Preventing climate change - software and other strategies

Governments have now accepted that the earth's climate is changing and that we need to do something about it. Nicholas Stern, a british diplomat submitted a report (The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review) on the economic and financial impact of global warming (or more appropriately climate change) to the British chancellor and prime minister.

The results of the report caused quite a stir when they reported facts that were already known to the scientific research community - that the earth will heat up 1-2% or even 5-6% in the coming years.

Mr. Stern has given tight deadlines to governments around the world to divert at least 1% of global GDP towards mitigation measures and related costs.

Need for new institutions

An institution is something to which people belong, however something that endures across generations. Common institutions known to us include family, school, religious community, profession al institutions among numerous others.

To address the impact and take both preventive and remedial measures we need new institutions. For instance, these institutions may look at carbon flows in an area and determine if carbon levies need to be applied.

To explain this scenario a bit more, lets say a producer in China (a new plastic toy factory), is able to sell its toys to kids in California. The total carbon costs of that toy would be a sum of the carbon emissions towards production in China, emissions in extraction and transportation of raw materials to the factory and costs in transportation of toy to California. Such a scheme not only puts the cost on the factory in China but serves as a demand control mechanism by taxing the consumer.

Will such a scenario happen? For sure, countries that have export driven economies will feel the impact, and will possibly use WTO to rally their cause. But eventually, once Chinese have mastered emission technologies, they will support these scenarios. Another corollary is the need for improvement in global logistics technology that is available to all economies.

Other impacts

We may see changes in siting of carbon based energy production facilities to places like Africa or even Sahara. On software side, new software forms will be needed. We will see a proliferation of environmental monitoring and logistics solutions. Carbon emission models may become open-source libraries that can be easily downloaded. For software architecture, we may need new institutions like LEEDS is for building architecture in choosing technologies (materials) and software processes (automated build and testing scripts) that reduce the energy cost of software solutions. Software deployed on virtualized and shared environments may be promoted to reduce energy footprints.