprint, an electricity footprint to create,
so if you could
close the loop on that material cycle it would go a long way towards
reducing environmental burden
both in production and in the use phase of a vehicle, given the lightweight potential of aluminum
and the strength of the material.
garden
Another thing is that
a triumph doesn't need to be a product. Like I mentioned it could be a service, it could be
a policy.
Think about a regulation that
might allow businesses, power utilities
to internalize some costs of
greenhouse gas emissions for instance,
pollutant emissions, mercury emissions, what have you.
And that sounds like increased cost but there's some operating costs
benefits to renewable technologies so if you think about solar electricity, once
you've got it in place and the sun is shining, the operating costs can be fairly low. The same
goes for wind. There are maintenance costs of course but it's not
like you have fuel costs. So a policy that might encourage in a smart way
a renewable electricity future might also classify as a triumph.
One of the interesting things about traps, trade-offs, and triumphs
is that
they're dynamic.
Definitions change over time, technologies change over
time and what might be a trap at one point
might be a triumph at a later point.
That's a song called going through the motions
by a band called The Miracles of Life and
I think the idea of going to the motions is the crux
of the sustainability challenge.
So when we think about going to the motions and sustainability the real question
for us is whether we're going to keep doing things the way we are,
or whether we're going to use our engineering talents to
make a better life not only for ourselves but for future generations so
they're not at risk of not being able to live at the standards that that we live
today. That they have access to resources, material resources
climate resources, air, water,
with the same ease that we do today.
So really what it means is for the mechanical engineering it means
thinking about the types of
energy systems,
mobility systems that
we have today but re-envisioning them.
Thinking system-wide, thinking about our friends on central campus and what
they can bring to the table and not just to have the technology but the context
of the technology. If it's mobility maybe it's not just about the cars but it's
about transportation,
it's about multiple modes, it's about the future of our cities. If it's civil
engineering maybe we're thinking about buildings and their place.
Thinking about much smarter buildings that use energy much more
efficiently, that recover the water
that those facilities use. If it's industrial processing and
waste water treatment maybe it's future system or we can take wastewater and
treat that waste water in a way that not only cleans the water but it
also produces energy and produces fertilizer.
If it's the chemical engineer it's new ways of producing energy carriers and
batteries that will allow us to store energy from renewable sources
in times like night where we may not have that solar energy available to us, the wind
isn't blowing.
If it's the computer scientist it's the software and applications that enable all that.
If it's the electrical engineer it's about that computer that really
doesn't require that much energy,
server farms that are really running lean.
And it goes on and on from there.
Engineering is about technology and sustainability is about technology
so we as engineers not only have to design that technology but to do that
with an eye
for what society really needs not just today
but in the future.