Paper - Sustainability Agenda

Sustainability Agenda

        What is the most important thing engineers can do to help realize a sustainable energy future? The most important role is for engineers to provide their services in different areas and professions. They should spread their influence through the sectors of politics and management in order to help companies and the rest of the nation realize what sustainability entails. Although spreading information allows for people to make informed rational decisions, what is more effective is when someone who already has that information is put in a position that can promote a sustainability agenda.

        First we must address the concept of rationality. Rational decisions involve complete knowledge of the situation and making a choice based on the most benefits and least disadvantages. One of the most common obstacles to this is simply that the general population on average isn’t informed about topics and issues, in this case sustainability. There are multiple ways to approach this. The first way is best handled by educators, which is to teach the subject. This is the most direct way to address the problem which is to directly tell people about it and help them learn about the subject. This is a huge role and vital to the sustainability cause however, it is not the primary role of the engineer. They’re not put in a position where they can influence change by teaching the next generation, but they can educate their coworkers and other members in the workplace.

        Currently there are restrictions built into the social structure of the workplace. In general, most engineers do not get to make high level decisions. Level refers to the level of design that the engineer is operating at. Low level design is where the majority of engineers work, which is on a small component of the overall project, for example managing tcp/ip or udp connections in computer networking. An upper level design for the same project would be something like working on the application skype and detailing how it groups multiple people into one phone call. This would be an upper level design specification or project. More computer engineers are required for the low level design and maintenance of the program, and fewer are needed for the upper level decisions. Those high level decisions are generally reserved for the more experienced employees in the field.

        However, since sustainability is a recent concern, the experienced employee’s in the workplace don’t have the same focus in their education on these kind of ethical and long term concerns. Thats why it’s important for newcomers to all fields of engineers to be more vocal about sustainability. In the workplace, there are often forums and associations where engineers can talk and share concerns about a project. Normally this involves meeting tight constraints on time to market, or on fulfilling design specifications. However, it’s important for sustainability to become worked into the main components in the design process rather than as an afterthought. New engineers must have the courage to try and promote sustainability to management and higher level engineers who can influence policy on those levels.

        The other way is simply to be in those positions with a modern engineering background. Engineers who have been trained to think in terms of sustainability have to take an active role to control those upper level decisions that are usually reserved for senior members and management. This is simply a matter of time as engineers progresses in their career, they are able to gain more influence over projects as well as climb up the corporate ladder. The reason this is a necessary step beyond simply trying to inform upper management is because of an issue pointed out in The Ethics of Sustainable Resources by Donald Scherer. The current management is already set in their ways. They are already in a high position and often wealthy, so they are buffered from economic shocks and will be among the last people to feel the effects of the sustainable energy crisis because they can buy their way out of issues. This means that the main way to make your voice heard, is to put yourself in a position of power. This allows for the company to head in a sustainable direction because you have the training and access to information to make good rational decisions about the subject of sustainability.

        Another area where engineers need to make their voice heard is in the political sphere. Most politicians aren’t qualified to speak on scientific and mathematical matters because their background did not include that training, since they mostly consist of political science or law majors. Engineers on the other hand have the training and judgement to analyze scientific and mathematical data which is necessary to properly discuss sustainability issues.

        Luegehnbiehl in his article on Ethical Principles for Engineers in a Global Environment lays out foundational principles of engineering ethics which give us reasons why it is necessary for engineers to put themselves on the political field. The principle of engineering competence say that engineers should strive to carry out work that they are capable of. In this case it is dangerous to let those with a pretense of knowledge rather than formal training make decisions about a subject they aren’t qualified to debate about. This means that we need some engineers to extend themselves beyond their own fields in order to exert their influence on different sectors in society to properly promote a sustainability agenda.

Paper - Ethical Motivation for Sustainability

Ethical Motivation for Sustainability

        The engineering profession holds a large amount of responsibility to promote sustainability because of both the knowledge and skills engineers have. Engineering transforms our raw materials into usable products, which means that it’s responsible for consuming the vast majority of our resources. Engineers are some of the few people aware of what goes on in the process of manufacturing, and their possible consequences. Therefore that knowledge binds them by duty to be responsible for both the direct and indirect consequences of their actions.

        Why should engineers care about sustainability? Here we have to establish the ideas of justice and distribution. If we care only about the present, there isn’t really any reason for engineers to concern themselves about sustainability since there are enough resources right now to be distributed among humanity to support enterprise and construction. However, this will not always be the case. Sustainability means that the rate at which we use resources is less than the rate that resource replenishes itself. Since we are using resources in an unsustainable way through the use of fossil fuels, we are facing a crisis where our civilization will eventually run out of usable resources. Estimates show that this will be sooner rather than later. This means that we have to worry about distribution of resources in a temporal way in order to preserve intergenerational justice.


        Intergenerational justice is the idea that we have an obligation to preserve the livelihood of future generations, which is an extension of the golden rule. The golden rule of ethics is the idea that we should treat others the same way that we would want to be treated ourselves, and it is found in every society on earth in one form or another. Intergenerational justice applies this not only to the people who live right now but the people who will live. If our generation uses up so many resources that it impinges on the ability for future generations to survive it would be unethical and a violation of the golden rule. A journal article Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice by Brian Barry goes over the specifics of intergenerational justice. Intergenerational justice assumes that we want progress for humanity as a whole. If we reverted to living like cavemen, sure we would solve the sustainability crisis, but it would not be just. Justice involves ensuring that quality of life of future generations is either equal or better than it is now. This is why we have to examine the engineering profession that create products and services since those items often increase quality of life.


        What role does the engineer serve in society? Alastair Gunn in his Integrity and the Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers notes that engineering is a unique profession with its own specialized concerns. Engineering projects are expected to be 100% successful, something that is not generally expected from a profession. For example, we expect that once a bridge is built it will stand and not fail. Engineers are unique in that they deal with the concerns of a large body of users, rather than singular interactions. An example of this is that a doctor visibly meets with their patients and interacts with them. On the other hand an engineer who works on a project is usually only in charge of a small aspect of it, and interacts with the user indirectly after the product has been assembled, purchased, and then used. This means that there are many layers of separation between the engineer and his end customer, which makes it difficult to see what responsibilities engineers have to society and their customers. However, the engineer must be able to live up to the expectation of 100% success with their projects, as it can often lead to disaster such as in the example case of a faulty bridge.


        So even though a single engineer can only control a particular aspect of a project, it is their role in society to make sure that projects are as successful as possible. Success in this case must adhere to the ideas of intergenerational justice in order to remain ethical because of the impact engineering has on future generations. Thus in order to live up to the role in society that is expected of them engineers must promote sustainable policies and practices.

Paper - Obstacles of Sustainability

Obstacles of Sustainability

The greatest obstacle to obtaining a sustainable energy future lies in the the organizational structure of our society in both a social and economic sense. It is currently difficult to promote new thought into our societal systems because large companies have become so established on a global scale. The central issues in design and development involve design constraints and time to market. Companies rarely take into account the long term environmental effects of their actions, which needs to become part of the normal operations of more companies. In addition, sustainability is an investment into the future, which contrasts with the in the present mindset of a market economy.

The first obstacle we need to address is the inflexibility of a market economy. In theory the free market allows for everyone to compete without governmental restrictions. This allows for products and services to freely compete letting the best service win out.  Although this seems like a system that gives everyone a fair chance at success, this isn’t always the case. The market economy is fair when a technology is in development, however it becomes inflexible once technologies have been established. Once a company becomes established, it becomes very difficult for newcomers to break into that market. 

The issues stems from capital. Older companies have more money and resources to do further research and development for their product. This means that their product will likely be better suited for its end result than a new company which limits change. Another benefit of having extra capital is that it gives the company the option to buy up smaller companies in order to reduce competition. Examples of companies that were able to achieve this kind of domination in a market are the companies Microsoft and Bell, both of which used to hold an almost complete monopoly in their respective markets. Although now this dominance has been somewhat broken, it took the intervention of the government to reduce the power of Bell Labs, and drastically different design goals to allow companies like Apple, or heavy utilization of open source products like Linux to compete with Microsoft.

This concept comes from the Theory of Innovation which states that a social system is made up of five different kinds of people: the innovators, the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and the laggards. In the field of sustainable energy sources for energy generation already exist with  the coal and petroleum industries, which puts us in a social system where people are mostly made of the late majority. The late majority are people who are comfortable and accustomed with existing products. Because they are already comfortable with the situation, they are resistant to change, and this includes not only the fossil fuel companies, but also their customers which includes the vast majority of the entire population. Most people already use electricity and gas in order to live in their homes and drive around for work or leisure. This means that sustainable energy, is in that difficult stage where the market is normally unfriendly towards it as well as having to deal with competition from large already established industries.

In order to make sustainable energy viable in the market, there has to be some kind of incentive socially and economically. The social motivation is thankfully already there, and simply needs time and effort to grow. Forms of media ranging from presentations by presidents, to books such as the post carbon reader series serve to inform the public that we are in an energy crisis and that there is a need for alternative sustainable energy sources. Heinberg’s article What is Sustainability in the post carbon reader gives us a set of axioms explaining why sustainability is necessary. His first axiom is that “Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.” This points out the fact that unsustainable practices, even if you are for some reason skeptical of the effects of global warming, will still result in the loss of resources, and the potential for societal collapse because of our limited resources.

More scientific articles such as Smil’s Science, Energy, Ethics and Civilization show us the immediacy of these issues. We are already hitting the point where our consumption of resources is hitting Eath’s natural limit and can only last for about 1 or 2 more generations without change. So we know that social motivation for sustainability exists. However, why hasn’t this been effective in motivating action? The answer is twofold.

First we also need to worry about the economic aspect because in order for technologies to be implemented, someone must be able to make a profit from that technology. The issue is that since alternative energy restructures existing technology, and is still in development, the initial cost of most sustainable energy generation is much higher than conventional fossil fuel generation. A good example is electrical wind generation. Wind power has historically been so cost inefficient that generators have only been built during the years where the government gives out huge tax/rebate incentives. Whenever those incentives run out, construction immediately halts as it is no longer profitable. Although this is a more extreme case, sustainable energy has trouble becoming profitable.

Secondly, sustainability is a long term concern. In general people are concerned with their day to day activities, not what will occur 20+ years in the future, and even when we are, the scope of our concerns are usually limited to our immediate family, such as our children. Sustainability concerns the survival of humans as a race, rather than concerning the individual or their families. This means that the sheer scope of sustainability hinders most people from taking action because they are all too willing to place responsibility for that on someone else, and keep their concerns focused on their day to day lives. This is why even though there are some efforts already in place to address the social and economic problems inherent to sustainability  they still remain as the biggest challenge for the sustainability movement to overcome.

Paper - Rational Decision Making

Rational Decision Making:

Large Hadron Collider Scenarios

    The more humans have tried to learn about nature the more they realize how little they understand. Physicist Gary Zukhov once said that, “Physicists have ‘proved,’ rationally, that our rational ideas about the world in which we live are profoundly deficient.” As an addendum we should add that the same applies to our own minds. We have to be able to make fully rational decisions when they have long lasting impacts and consequences.

    Why would do we want to make rational decisions? The reason is that it’s often the most optimal choice. A rational decision is made by listing out the characteristics and consequences of a choice, and choosing the one we think is best. The primary issue here is figuring these characteristics and consequences out in complex large scale systems and decisions. Its easy if the system is small, for example, when grocery shopping, we have can make rational decisions based on the label and our tastes without drastic consequences, making it a good choice. However when the situation is more complex, and there isn’t a label we can check things become more difficult.

    The first obstacle in dealing with rationality is simply the lack of information, or the presence of misinformation. For example, lets take the Large Hadron Collider. There was opposition raised against it by the many doomsday scenarios that it could create. Perhaps most famously the idea that the Large Hadron Collider can create black holes that would destroy the world. Now from a physics perspective, we can realize and calculate that the black holes created will be so small that it will almost immediately evaporate due to Hawking Radiation. This is the process where the spontaneous formation and destruction of particles occur along the edge of a black hole, resulting in one particle/antiparticle exiting the black hole, and one being sucked in, reduces the mass of the black hole causing it to evaporate.

    However, Hawking Radiation as a process isn’t generally known. This is a case of the absence of information in the general public. If everyone readily knew about Hawking radiation it would be clear that this threat is not an issue. Since this isn’t the case, it can cause people to over evaluate the dangers of the Large Hadron Collider leading to an irrational risk/benefit analysis.

    Another issue linked to this scenario are the problems of anchoring and overconfidence. Many people envision a black hole as an infinitely absorbing object that just gets larger and larger at a rapid rate. This has been popularized from various science fiction movies and most people believe that a black hole is a vast absorption machines that sucks in everything around it. In reality, although its impossible to escape a black hole, it doesn’t grow as actively as it is seen in the movies. We know that there are many black holes in the universe so theres no way we could exist if they were as terrible as they are depicted in the movies. For example, if the Sun turned into a black hole, although we would notice the lack of light in 8 minutes, the orbits of the planets wouldn’t change.

    This anchoring occurred because of the way in which the human mind works. Most people's first experience with a black hole is in the form of a movie. Since it was our first experience with this object, it is the most easily recalled and anchored in our memory in that way. This anchoring is due to the availability heuristic. A heuristic is an experience based method towards problem solving. The availability heuristic is when we make a decision based on the easiest event that we can recall. In this case, its much easier to recall the vivid dramatic events in a movie, over something that can be learned in a classroom, or through scholarly articles.

    The lack of information in the general public combined with misinformation caused by the availability heuristic could easily have led government officials to make an irrational decision regarding the Large Hadron Collider to shut it down. Now we actually haven’t done extensive analysis on what the risks/benefits of the LHC are worth but this is already considered an irrational decision because it was motivated by incorrect information.

    This hypothetical situation leads us to another aspect in making rational decisions, recognizing feedback loops. There are powerful information and societal feedback loops inherent to our society. Lets say the media spreads the word for the potential of world destruction due to the Large Hadron Collider. This initial spread of information could affect people in high ranking positions in a socio political group. In this example lets take the theological example of high officials in the church. If these officials change the church’s official stance on the Large Hadron Collider the media will publicize it as one of their sources. This leads to more to more reports being made on the subject, which could reinforce the stance of the church, reinforcing the stance of the media, so on and so forth. This is an example of how even an initially incorrect or false claim can grow itself into a large multi group movement.

    The above scenarios all deal with the lack of information or misinformation and how it can spread to become a threat to rational decision making. The next case deals with how we process information. When we consider a complex project like the Large Hadron Collider, we have to take into account more the risks and benefits than just discovering the Higgs boson and the potential to create black holes. We also have to consider it as an engineering project and make decisions based on a sustainability standpoint.

    We can go through a few calculations here. It took about 4.75 billion dollars to construct the LHC, the electricity costs run about $23.5 million per year, and requires an operating budget of 1 billion dollars. This is a huge economic investment. Depending on the location this could cause huge issues, for example if the LHC was built in a rural 3rd world country so that it’d be physically out of the way from first world countries, it could devastate that locations economy as its resources gets forced into one project. Likewise we also have to consider its yearly costs, taking into account that the average cost for electricity in Europe is about 17 euro cents a kilowatt, we can calculate that the collider uses up about 150 million kilowatts a year. This is enough to power about 12,000 homes. Again this could be a huge burden on the host country for this project depending on how wealthy they originally were.

    In reality, the Large Hadron Collider was built in Switzerland which has good low emission production of electricity, and so the environmental cost in greenhouse gases for the LHC is only about 700,000 kg of CO2. Now, we can weigh this in both an economic and ethical sense. Assuming we view progress as a worthy goal we can think that these costs seem to be fairly reasonable for the possibility for completing the standard model of particle physics which leads to development in every aspect of almost all sciences. On the other hand considering the costs would this money have been better spent towards alternative energy development or medical research towards curing cancer? This are the things we have to consider in order to make the decision fully rational by obtaining the correct information and processing it in all aspects socially, economically, and ethically. So as we can see there are many different obstacles when it comes to making rational decisions. The issues range from spreading correct information to recalling appropriate information, from recognizing trends in a system, to determining what is the correct choice. However, although these topics may seem disparate, we can address them all in the same way, through education. One of the aspects of education is distributing correct information in a way which is easy to recall which addresses the first two obstacles. Recognizing trends and making appropriate choices is comparable to learning appropriate problem solving techniques, which is the other aspect of education. The last aspect of our education is in our values as a person. We have to consider whether or not our decisions are ethical and work towards a social good, which again we grow through not only our official education but simply through experiencing life. When we consider and weigh all these aspects we can then make rational decisions that benefit us all.

Notes - Conclusion Rational Thinking

The following are notes for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

• Include awareness of cognitive limitations and biases
• decisions ad infinitum not viable
• improve decisions by consciously avoiding common faults/biases
• Define system boundaries
• figure out appropriate scope/scale of a decision
• include both spatial and temporal effects, intergenerational effects
• Identify important stocks and flows
• think about rates of intake/outflow
• when effects take place
• be aware of full cause effect chain and timing
• Identify feedback loops when possible
• find out limitations of feedback loops
• what mechanisms drive a loop
• Increase information
• educate all decision making bodies fully
• Look at systems over events
• figure out if an event was caused by a system or spontaneous events
• if caused by system fix the system rather than focus on uncontrollable events

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Notes - Strategies for Addressing Limits to Rationality

The following are notes for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

• Addressing the limits to rationality
• acknowledge our limits
• actively seek information that promote sustainable behavior/complex issues in general
• proactivity to understand more
• receive further information with an open mind

Becoming Environmentally Informed

• knowledge is the first step, finding academic literature
• social, economic, and environmental dimensions
• ecological footprint
• measure of the environmental impact of a person's daily activities
• environmental consumption i.e. transportation, home expenditure, food consumption
• calculators have been devised to keep track of
• sources of energy used
• land, water resources
• vary in detail but useful as rough guidelines
• carbon footprint
• amount of greenhouse gases produced
• fails to account for differences in social groups as they are statistical averages
• Paul Ehrlich's IPAT equation
• (I) Ecological Impact
• (P) Product of Population
• (A) Affluence
• (T) Technology
• attempt to think systematically about how factors combine to affect processes and resources
• overgeneralization
• environment is tied to wealth, per capita resource used increases with affluence, wealthier nations have larger footprints than poor ones
• link not always straightforward, some wealthier nations are greener than less wealthy ones
• i.e. Europe's footprint is smaller than United States

Becoming Socially and Economically Informed

• Integral measure of factors can't be measured by just environmental impacts
• Fair Trade practices
• products made by non exploitative practices
• tries to ensure employees reap stable socioeconomic benefits
• Sustainability involves balancing ecological, social, and economic factors and weighing the relative importance of one another
• Intergenerational communities vs familial communities decision making

Systems Thinking

• (CAS) Complex adaptive systems
• systems that are rapidly changing, large and hard to model
• vital to choose attention to vital information not just vivid
• Most states include critical thinking as a core aspect of education
• solve disconnect of memorization and understanding
• in general the public's critical thinking skills is not at a high enough level to process information in long term ways
• Synthesis
• standard practice
• Divide problems into smaller more manageable components and view them separately
• education system reflects this, division of subjects i.e. arts, mathematics, sciences, etc
• Long term decisions are often multi disciplinary
• acknowledge that we have to sometimes view problems as a whole instead of breaking them down
• Scale
• think of the scale of consequences
• effects globally
• effects community
• effects personally
• Stocks and Flows
• Recall from Georgescu-Roegen's distinction between stock resources and fund resources
• stock resources - draws from a limited reserve
• fund resources - near infinite, or self replenishing
• stocks
• immediate effects of an event
• flows
• consequences of events/effects of a stock
• apply to global climate change
• minimize greenhouse gas
• gas emissions is the stock
• side effects of global warming such as climate change is the flow
• Must consider timeframe, there is delay between when gas emissions are released and when effects occur
• consider additional actions such as heating cycle of earth, to figure out when heat gets capture from gas emission and held for longer than normal
• Feedback loops
• presence of feedback loops
• negative feedback loops
• systems tend towards equilibrium through loops that return the system to normality
• positive feedback loops
• systems grow uncontrollably
• more likely to cause problems as it destabilizes equilibrium
• catastrophe can occur when it hits a boundary or limiting condition
• i.e. bacterial growth
• unrestrained bacteria growth increases population of bacteria
• bacteria consumes resources in the area
• causes drain on resources, death of host area
• Resilience
• ability to respond to change
• fail safes implemented
• system archetypes
• common patterns of loops/behavior of a system
• helps to understand what fail safes will be effective

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Notes - Obstacles to Making Good Decisions

The following are notes for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

• each person makes many decisions a day
• daily decisions are made without much attention/introspection
• often governed by
• habit
• personality
• previous experience
• Big/special/new decisions require more thought

Rational Decision Making

• i.e. choosing a product in grocery store
• prioritization of decision making
• habits usually stay habits
• follow social conventions
• Unconscious list of characteristics made for an item
• pick based upon best characteristics for that list
• list has multiple prioritization
• i.e. based on price
• Rational decision making
• people make choices that maximize their interest/match their list
• for groceries decision is simple, and out of habit
• complicated long term decisions what to do?
• First collect information
• compare options
• think about long term cost/benefit
• risk/hazards
• emotion, what do you care about?
• issues
• perfect information not available
• long term cost/benefit not specifically known only estimated
• How to deal with issues to remain rational?
• probabilities give us a good idea of unknowns
• modeling/prediction
• however, this is not applicable to general public
• field of engineering
• many theories and books about decisions
• multiple criteria
• additional variables included, compare dissimilar components
• sustainability added into the field

Limits of Rationality

• lack of information is the clearest barrier
• i.e. grocery shopping
• we don't know where the food was grown
• the wages of the workers creating the product
• Available information misleading/not full situation
• i.e. electric hand drier may save paper, but it also consumes electricity
• In addition, people often aren't trained to process information fully rationally
• usually in life, a good enough answer that may not be fully rational is acceptable
• human perception is selective not comprehensive
• we always filter and interpret, not look at big picture
• often see what we expect to see based on prior experience
• Memory is limited
• we can only handle about 5-7 units of different information at the same time before forgetting
• we can overcome this by grouping terms to increase the size of units
• i.e. telephone numbers
• Attitudes/biases
• habits/previous information influence choices
• Sheer mental capability
• not everyone trains the mind to calculate options
• bounded rationality
• make decisions based on what we have available
• simplify this using heuristics, rules of thumbs to approximate rationality

Cognitive Heuristics

• Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky psychologists who helped clarify heuristics
• Availability Heuristic
• ability to use information stored in memory
• when event is easily recalled, consider it in future
• easiest choice to imagine or recall more likely to believe in occurrence
• created biases
• i.e. belief in jets crashing frequently because crashes are covered rather than successful flights
• variety of applications in this heuristic
• television ads in order to spread information
• public service ads have direct effects on popularity of products
• power of celebrity status to influence choices regardless of their actual ability
• vivid memories recalled over potentially accurate more longwinded ones
• difficulty with precautionary principle
• we remember catastrophes over mundane success
• difficulty with implementing nuclear power
• Anchoring and Overconfidence
• people tend to anchor to initial facts
• first impression most important
• causes difficulties in negotiations, hindering 
• Problems with Probability
• we see patterns inappropriately
• i.e. flipping a coin
• if we see 9 heads in a row
• think we "are due for tails"
• but this is imposing on the random chance of flipping the coin
• same ideas with 100 year on average floods or forest fire chances
• Uncertainty
• people avoid probabilities and uncertainties
• lean towards certainty, desire to have control
• avoid circumstances where input is hopeless because uncertainty is great
• public's confusion on climate
• predictions technologically based are difficult because few are qualified
• exaggerations/fear tactics used
• people rarely act on fear?(questionable statement raised by book)
• multiple biases overlap since biases may draw people in different directions
• increase in scale of complexity does not help non experts
• only logical information reinforced by experience often stays
• i.e. cherry blossoms in japan changing time of bloom
• Discounting the future
• Economically beneficial decisions can have ecological downsides
• short term benefits are easier to see over long term ones
• politicians and corporations focus on next elections/quarterly goals
• importance of extending timeframe people can see
• change needs to be bottom up in terms of sustainability
• Complexity
• the more complicated the system, the less likely people will think about it
• mental overload
• tragedy of the commons
• commonwealth where people over invest in their own wealth
• causes depletion of shared wealth, collapse of system
• difficulty of perspectives values and attitudes of different peoples in addition to the complexity of actual problems
• How Barriers to Rationality Affect Decisions
• biases make decision making difficult even if people are given more time
• mental shortcuts such as availability heuristic override longer term decision making
• lack of trust
• some corporations promote biomass usages
• green movements automatically distrust corporations dissuades some from using viable source
• Heuristics we have now are more suited to small communities/neighborhoods
• in history useful for finding food
• building shelter
• care for own young rather than community
• Discomfort with uncertainty promotes non-action
• Experts in fields frequently stopped by publics overreaction to miimal risks
• nuclear plant meltdown
• Emotional overturns can also affect rationality, in both a positive/negative way
• i.e. issues with food pesticides effect on infants

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Notes - Making Ethical Decisions for a Sustainable Future: An Overview

The following are notes for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

Social Sustainability

• The Golden Rule
• We believe we have the right to have our basic needs met
• extend this right to our neighbors, locally and globally, and to those in the future
• The Rights of the Vulnerable
• Care Ethics, obligates us to share responsibility for the welfare of the poor, weak, sick and disenfranchised
• meets the needs of the present
• environmental justice
• The Distributional Principle
• Ensuring that both advantages and disadvantages equitably distributed
• fair processes for decision making
• Chain of Obligation (Expanded Community)
• distributional justice across temporal boundaries
• prospects of future generations based on current behavior patterns
• intergenerational justice for a fair distribution of resources

Ecological Sustainability

• The Land Ethic
• provides a basic guideline to judge morality
• actions must preserve
• basic integrity
• stability
• beauty 
• of a community
• land is not a resource but a community
• The Rights of the Nonhuman World
• addresses the rights of animals, how individual organisms are treaed
• animal rights
• can include plants, and geological formations

Economic Sustainability

• The Polluter Pays Principle
• ethical/legal principle ensuring cost of pollution is justly allocated
• shifts burden to those causing pollution
• Extended Producer Responsibility
• EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility)
• manufacturer's responsible for entire life cycle effect of their products
• recycling required
• The Beneficiary Compensates Principle
• BCP (Beneficiary Compensates Principle)
• compensate parties to those who ask to forgo development
• international community pays
• Full-Cost Accounting
• objective is to ensure all social and environmental costs of a product or process are identified
• costs distributed after identification

Integrating the Dimensions of Sustainability

• The Precautionary and Reversibility Principles
• Where there is scientific uncertainty regarding technology or activity being implemented
• pre-emptive action to avert potential threats
• health
• environment
• Reversibility principle
• ensure that ability to reverse consequences is built into the technology
• Transparency
• Good Governance is essential so force nongovernmental organizations to do greater documentation
• elected officials stand behind campaign promises
• consequences and components of technology made public

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Notes - The Rationale for Sustainability

The following are notes for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

• 70 documented definitions of sustainable development

Sustainability Interlude

• Basic idea is to consume less than you produce
• i.e. if you get interest of 100,000 dollars a year, only use that $100,000 that year, instead of dipping into savings
• To apply this we go to a larger scale, where we have to allocate resources for the entire globe
• how to distribute fairly
• predicting the changing production and consumption

A Response to Crisis

• Crisis of development
• Proportion of those in poverty at about 20%
• World is suffering from environmental crises and lack of resources, stressing the lower income more
• 1983 U.N. convened World Commission on Environment and Development
• later called Brundtland commission
• address sustainability, provide reports on condition of globe
• goals
• basic needs of all humans should be met, poverty eliminated
• limits placed on development because nature is finite
• moral responsibility to future generations

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Notes - Contemporary Sustainability Based Frameworks

The natural step

• Developed by Karl Henrik Robert
• Eliminate our contribution to
• the progressive build up of substances extracted from the Earth's crust
• the progressive build up of chemicals and compounds
• degradation of natural processes
• conditions that undermine people's capacity to meet their basic human needs
• Progression Levels
• 1 policy for year by year reductions in emissions
• 2 increase ratio of recycled to raw materials
• 3 maximize resource efficiency reduce nonrenewable contributions
• 4 Introduce LCA(Life Cycle Assessment) analysis to provide detailed understanding of impacts
• 5 set limits on extraction and land use

The Hannover Principles

• supposed to serve as a how to for ecological design
• defines sustainable design
• Principles
• Insist on the rights of human and nature to coexist
• Recognize interdependence
• Respect relationships between spirit and matter
• Accept responsibilities for consequences of design
• Create safe objects of long-term value
• Eliminate the concept of waste
• Rely on natural energy flows
• Understand the limitations of design
• Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge

Corporate Social Responsibility

• Milton Friedman said we undermine free enterprise if companies think about anything other than money
• Long term responsibilities need to be assigned, Tyco, Enron, Exxon, etc.
• CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
• Intel stepping up in education field
• Standard Chartered, UK bank global initiative to provide eye care, and micro finance loans
• Xerox promote friendly paper use
• can accrue benefits financially for company
• better brand identity
• lower levels of regulation
• reduced scrutiny
• gain government licenses for operation
• Policies
• Adoption of internal controls reform
• commitment to diversity
• management teams view employees as assets
• high performance workplaces, employees involved in decision making
• adoption of operating policies above regulations
• greater resource productivity
• taking responsibility for production phases
• GRI(Global reporting initiative)
• opening up reports to world about organizational performance
• Some accused of greenwashing, as a fake publicity movement

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Working Toward Sustainability ToC

Table of Contents

The following is a table of contents for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

1. A Context for Sustainability
1. The Rationale for Sustainability
2. The Technology Challenge
3. Introduction to Ethical Concepts
4. Social Dimensions of Sustainability Ethics
5. Environmental Dimensions of Sustainability Ethics
6. Economic Dimensions of Sustainability Ethics
7. Integrating the Three Legs of Sustainability
8. Improving our Thinking about Sustainability
1. Obstacles to Making Good Decisions
2. Strategies for Addressing the Limits to Rationality
3. Conclusion
9. The Process of Changing Behavior
10. Creating Change with Groups
11. Applying an Ethic of Sustainability
1. Making Ethical Decisions for a Sustainable Future: An Overview
2. Contemporary Sustainability-Based Frameworks
3. Putting it all Together
4. A Final Critique

Paper - Sustainability Beta Test 2012

Sustainability Beta Test

Chris Luk

Abstract
<in progress>

Introduction

Y2K, missing days in Mayan calendars, the Large Hadron Collider causing black holes, these are just a few of the recent end of the world crises the media has publicized. Its been a recent trend in our culture, to be concerned with the end of the world and so far, we have passed over such events with little trouble. However, our world is still threatened, though in a less dramatic fashion.

Issues and Concerns

The crisis we face is one of energy, of production, of sustainability. Sustainability is defined as resistance to degradation, and the ability to endure and in this case, we are concerned with the continuation of our civilization. If the world follows the model of development that the United States has done, the world will simply collapse. We have already passed the point where our consumption exceeds our production of resources so the resources we have now will only diminish. In the article The Bottleneck Wilson states, “For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more Earths”(Wilson 84).  Although the amount of resources and rate of consumption is in question, all studies agree that we will use up the Earth’s resources sometime in the near future, and that change is necessary. Vaclav Smil, a professor at Penn State, helps to drive home the point of the urgency of the situation by noting  that the United States currently uses up about 27% of the world’s current energy production. How much more of a problem would this be if China, a country with more than 4 times the population of the US consumes the same amount?

These are the issues our generation faces, changes have to happen and soon, with engineers leading the charge. Engineers as a profession, are responsible for increasing the quality of life enjoyed by the rest of the population, however this also makes them responsible for the drastic increases in energy consumption. Even though they strive for efficiency, many times this does not line up with the keeping consumption lower than our production of resources. William Stanley Jevons famously stated, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth”(Jevons)(Smil). As efficiency increases, we often find ways to consume even more resources.

Smil p.711

Viewpoint of the Engineer

So now that we are aware of the causes and problems, we must address the matter of responsibilities and roles. The profession to address is that of the engineer. Engineering as a discipline, is responsible for shaping the material construction and production of our entire society, and because of that it is the field of study that consumes more raw materials and resources than any other discipline. However, we can't simply ask that engineers to stop or lower consumption. As Alastair S. Gunn noted, the duties of an engineer are many and complicated. The public expect both reliability and progress out of engineers. Every engineering project is supposed to be 100% functional, failure is not considered acceptable. In addition, we assume that some radical new product will come to increase our quality of life with more and more rapid turnover. The new generation is far less patient than previous ones when it comes to satisfying wants. Communication, shopping, and luxuries are available on the spot. Take for example the cellphone. We can make long distance calls now, anytime anywhere, but it wasn't so long ago that the majority of citizens needed to go home to their main phone line, and even have delayed calls where it took a significant amount of time to transfer the signal from one end of the globe to another. This has forced engineers to focus their work and concerns towards functionality, profitability, and time to market rather than the potential ethical and global impacts their work could have.

Neglecting to realize the difficulties and addressing the problems in the workplace for engineers can end in disaster. Tragedies such as the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger where lives were lost by simple calculation errors, remind us of the impact and responsibilities of an engineer. The public expects engineers to speak up whenever they are capable of spotting an error, but at the same time doesn’t realize the cost of such decisions. Although it may seem like a simple thing to speak up about an error or a problem, in the workplace where speaking against a superior can cost you your job, from a personal perspective the question may not be so clear. Recognizing that such an event can occur requires that engineers act with a sense of integrity, wholeness in personality and talent that must be part of the curricula for engineers, as well as built into the structure of the workplace to allow for flexibility of thought. By integrity we mean that the education and personality of the engineer must be high enough to both recognize when mistakes occur, and be willing to put their livelihood on the line to do what is correct from a moral or ethical perspective.

Restructuring our Perspective

So we want to figure out how to allow engineers to bring up the question of sustainability. In a capitalist economy, where the market decides what succeeds and what fails, the initial investment towards a sustainable future is a daunting one. Almost all current technologies in renewable energy sources, or low consumption construction techniques require a large initial investment that returns in value far in the future. For example, building an array of solar panels, or a wind farm has a far later return on investment than a coal power plant. This means that in an immediate sense, there isn’t a short term economic drive to move towards sustainability. So even if an engineer can recognize the errors of ignoring sustainability and production of products, he can’t act on that knowledge. However, like the engineers who worked on the Challenger we can’t simply ignore the necessity of reducing our consumption. The world is at stake here, and the only ones who can start the process to fix this problem is the profession that creates the material products and services provided to the world.

Thus we need to provide both economical and ethical motivation for sustainability. First we must concern ourselves with survival as a species. This is actually a harder task than it sounds. Notice that sustainability is an issue that displaced both spatially and temporally from our daily lives. For example, if you're old enough that you will die before the resources run out, why does it concern you? Why are we concerned about the species as a whole over our own current well being? To make this challenge even more difficult, we have to realize that sustainability is not an item of value we can pass down. If you gain wealth, you can pass down your material possessions to your progeny. If you are knowledgeable, you can prepare your children for the world to come. Sustainability is not something you can directly hand over to your own children, rather its something a generation hands off to the next generation and we must prioritize that by realizing the global interconnection between people in the world.


Globalization and Restructuring

Thanks to the internet and communication technology, we’re already well on our way to realizing that thinking globally as a species is only a matter of time. In the meantime, we must  take a page out of the development process for computer applications and run a beta test for sustainability. Engineers must look to restructure existing architectures, to make things not only more efficient, but consume less resources as a whole, instead of focusing on creating brand new products. In particular, electricity generation must move off the dependency on non-sustainable fossil fuels, and all stages of production from the construction of workspaces, through production, to the usage of product must consume less energy, not just be more efficient than it is now. We have to reverse the impact and allow for our production and consumption of resources to stabilize.

To enact this change engineers must be ethically driven simply through a solidity of character, in integrity, to care about their fellow humans and prioritize communal thinking. In the future this must be incorporated into the education of engineers, but for now it is the responsibility of this generation to realize the urgency, and aim to restructure current methodologies with sustainable energy techniques and standards in mind. In order for this to happen people in industry must more solidly attach themselves to their companies and think more about making the company succeed and grow in the long term as opposed to personal benefit as restructuring rarely results in immediate monetary benefits. Management must follow suit from the engineer’s lead and reward long term thinking and goals over short term ones by promoting loyalty towards the company. 

General Education and Rational Thought

<in progress>

Conclusion

To do so we must expand upon the role of education. First information must be spread about the urgency of the situation. Secondly, we have to bring greater standardization to the field of sustainable energy. Standardization is what drives both efficient and quick changes in a field. For example, lets take one of the fastest changing fields in industry, computer science. In computer science, even though there are many different higher level programming languages, the way in which they operate is relatively similar. You tell the computer a set of instructions, and it translates it to machine code and executes. The way that you structure your instructions, though syntactically different, often uses the same formats, such as the heavy emphasis on recursion methods. This applies on to sustainable energy because right now, the way in which it is taught at a university varies, and the way in which calculations are done in the filed varies greatly because its a new field. This makes it difficult for professions to talk about sustainability in the same way, since they all learned different things and work with different tools.

Thirdly, educators must work more closely with private industry so that a future in a company can be secured. If students are excited for and have a job security in a particular company, the motivation to benefit the company in a long term way is already there. Increased job security means more discussion can occur about policy and company goals without fear of reprisal. Having a more comfortable working environment, with a unified goals allows policy changes and organizational restructuring to happen which allows for a sustainable energy initiatives to succeed in the company. If these goals can be achieved we would have an appropriate economic and social structure to allow for change, and the ethical incentive through globalization and upbringing to care for the propagation of our species to give us a sustainable future.

Bibliography

Smil, V. 2010. Science, Energy, Ethics, and Civilization.

Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness, R.Y. Chiao et al. eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 709-729.

Gunn, Alastair S. "Integrity and the Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers."

Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. 125-33. Print.

Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question. [S.l.]: Macmillan, 1906. Print.
Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print.