thinkingstring.com

If you want to understand whether COP15 us likely to make any meaningful difference look not to Copenhagen, nor to the twittering commentary of my fellow bloggers, journalists and assorted spinners. Look instead to England. The most important thing that has happened this week that frames the Western World’s proposed and possible actions on reducing GHG emissions took place this month in the UK High Court, where BA won an injunction declaring proposed strike action by BA cabinstaff as illegal.

Unite, the union representing some 12,000 BA employees had propose to cal a 12 day strike. Such action would, according to BA head honcho Willie Walsh “ruined Christmas for millions of people”. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was reported as saying he was “very worried” by the prospect of a BA strike, and warned that BA and the unions must both consider the damage the airline would suffer if they cannot reach a resolution..

And there lies the key to understanding the degree to which Brown and other(se)elected national head honchoss of his ilk can lead us toward a safe level of greenhouse gases. They will pledge the world in Copenhagen. Just as anything they propose doesn’t interrupt the voting public’s plans to fly somewhere to see Granny or sit on a warm beach for Christmas.

How then are we meant t cost into airline tickets the environmental cost of flying, in a way that encourages the potential traveler to consider and choose alternate means of transport? Therein is the hypocrisy, moral weakness and failure to lead that speaks volumes, but leads is little.

It is reported that Willie Walsh will, on behalf of the IATA will promise to cut the airline industry’s emissions by 50% over 2005 levels, by 2050. It is further reported that the airline industry is taking such a pledge in order to sidestep what they expect to happen to them otherwise. Which is raucous protest by the rallied (and ever swelling masses) of concerned citizens, and censure from the soon-to-be-assembled set of speakers due in to Copenhagen in 76 days time. In effect, Willie has realised that the price the airlines must eventually pay to be allowed to continue trading is on the same sliding scale as that used to calculate passenger tickets. Leave it until later before you commit on the decision, and for the same outcome you just get charged more and with less choice.

Have the airlines finally got on board with the programme?

The choice of 2005 as the baseline year is the first red flag that all might not be “final and best effort” down at the IATA HQ. 2005 was one of the peak year for airline emissions this decade - prior to the recession-led slump in airline travel that has resulted in a fairly dramatic drop in emissions from the sector during the 2008-2009 period, and interestingly also before the run up to $147 p/bl oil prices. During the recession airlines have parked unneeded aircraft left and right, mothballing planes that nobody could afford to fly on any more. They have therefore chosen for themselves a baseline year that allows them plenty of scope for growth in airline movements and passenger numbers compared to now.

The airlines have also calculated that their efforts to cut emissions will result in higher costs being passed onto travellers. So it should - if the idea is to dissuade passengers from flying and encourage them to consider alternative means of transport, for example a national high speed rail system. However early reports indicate that the IATA estimates that the incremental cost will be around the £40 to £50 mark for a long haul trip. Interestingly this is the same price range for a charge applied to a would-be traveller by one of the flight-offset companies. I’ve written before here that offsetting doesn’t really make a lot of difference, and also that a £40-£50 charge on top of the cost of a long haul flight isn’t likely to make that much difference at all to a potential traveller’s decision as to whether to fly or not. For short-haul flights, the ones that are actually more likely to be unnecessary (you can catch a train from London to Paris but you can’t from London to Sydney) the incremental cost is likely to under £10, possibly under £5. Certainly not enough incremental cost to have anyone caring about whether they fly to Majorca on holiday or Paris for a meeting. After all, Ryan Air and the like charge that much just to allow you to breath inside the aircraft.

It will also be significant what percentage of the industry’s planned cuts come from carbon offsets, from reduced capacity, from fleet efficiencies, or from biofuels. The latter is particularly worrying - powering all the world’s aircraft with biofuels will use so much of the world’s arable land we won’t even have enough left spare to grow the peanuts to give to all the passengers (Oh…I forgot you don’t get free peanuts anymore anyway).

What would be nice is if the industry recognised that it is not just in the flight business, it is in the communications business. During the recession business travellers stayed out of the skies in sufficient numbers that the IATA Chairman stated recently that “teleconferencing has become a competitor to business travel via flying”. The airline industry needs to embrace this trend, not continue to fight against it. Having fronted Willie Walsh up to speak on their behalf, they perhaps now might consider the merits of joining forces with the growing teleconferencing industry to examine how communications hubs can best be developed to serve the business executive. Heathrow runway and passenger terminal expansion plans can be torn up now and they can start immediately on something like this instead.

Embracing “game changers” like teleconferencing might also help the airlines deal with the ever rising cost of petroleum based feedstocks for airline fuel. Willie Walsh himself is not stranger to the impact of high oil prices on airline viability and profitability, with BA shedding pounds and staff as oil climbed to $147 p/bl during 2008. Oil prices are not coming down to sub-$70 in the longer term. That too will represent a serious challenge to long term airline viability.

The IATA’s announcement is a welcome one. It ought not however to be seen as the airline industry rolling over sweetly and wagging its tail in a happy-go-lucky manner as climate campaigners coo and rub its stomach. The devil is in the detail regarding how the industry will achieve its promised cuts.

I recently was “followed” by Dennis McMahon of mygreenflight, a company that bills itself as offering carbon offsets for the air traveller. This author isn’t necessarily a fan of offsetting (see here) so being followed by an offset provider, especially one so bullishly named was an act just bound to make me poke around a little to see what was what. After some surfing around mygreenflight’s site for a while I emailed off some questions to the vendor, which Dennis subsequently and thoughtfully answered - more on that in a moment.

Before getting to that detail however it is worth spending a moment looking at why the entire concept of offsetting might be a little flawed. Offsetting is best described as a cousin of carbon cap and trade schemes (CCT), which themselves are the market led approach to managing and eventually reducing industry emissions. CCT schemes, like the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment, the European Emissions Trading Scheme, and the hotly debated nascent Australian scheme seek to create a finite market in emissions permissions. That subtlety is often ignored, such schemes do not actually trade emissions, they trade permission slips. Such permission slips are really no more than promissory notes that have a financial value intended to be significant enough that a nation or industry that needs to buy them will eventually be pushed into actually taking steps of their own to actually reduce the levels of GHG they emit. In theory, the costs associated with reducing actual emissions is less than the cost of continually buying the permission slips, therefore setting up an economic incentive to change. Meanwhile, a purchased permission is withdrawn from the market thus reducing the pool of permissions available, and the money garnered through the purchase of the permission slip might even be invested in some form or another of carbon sequestration equal to the task of absorbing the GHG emitted.

In reality however several major flaws are evident.

For a start, the cash value of the permission slips does not encourage investment in techniques, technology, or behaviour that actually reduces GHG emissions. The EU ETS is infamous for the wild fluctuation in the value of the permission slips. Such fluctuations will only be eliminated when the market is regulated and managed in a planned and interventionist manner (much to the angst of those who trust entirely in the free market approach - they see the open trade as being that akin to any other commodity while ignoring the fact that the price needs to be managed as the intention is actually to influence behaviour).

Secondly permission slips don’t reduce actual emissions. Meanwhile the GHG were almost certainly actually emitted by the individual/organisation that purchased the permission slip, and lets not forget that those emissions then stay in the atmosphere for a considerable period of time - think tens to hundreds of years. Offset schemes often claim that investment in them will result in creation of carbon sinks that will absorb a quantity of GHG equal to that emitted. Even if such action does occur (and there have been many cases where such claims are entirely fraudulent) it is highly unlikely that such schemes will effectively sequester GHGs for the entire duration that those GHGs that were actually emitted remain active in the atmosphere.

Some schemes claim that the money raised through permissions trading is spent encouraging the retention of the world’s existing carbon sinks, usually in the form of forest conservation. For example offsets can be purchased to buy a chunk of Amazon rainforest, thus protecting it from logging or clearing to enable urban expansion, the growing of monoculture crops such as corn for biofuels, or beef cattle grazing. Of course the only significant remaining stands of such forests are in developing (none G20) countries and such clearing is as often performed to enable the farming of produce (as well as the logged timber) for export to the G8 nations as it is for reasons of domestic poverty and lifestyle pressures. Putting aside for a moment all the not insignificant questions regarding unwanted foreign intervention and ownership of land in such countries it is worth remembering again that stewardship of such carbon sinks needs to be maintained for the duration that the actually emitted GHGs remain active. Most importantly, remember that such schemes do not incrementally add sequestration capacity, they simply attempt to retain the paucity of what natural sequestration capacity that remains. Meanwhile we already know that that remaining capacity is insufficient to actually absorb the levels of GHGs being emitted. Therefore such efforts might best be described as knocking around the edges of the question of ownership of natural carbon sinks, rather than incrementally adding capacity or actually reducing real emissions.

With all that in mind lets return to the specific example of mygreenflight. The first thing to know is the roots of the company are in a logistics business the mission of which is to enable the airline industry to further expand. Therefore you have the conundrum of this being an offset company with a tactical goal of reducing emissions through the trading of permission slips, which meanwhile has the strategic goal of expanding an industry which is arguably already unsustainable. GHG emissions aside it is worth also remembering that the entire airline industry’s future is tenuous at best in light of ever rising fuel prices. The answer by the way to rising fuel prices lies not in a move to biofuels. Despite early and highly publicized PR stunts dressed up as trials biofuels remain a potential solution that even the IATA regards as being at least 15 years away from reality and anyway the demand for biofuels from the global airline industry would require biofuel crop monoculture on almost all of the Earth’s available arable land, including all that currently used for food crops and all that currently “used” by all those virgin forest carbon sinks.

All that aside, to test mygreenflight’s scheme I used the company’s offset calculator to see what it would cost me financially to purchase offsets, and meanwhile to see what they think is required to “absorb” the GHGs actually emitted in my flight. To do so I added one long haul flight and one short haul flight (economy return, using bmi and Qantas as my chosen airlines).

My flight details as entered were:

Shorthaul: London Heathrow to Edinburgh (LHR-EDI) bmi, Economy Return. 0.17 t of CO2 emitted, requiring an offset costing £1.30
Longhaul: London Heathrow to Sydney, Australia (LHR-SYD) Qantas Airways, Economy Return. 5.31 t of CO2 emitted, requiring an offset costing £41.86

Total: 5.47 t of emissions for a cost of £43.16 in purchased offsets.

The first observation is that if the goal of offsetting is to allow me to trade in a CCT scheme, the goal of which is to provide an economic framework that ultimately changes behaviour through the internalisation into the balance sheet of the economic externality that is the emissions, through the mechanism of incremental cost then it has done little to actually deliver. £43 and change is unlikely to actually encourage me to seek alternatives to flying - though to be fair there really isn’t an alternative to flying in order to get to Sydney, however £1.30 (less than the cost of a coffee at Heathrow) isn’t going to encourage a potential traveller to catch the train to Edinburgh (an act that the train operator Stagecoach calculates would result in 86.4Kg of carbon emissions). Of course given that mygreenflight’s strategic mission is to enable expansion of the airline industry it stands to reason that the emissions calculated, and the offset costs assigned to them be finely balanced between providing a feeling that the passenger is making a difference without actually encouraging the passenger to take up an alternative mode of transport (or even consider not travelling at all).

But I also wanted to know more on what my £43.86 was going to buy, and this is where I emailed mygreenflight for more details. To ensure that I capture the full Q&A exchange copied here is the email I received in reply from mygreenflight’s Dennis McMahon (spelling and grammar errors, if any are “sic”).

-snip-
Hi Simon,

My apologies for the delay in responding to your questions.
Please find my responses to your questions below:

YOUR QUESTION: What audit trail is there of what this money is actually used for?

MY RESPONSE:

Our systems will see the funds being applied to Voluntary Carbon Standard Projects that generate Voluntary Carbon Units or VCU’s, which are a subset of Verified Emission Reduction Units (VERs).

All projects from which we purchase offset credits need to have the following criteria:

· Third party verified by accredited Verifiers in this field
· Credits must be issued
· Credits must be listed (or able to be listed) on the TZ1 VCS Registry
· Credits when allocated to offsets purchased by passengers will be formally “retired” on the TZ1 Registry

Re the audit trail – our processes and systems are being reviewed by Bureau Veritas (UK office) to ensure that we have the correct systems in place now. Bureau Veritas will also be conducting periodic audits of the funds trail, and providing reports for same, to ensure that we accurately retire the equivalent number of credit tonnes to match the offset credits purchased.

Initially, there will be a delay between offsets purchased from the site and the retirement, as there is a need to purchase a commercial qty of credit tonnes from project developers. As we gain purchase trend data (both quantities and preferred project types) from clients such as yourself, and expand our airline partnering program, this approach will be replaced by forward purchases, so that retirement can be made from a pool of credits we have forward purchased.

YOUR QUESTION:

a) Is it to purchase and maintain natural forests or other CO2 sinks, if so how much land equals how much CO2 and for what period do you guarantee to manage the purchased asset?
b) Is it to plant new trees and support reforestation?
c) Is it to support CC&S technology research?
d) Is it to trade in ETS permits and if so which markets do you use (EU, UK,,,?).

Basically I am looking for some info on what you actually do that practically makes a difference.

MY RESPONSE

We have decided that we will be guided by our clients as to the project types that we support – you will note that we offer a range of project types (but not specific projects) on the calculator page at the moment. This is to ensure that we get actual feedback from clients about the projects that are of interest to them. Based on that data, and the quantity of tonnes offset for each project type, we will purchase and offset credits from those projects that client shave told us they want to support. Naturally, our purchases will be partially dictated by availability of credits, but we are determined to match client preferences with project types as much as we can.

In specific response to your questions on this topic:

a) We are maintaining a watching brief on forestry projects and developments related to the REDD projects. We think there will be accredited projects in this category post-Copenhagen, but at the moment, there is too much uncertainty as to methodologies to give us the confidence to purchase forestry credits. I know that there are many forestry projects generating credits in North America and other parts of the world, but as far as I am aware, none of those projects have sufficient credibility to be verified and accredited under either VCS or Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) rules.

Simon, if you are aware of any projects that meet the VCS or CDM criteria, please let me know.

b) See a)
c) Funds are not to support CC&S technology. This technology is currently way too speculative for us to get involved in – we would prefer to utilise credits from projects that have a solid bases in accepted methodology, and that meet the “additionality” criteria required fro VCS and / or CDM project verification
d) We are not looking to trade in ETS permits as part of the MyGreenFlight Carbon Offset program. We may assist airline clients in this area if asked, but it would be as a separate consultancy service.

YOUR QUESTION

I have thoroughly read through what you say on your “About us” pages, and am looking for me insight than “..we will obtain all of the verification and accreditation documentation from the Projects to ensure that they are fully accreditied (sic) and verified”

MY RESPONSE

Simon, every CDM or VCS Project must have a number of documents to establish the Project, to define it’s scope and the number of credit tonnes projected to be generated.

These include:
· Project design document
· Validation Report
· Monitoring Report
· Verification Report

These are the documents we will be checking to ensure that projects meet our criteria. In addition, we (or agents employed by us) may visit certain projects to confirm “on the ground” additional social co-benefits that may be claimed by the Project Developers.

DENNIS MCMAHON

Sales Manager
Greenflight

-/snip-

It must be said that Dennis’s reply, on behalf of mygreenflight is entirely professional, thorough and reasonably precise. Specifically and impressively he also puts forward the view that current forestry projects are tenuously beneficial to say the least. It is also worthy of note that the company does not currently invest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology development as such projects do not currently meet the criteria for additionality - meaning they don’t actually currently result in an additional carbon sequestration capacity. He is to be congratulated for taking on my questions and dealing with them in this manner.

Having said that, I’m still not sure what my £43.86 is buying - a strong sense remains that any offsets purchased from mygreenflight is simply being banked until such time as a suitable way for the company to invest the funds is found. A traveller may therefore assuage the guilt now of GHGs emitted into the atmosphere now, on the promise that sometime later something will be done that will somehow sequester an equivalent amount of emissions. While the emissions are guaranteed to be making a difference from the instant that they are released, what contractual guarantee does the purchaser have that later they will be neutralised through an investment that mygreenflight will make (not that I am in any way suggesting that the company will do less than make a best effort)?

So at this stage this exercise leaves me unchanged in my view that offsetting isn’t worth the effort. Travelling short haul distances by methods other than flying and in ways that reduce actual emissions (train etc) are not always possible, but they are also admittedly often less convenient and more expensive than the flying option. I remain of the opinion that when and if I have no alternative to fly I am making more of an actual difference by “copping” the expense and extra effort of not flying on a later occasion when the alternative does exist - in effect “banking” the money myself that I could have spent on offsetting into an account that I can later use to pay for a possibly more expensive train ticket, or even just treating myself to an extra coffee (with my £1.30) as a personal reward for making the effort.

Fittingly the news (as reported here) that the UK government is to push the use of high speed rail over the use of short haul aircraft for travel within the UK comes to me via a copy of The Guardian from the nice man seated opposite me in seat 29, en route to Edinburgh. We sit here in a little threesome of macbooks, the newspaper man, his colleague and I, with only a niggling worry at the back of the mind that there is only one 240v socket to share between us. The other two macbooks being the newer it is likely that my battery will run out sooner, giving me “first come, first serve” ownership rights over the electricity nipple. Perhaps the only time that a short(er) battery life gives any sort of advantage.

The preferential use of rail over air for passengers, and over road for long haul freight has been a long term interest for this author. Perhaps a legacy of being birthed in the rail town of Crewe, and being descended from a family with the stains of coal dust, diesel, and points grease deeply embedded in the pores. My father recently retired from his position as General Manager of Invensys Rail Division’s Asian operations, based in Bangkok, after a lifelong career in the industry of rail infrastructure internationally working for Westinghouse Brake and Signal (now a division in the conglomerate Invensys). Both of my grandfathers worked as boilermakers in the Crewe train yards, and my mother was a computer operator for British Rail in the 1960s. No trainspotter me, but I hold no distain for the concept of long distance steel wheeling and will now happily eschew the opportunity to doff my shoes and stand in line to be body-rayed at Heathrow.

The UK Governments newly found support for rail is a welcome change from years of neglect, and billions of pounds of subsidies and countless examples of planning support for more carbon intensive travel options, especially flying. The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead continue their legal challenge to the previously granted approval for a 3rd Heathrow runway even as transport secretary Lord Adonis reportedly states that “switching 46 million domestic air passengers a year to … rail is manifestly in the public interest”.

Interlude - just noticed that the curved girders supporting the roof over the platforms at York is attractively pierced with little star shaped cutouts.

Those 46 million passengers will only choose rail over anything else if the price is right (not I would argue, necessarily cheaper), while the service and experience meets or exceeds that to had in car or in the air. The provision of positive customer service experiences must also extend beyond the actual journey to include the planning, booking and ticketing; the transfers between the starting and end points and the relevant stations; and the numerous peripheral steps in between. The latter by the way, is a euphemism for “shopping opportunities”. Much effort has been made to create a sense and reality of “joined-up” services when flying. Ironically the Heathrow Express rail service provides a more seamless travel experience for air travellers starting or continuing their journeys into the capital than many long distance rail passengers might expect to find. Not only is there a morass of overlapping and uncoordinated rail services in the UK, operated by a mess of privatised and public companies, there is generally very little integration between rail and other transport modalities.

For passengers, the challenges of navigating between services - finding the connecting train for example - is hardly assisted at present to anywhere the degree that a potential air traveller might enjoy. It is impossible for instance to access a single application or internet hosted service from a handheld device and be provided with real time information on services throughout the duration of a multi-hop journey. Considering the availability and accuracy of GPS based location services on modern smartphones it is difficult to believe that an mash-up application can’t be developed that would not only pull together all the details of a travel booking, but could also guide the traveller to the correct platform for the next connecting service too.

Meanwhile, it is not just 46 million passengers who ought to encouraged into modern rolling stock, it is also long distance freight. Mile for mile, rail is most energy efficient method for hauling bulk goods, especially heavy produce. The pressure group Freight on Rail states that each bulk freight train can take the load equivalent of fifty HGVs off the roads. HGV drivers will twitchily reach for the keys for their big rigs all the while threatening rolling protests and road blockages at any suggestion of a concerted effort to switch bulk haulage (back) to rail, but the fact remains that shuttling the goods they carry by rail between distribution points emits far less GHGs than the fleet of HGVs required to do the same job would emit. Freight on Rail reports that 26% of the UK’s emissions can be attributed to road transport of goods.

A resurrection of the UK rail network is more than just rolling stock, routes and encouraging passengers and cartons alike onto the tracks. It is also about urban planning. Rail is an infrastructure at both local and national levels. Towns, transport interchanges and other peripheral infrastructure elements need to be planned with the idea that rail is a preferred transport modality. Rail infrastructure is long lasting and immovable once installed and so new urban developments, and redevelopment of existing towns etc need to flex a little to best accommodate their presence and encourage the use of the supplied services. Such ideas fly in the face of the open market free-for-all that characterises post-Thatcher Britain, however perhaps in these market interventionist times we may find the political and public will for a more planned approach now, with the goal of a better service and environment for all in the years ahead.

Last minute addendum: if this reaction by the airline industry is anything to go by, Adonis’s announcement might just have some legs.

A recent tweet by tebbo recommended a short article on a proposed in-wheel electric motor that can be retrofitted to existing petrol vehicles…. “RT @Vibroseis Retrofit hybrid kit for your car using electric wheel motors http://bit.ly/8gLox <<< Nice one Mr ex-IBMer”

Its an interesting idea. The technology proposal is for a set of electric motors to be installed between the wheel and the brake mechanisms, and powered by a battery array in the trunk. The motors will take up some or all of the load with the petrol engine therefore needing to work less, perhaps including down to only an idle speed. The petrol engine wouldn’t be able to be turned off completely when in motion as it will be required to power the vehicles existing essential systems - steering, brakes, aircon, digital-integrated-multi-media-web-browsing-GPS console, and heated 48oz coffee mug holders.

The practical challenges to making such a system work have to be: electric engine power limits; battery technology constraints,; integration with existing controls especially braking (incl. ABS) and acceleration - such systems may be fly by wire or cable/hydraulic; networking of motor units in order to synchronise output across the two/four wheels; the need to support multiple wheel size, stud pattern, rim offset configurations.

Wheel sizes and configurations are standardised more than you might think. A quick check of the webiverse finds that there are probably about 20 combinations of wheel size and stud pattern that are used across a high proportion of vehicle manufacturers and models. The practical consideration of deliverable motive power from the electric motors versus vehicle weight might reduce the range of cars the technology is practical for anyway, so the most common 20 size/stud patterns might well fit 75% of the addressable market. If the electric engine drive assembly is designed to allow for it then additional stud patterns can be bolted on easily. The published design schematic (see figure) seems to indicate that this is catered for.

The other caveat is that of bureaucracy. As the electric motor system is a change to the motive power source of the vehicle, and on paper adds horsepower over and above the existing petrol engine I would imagine that every vehicle in which it is installed will need to pass some sort of re-registration and roadworthiness inspection. There will no doubt be insurance implications as well.

There is another important design consideration - style. There is a trend toward Brake Bling. The designers will do to remember to cater for those who wish to greenvertise their new electric wheels.

Henry David Thoreau said, “We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice”.

And so it is with technology and the energy supply model underlying it. What wonders the profligate use of petroleum based fuels and coal has brought to mankind over the last century. Borrowing profusely from the energy stores of the past has allowed us to break free from the limits otherwise placed on us, had we needed to continue relying solely on plant based energy sources for fuel, and animals (and human slaves) and the occasional use of wind, water and gravity for motion. Supporting as it has the major technology innovation driven macro economic cycles of the 20th century we must recognise that even our current plans (such as they are) to move to widespread use of renewables for electricity supply would not be possible without the construction and technology innovations fuelled by the petro industry.

Our current perilous state is the end result of two human failings.

Firstly, we have treated as an externality the economic and environmental cost of the pollution generated through burning coal and petro fuels. The treatment of pollution as an externality is not just a problem of human behaviour; it is clearly also a systemic failure of market fundamentals, and one that must be addressed even as we seek a way out of the current global economic unravelling.

Secondly, we have failed to plan sufficiently for the eventual and entirely logical decline in the availability of oil supplies. The extent to which we have collectively found it convenient to ignore the clarion calls regarding the peaking of oil supplies is breathtaking.

Yet here we are; facing the environmental unravelling that results from a century of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the collapse of the market systems as a result of self deception as their true operational nature, together with the real likelihood that peak oil is a “now” not a “later”. You couldn’t plan that nexus better if you were the scriptwriter for a Hollywood disaster movie.

While the irony of our current problems should not escape us the technology that it has allowed us to develop might however provide the means for us to avoid some of the worst of the potential resulting scenarios. It may be argued that in the long term (meaning: really long term) human society needs to evolve to an entirely different model (and why not - we have seen already in human history the existence of several different models that have been effective in their day, given the needs and limits of the time). However in the short to medium term we must recognise that we cannot simply stop doing every activity that is currently performed and that in this new reality is recognised to have an unacceptably large ecological footprint. To attempt to do so would be far too disruptive of the current social order to be acceptable. Instead, we must use technology in different ways in order to provide low GHG emission alternatives to current heavy GHG emission ways of working and living.

Of all of the changes we must make, the two areas that will require technology-supported alternatives to most desperately are travel and electricity supply, and they are in fact linked.

Lets first look at travel. The four most common forms of polluting travel are (road based) vehicular, sea-borne bulk carriers, air, and rail. Which is worse is a moot point as far as progressing the discussions along in the short term, especially given the debate over the actual impact of jet propelled, high altitude flight. For simplicity’s sake it is worth assuming that they’re all bad, and they will all need to be drastically curtailed and/or re-engineered if they are to remain viable.

Sea-borne bulk carriers are the easiest to deal with, so lets get that topic out of the way first. The easiest way of avoiding pollution resulting from an activity is to not perform the activity in the first place. The vast majority of bulk carriers are either carrying crude or refined petrochemicals or derived products or coal; raw or semi refined minerals; components that are destined to used somewhere else as part of a highly distributed supply chain; or completed manufactured goods. The shipping of petro products and coal in bulk will clearly decline anyway as we remove these products as primary energy supply sources. Highly distributed and long tail supply chains look increasingly unviable when we recognise those costs that are currently treated as economic externalities, and in doing so account for those costs in the price of the resulting product and service. Already companies are beginning to re-examine their supply chains in light of GHG emissions, and work is underway to further refine the Scope 3 calculations of the GHG Protocol by the World Resource Institute in order to provide further clarity regarding the details of supply chain reporting. In a similar fashion, we can expect a reduction in long distance shipping of manufactured products, especially as the embodied footprint of such products is more commonly calculated, reported, and as a result priced in to the product. In such a scenario a locally produced product will become more desirable than an equivalent product manufactured remotely. The accounting for the pollution resulting from the fuelling of the remaining shipping movements will naturally encourage a re-examination of nuclear driven ships, and the use of wind power.

Rail meanwhile needs to be powered by either clean sources of electricity, or through acceptable bio-fuels. These same two energy sources are also required for road based vehicular transport. We must however get much smarter in our use of technology if we are to make rail transport again acceptable as a common form of mass human transport. Currently rail journeys are more often than not an exercise in frustration, uncoordinated as they are with bus services, and with the thicket of overlapping rail service providers that has resulted from privatisation of the rail network in many countries. Successfully getting from A to B via rail services is an unnecessarily complex wrestle with numerous timetables, ticketing systems, and interchanges - none of which have seen much effort to simplify. It needn’t be so. If we made the same effort toward taking the friction out of rail transport as we have to making car travel easier and more enjoyable we would go a long way toward making mass rail services far more attractive as a form of human transport. Coordinated web based services for timetables and ticketing is a start. Telecommunications based services to enable information to be readily available to travellers is also required - why can we buy a GPS mapper for a vehicle for $100 but can’t be similarly helped to navigate from one train to another or from train to bus to address. Location based services must be extended to encourage commuters out of their vehicles and onto public transport. Meanwhile, we must also look to move much of the bulk transport of goods off the roads and back onto the rails. The decline of the use of rail as a viable bulk material transport method is illogical, should be reversed, and will certainly become more attractive as road carriage costs are internalised into the economic model.

Road travel in its current form will only continue if fuelled by either acceptable bio-fuels or clean electricity. It is likely however, and perhaps desirable in the greater scheme of things if we also achieve a drastic reduction in the overall use of cars as a form of transport. It is important to recognise that we have managed to engineer into society an unnecessary reliance on vehicular travel. Urban design must be rebalanced such that the use of a car is not required for much of everyday living. It is illogical that we have decimated the economy of the local shops through the adoption of huge shopping centres for which we have no alternative but to drive to in order to use. There is much talk today by the USA’s Obama administration regarding the links between Wall Street and Main Street. The reality is that the death of Main Street (or the High Street if you’re in the UK) has more to do with this engineering out of local economic resilience as it has to do with the failures and corruption of the banking and finance markets.

Removing cars from the road will however also require us to provide technology-based alternatives to many activities. For a start, telecommuting must be made more common and far easier. This will require many changes and the provision of enabling services, not least of which will be the provision of secure broadband services to everyone. In fact, high speed communication links are perhaps the most important enabler of change if we are to at all engineer our way out of both the problems of climate change and those presented by peak oil.

And what of “clean electricity” supplies? Aside from altering the fuel stocks used for generation, away from coal and natural gas and toward renewables, the most important change we must make will be a fundamental change in the energy generation and distribution model. In order to engineer the required resilience into a smart grid system we must move from the highly centralised and concentrated generation model that we have today, and move to a highly fragmented and widely distributed micro-generation model. Such a network will have a dynamic and rich mix of renewable generation sources as well as tapping into the stored energy sources that are parked (electric) vehicles and the like. Successfully achieving a resilient and balanced power supply that supports both baseload as well as peak demands will require co-ordination of the supply and demand “nodes” as well as the grid that connects them. This co-ordination is what is meant by the term “smart grid”. Telecommunications infrastructure is again the enabler, providing the means to monitor and manage the various consumptive or contributory nodes.

That just leaves us with the little problem of air travel. Simply put, even if we develop an acceptable source of biofuels the days of mass air travel are rapidly drawing to a close. All the highly publicised experiments by various airlines in the use of biofuels are nothing more than a distraction and a con. Airline travel will be severely curtailed. Humanity may eventually get used to that - keeping in mind the fact that for all the protestations to the contrary by holiday makers and airline executives the reality is that international and domestic long distance travel is something that we have only recently managed to fall so deeply in love with. Those same airline executives as well as the forty-something holidaymaker would do well to be reminded that as recently as their own childhood humanity managed to do quite OK without racking up half a million air-miles each per annum. Again however we must face the reality of the short term, and again telecommunications must step up to meet the demands now built into our personal and business structures of behaviour. Telepresence enabled communications provides a useful alternative for the business executive, and with the right investment may even provide some acceptable alternatives to flying around the world in order to have Christmas dinner with that distant relative whom you didn’t really like all that much anyway.

Telecommunications therefore is perhaps a great saviour in many ways as we re-engineer our current personal, working and industrial models. However there is also one more role it needs to play - that of helping us to accurately account for the embodied ecological footprint of the goods and services we consume. As the embodied footprint of a product is linked to the distance that we transport it and the mode by which we transport it, location based services will increasingly be relied upon in order to accurately account for that travel. We must become far more aware than we are today of the complex shifting back and forth of products that takes place before they reach their final consumption point.

All that remains is for us to find the will to move forward. A reasonable question might also be to ask whether our various telecommunications providers have the vision and the strategy to play a role in delivering the infrastructure and services we will need from them. Lets continue to shout the demand down the phone line to them, and hope for more than confused static in return.

Sometime in the next one thousand, four hundred and fifty eight days its all going to get really ugly. There will be no single day of reckoning, but rather a wave of reckonings - somewhere around 303,824,640 of them. According to no less an authority than the CIA 303,824,640 was the USA population back in mid 2008, though there have been a few burials and births since then so perhaps this piece of intelligence, like so many others from the CIA should be taken with just a pinch of salt.

Arguably more than a few have already tipped into the realisation of just what is in store for them should the newly elected US President, Barack Hussein Obama II actually bring into reality the promise of a low carbon economy. Most however are still dazed by the spectacle of the inauguration to give it real thought. Carrying on his shoulders the hope of so many Americans (and no small number of the majority of the world’s population i.e. the rest of us) that he can steer the USA away from its socially, morally, and physically destructive ways, President Obama cocoons many from the reality of what those changes might mean for them. When they’re told, or when they find that they can’t do today what they could do yesterday, stand well clear ladies and gentleman of the spinning fan blades.

The Obama/Biden administration is the first to unequivocally state that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is reality, and that it represents a major risk for the survival of life. While there have arguably been many missed opportunities to say more on the subject during the 2007/2008 election cycle and during the limbo days since the election it is worth quoting again from the Vice Presidential debate of 2008:

“MODERATOR: Senator (Biden), what is true and what is false about the causes (of global warming)?
BIDEN: Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. And, look, this probably explains the biggest fundamental difference between John McCain and Barack Obama and Sarah Palin and Joe Biden — Governor Palin and Joe Biden. If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.”

Obama gave further nod to the road ahead when, in his inauguration speech he said:
“And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

On those scores the Obama/Biden ticket would have got my vote (had I been entitled to one), though in fairness to my Inner Sceptic I should hasten to add that action is what will make the difference not words. And it is that action which brings me back to my original thesis: its going to get real ugly some time during the next four years.

Of those three hundred and three odd million American people there are very few who really get what those words might mean to them and their daily lives. It is one thing to hear the words, it is another to listen to them, it is yet another thing to internalise them and absorb the implications. The challenge ahead no longer lies with convincing a nation’s leader of the reality of AGW, the challenge ahead lies in bringing the citizenry of that country along the same road. I suspect that for most, it is today somewhat akin to the cynical exercise of going to Church on Sundays. Being inspired by the rhetoric of the preacher, washing out the stains of a few sinful acts in the confessional, praying with heartfelt earnestness for the redemption of those who have lost the way on the true path…and then going right back to the same shit way of living by Sunday evening.

So sometime during the next four years, those 303,824,640 or so people are going to find that navigating the road ahead involves their participation. The problem hasn’t been solved by a newly elected President dropping one sentence into his inauguration speech. The problem won’t be solved the by Washington twiddling a knob or two on the economic and social control panels that mysteriously manages (or not) the ebbs of flows of the macro economic maelstrom. Nor will it be solved by changing a light bulb or two, turning down the thermostat a degree, and manufacturing the same old stuff in the same old way but with a nod toward any resulting device having a better energy efficiency than last year’s model.

Obama’s implementation of his campaign words will instead involve changes in the running of every day American life. And seeing as so many other countries are followers and imitators of that social and economic model a lot of other lives too. Yours. Mine. Your neighbours. Your parents and your friends. What we drive, whether we drive. Where we holiday and how we get there. What we eat, how that food is grown and where it is grown - and therefore when it is available. Where and how we design our communities and buildings. How we define success and freedom and how we reward it. What our expectations for economic and social growth are. Which businesses make sense. Which businesses need to be deliberately shut down. These are just a few of the smaller questions that we must address as we enact change.

Some of them have undoubtedly already twigged. A largish number who perhaps already have one of these plastered on the back of their Chevy Suburban. Any slick talkin’ Dem-o-crat who tries to wrestle the keys for their Chevy from their clenched fist and swap it for the electronic keyfob for a shiny new Prius (or even a Chevy Volt) is probably going to find themselves staring down the barrel of a constitutionally legal firearm. These people are going to resist with every braincell, every dollar, every decision, and perhaps even with their physical might any effort to have them change their day to day way of life.

There are to be counted also the relatively small number of people who already truly understand the personal implications of dealing with AGW. They have proactively made personal decisions, and have set themselves on a course somewhat different to the day to day path followed by mainstream. They are the Eco-Amish. They already walk. They already eat a little differently. They already holiday locally. They already teach their children that unbridled economic expansion derived from profligate consumption of fossil fuels might well be mainstream, but it is also a truly dangerous thing.

Then there are the rest of them. To quote the newly elected President - change is coming. What worries me isn’t whether the newly installed US administration says and believes those words, it is whether the everyman understands the truth of those same words. And most importantly, whether the everyman accepts the change to them that delivering on those words means.

Hang on for the ride, this is where it gets really interesting.

What a failure of vision the announcement of the UK government’s go ahead for Heathrow expansion is. Brown’s government has added another item to the list of lamentable directives, all notable by their inspirational paucity and shallowness of intelligent insight. Not that Cameron’s side is much better - starting with Boris’s vision of a Venice like Thames Estuary airport with waves lapping gently outside as passengers board the next generation of eco-jets. The best thing that can be said of Boris’s plan is that if Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger ever needs to ditch a plane again at least there will be a nearby river to do it in. Don’t hit the Thames Barrier on the way in Ches’.

The decision to expand has been positioned as one that is necessary if the UK is to remain competitive within Europe, and globally. So sayeth the Chairman of the IoD, so sayeth the airline CEOs, not to mention the ever impartial BAA. Baroness Valentine of Putney, who took the unprecedented step of pausing as she reloaded her shotgun in between shooting foxes to comment “In the current economic turmoil, one mustn’t forget that if the UK is to face darn increasingly fierce global competition – if London’s access to world markets is to remain one of its unique selling points – the capital will need the best international connections. We simply mustn’t allow upstart economies such France and Germany to fly more aeroplanes than we do. The British Bulldog must be given its wings!”

And what an unnecessarily black and white view that is, simply because it ignores the possibility that we may, if we just try hard enough, manage to uncouple economic stability from the need to fly. What might such a vision look like?

There are basically two types of airline traveller - business and holidayer. OK, there are also people travelling for funerals, to participate in sporting events, or emigrating. There might even be the occasional asylum seeker who is either flying to the UK to spend some time getting to know the BNP (sorry Immigration Department) process for asylum seekers, or having already enjoyed the BNP’s hospitality perhaps flying back to the welcoming African regime from which they fled. It might even be the case that some of those failed asylum seekers might be flying back for repatriation to whatever tiny, remaining square of dry land we still call Bangladesh.

Of course the projected increase in passenger numbers that is used to justify the need for expansion includes the increased holidaying crowds, however Baroness Val appears a little dismissive of the economic benefits of 10 million more Aussie backpackers and Chinese holiday makers, which is odd really. It is worth remembering that outbound English holidayers are a net economic drain on the UK, taking as they do all their hard saved pounds and pissing them up the wall of some Ibiza nightclub. Every pound spent in Eurozone or in the US is a pound not flowing back into the UK economy. Indeed, if we are primarily worried about benefiting the UK economy then we’d be better off charging all those wannabe UK holiday flyers the fully loaded ticket cost, including a carbon and environmental tax reflective of the true environment footprint of their flight, with a view to encouraging them to holiday instead within the UK’s borders. Gap year students who have nothing better to do than backpack through India (no really….they truly have nothing better to do as there are no graduate jobs for them) might instead be encouraged to walk through Slough and Chalvey buying English samosas instead of Indian ones. Immediately, that will free up seats on both outbound and inbound flights for more foreign holiday makers to come here. More camera wielding Japanese gleefully pumping Yen back into the Putney High Street as they pose in front of a boarded up Woolworths snapping retro photos that celebrate England’s passed glory. A result for the IoD and Baroness Val - a net economic benefit to England and the beginnings of the traveller carrying the economic burden of the environmental footprint of jet travel.

Meanwhile let us remind ourselves that is the business traveller whom the airlines all find the most profitable to cater for. Not for them £10 seats and a bag of peanuts an optional extra. For the business traveller has the fantastically profitable habit of planning travel relatively late, and thus paying full price for the dubious joy of flying to New York, Hong Kong or Moscow to take part in a High Powered Executive Thinkfest. However as they too are charged the full environmental cost of flying, they’ll suddenly decide that those business meetings in New York sit a little more uncomfortable on the balance sheet. The already significant economic argument for avoiding optional staff travel will gain a whole new lustre.

Already, companies that have deployed high end video conferencing technology (”telepresence” as it is known) as a way of conducting effective executive meetings, with a range of international participants are reporting significant savings as a result of avoided staff airline travel. One company this author has spoken to has reported a saving in the region of $40 million, in return for a $4 million dollar investment in telepresence suite solutions. The use of such solutions is not without challenges of course. Telepresence suites are not cheap, and of course you need one for every location to which you wish to communicate. A reasonable alternative to each business having their own suites however is for a network to be established that can be shared by many businesses. And therein lies the failure of vision from the Brown government, and their wannabe Cameron alternatives.

Heathrow T6 could be so much more simply because it could represent the future of international and intranational business communications. By all means, build all the high speed rail you want. By all means, build all the bus and rail links in between London and Heathrow so as to encourage the use of public transport to and from rather than use of personal cars. T6 however, ought to a Telepresence Hub, not an additional runway. Business travellers, already used to the idea of heading out to Heathrow anyway, could find awaiting them not a baggage hall of lost luggage and the demeaning exercise that is full body scanning in your socks. Instead upon arriving and checking in a highly trained Telesteward could shepherd business people to waiting lounges where they may avail themselves of the facilities and prepare for their discussions, and then ensures that they can find their assigned suite and can start and conduct their meeting with success.

Bold thinking is required if we are navigate our way through the challenges we face from climate change. Heathrow expansion as announced has the boldness and vision of a wet tissue, locking us in to the status quo as it does. Ecoplanes are merely ecoplans on Boeing’s and Airbus’s drawing boards, and should only be a meaningful factor in our planning when they are a proven sight in our skies. Meanwhile, it is time for us to look differently at both the needs of the business traveller, and the meaning of “a transport hub suitable for the 21st century businessperson”. In the 21st century, effective ideas do not need an additional runway to have wings.

According to a report in The Independent, a poll of Scientists performed by the paper found almost unanimous support for active engineering of the Earth’s biosphere in a drastic attempt to strip CO2 from the atmosphere. Even though we are living in an everyday life-is-the-experiment form of biospheric engineering (which is how we got into this mess to begin with) it should be easy to recognise that such suggestions are the climate change response equivalent of a plumber sucking air sharply through clenched teeth as he shakes he head in despair of the extent of the work required. I’m afraid Madam, that this is going to be far more inconvenient, painful and expensive than we first thought…. [suck/shake]

To pursue any of the bioengineering efforts that have been suggested, which range from blocking sunlight using spaceborn reflectors to manipulating the ocean’s chemistry and currents in an attempt to increase its CO2 absorption capability, should be rightly recognised as a REALLY BIG ISSUE. Assume for a moment that those scientists are correct in their support for such steps, and that they have also correctly ascertained that the current efforts to curb the flow rates of GHG emissions are wildly insufficient, then we are at the beginning of where it all gets really scary. The moment that must recognised as one of those gravely addressed times when you realise things aren’t quite going as well as you thought, and on the table there are no good options left, only a set of bad ones from which to select the least worse.

It is worth pausing for a moment to just reflect on the enormity of what is being suggested, the risk inherent in the exercise, and potential scope of the end result if we botched it up. In an everyday and everyman’s sense, it is impractical to understand however what all that does really mean on a planetary scale - so instead I will express it everyday terms. Imagine that your domestic central heating system’s thermostat has gone haywire and the house’s temperature is wildly fluctuating. Its 38 degrees Celsius in the lounge room and its 5 degrees in the bedrooms. Biospheric engineering is the equivalent of saying “Look, we tried to fix the central heating system but we can’t make it work properly anymore. So what we’re going to instead is leave the heating system as it is; and remodel the house around to cater for the problem. Of course….a few walls will have to come out in the process….”.

You can imagine that you’d take a long, careful look at that before proceeding VERY carefully.

Similarly, we need to have a number of careful debates regarding biospheric engineering, and a vigorously applied risk management methodology to any path forward. Sure we need to analyse and rank the relative merits of each of the suggested approaches - including for each a matching “back out” plan. We must ensure that part of the risk analysis for each suggested bio-engineering technique is a thorough what-if effort that considers the likely range of undesirable outcomes that may ensue, and what we’d then do to deal with those that arise (and be ready to do it). But if we’re going to have an Intervention, then lets do it properly.

Because if we’re saying that we’re at the point of considering biospheric engineering then we are also saying that Monopoly money carbon trading schemes, non enforceable international protocols, voluntary corporate emissions disclosure schemes and a generally unregulated approach to emissions measurement and management didn’t work. Rather than abandoning all of those efforts however, we should continue with (some of) them albeit in a different way. Taking the path of biospheric engineering should also go hand in hand with direct social and industrial intervention to ensure that what we have collectively failed to achieve through voluntary and half hearted adherence to emissions reductions targets is instead enforced. That reality is the obnoxious truth sitting unacknowledged around the Climate Change Christmas Dinner table. Because if we are going to take the incredibly complex, expensive, desperate and risky path of technical intervention in the planets biosphere we also need to try a different, and more honest approach to reducing the emissions.

Some of the required steps would be enormous ones to take. Forcing an immediate change in vehicle design. Forcing a suspension of a near totality of commercial air traffic. A rigorous change in building design codes, and a strict timetable for retrofitting of existing building and housing stock. A soup to nuts reorganisation of our food supply lines. Redeploy military personnel to a multinational, U.N. type force the mission of which it is to protect from any further degradation those natural carbon sinks that we have left - for example preventing any further logging or burning of the Amazon. It would be untenable to intervene with the workings of one sink - say the ocean - to try and boost it’s capacity while actively degrading another through profit seeking enterprise. When we’ve done those then perhaps we can find the courage to have a sensible debate regarding overall human population targets, in context of the capacity of the biosphere to be able to support us. Its easy to understand why no politician has yet thought it a winning strategy to include such suggestions as elements of an election policy platform.

Lets remember though that we are living in truly interesting times. GM and Chrysler are continuing to negotiate the details of US Federal support, lest they disappear in a fog of their own tailpipe emissions. Is it really too difficult for the conditions to be very simple: “If you want this money, then stop building every other vehicle except for a zero emissions (0em) 2 passenger vehicle, a 0em 4 passenger vehicle, one for 6 passengers, a delivery van, a large van, a small bus and a large bus. You have one year. When you’re done with those, come back and we’ll tell you the next thing we want you to do. Oh…and you’ll co-operate with each other to achieve this. Go. Now…”.

Those unable to continue to jet around the globe will of course go absolutely mental. There’s no great answer to that other than to again ponder the enormity of the implications and risks involved in engineering the biosphere in an attempt to resurrect and boost in the short term the planet’s capacity to absorb the emissions that result from such activities. And that is why this now has the potential to get all very ugly, and why we must take a very deliberate, risk managed, and deliberated approach toward the next steps. Half arsed hasn’t worked, we need to apply some strategic sustainability governance from here on in. Welcome to the topics that will define 2009: Biospheric Engineering, Governance, Risk Management.

I cannot help but point out that the acronym that immediately jumps out from that is B.E. G.Ri.M. Happy New Year.

Telepresence - the generic name given to high definition video conferencing technology - has been much hyped over the years however with the close eye now been given to corporate travel it is perhaps now coming into its own. In the past the technology has suffered from the twin evils of over-inflated expectation together with the under-delivery of constrained network capability.

The fundamental difference between telepresence and videoconferencing is that the former attempts to be an immersion experience. At this end of the market, which is served to varying degrees of capability by Cisco, Teliris, Tandberg and HP, solutions are sold as “suites” with the necessary technology installed in matching and furnished meeting rooms at various locations. Meeting participants sit at Board Room type meeting tables across from a co-ordinated array of wide HDTV screens that display the participants in the “elsewhere” end of the meeting in life size. Much effort is made to visually trick the here and there participants that they are actually staring at each other face to face, rather than face to face (amongst the here participants) and face to camera to screen to face to camera to screen (amongst the there participants).

And that perhaps is the greatest paradox of it all. Telepresence must use a LOT of gee-wizzery in order to achieve its ultimate goal of you not noticing it. Telepresence must first convince you that using it is as at least as easy and intuitive as meeting someone face to face for real. And that is before you even begin to use some of the technology value add features that several of the vendors now claim as features. The extra challenge here is that you can’t help but express a quiet “Wow” as you first enter any telepresence suite - its something about ten or so metres of high-def flat screen installed in a mood lit and paneled room that almost ensures such an utterance. This mustbe amongst the few technologies that ranks highly on the Wow-meter however it begs to be unseen if it is to succeed in being more than a very expensive and rarely used corporate executive toy.

In order to achieve such feats of invisibility vendors have gone to a lot of trouble with the technology - from network performance to camera technology to acoustic engineering to visual trickery. Underlying all that is generally a fair degree of understanding of the “human nature” aspects of how we communicate effectively as people. Effective telepresence solutions must ensure that eye contact is assured, that meeting participants on screen have a 3D look to them, and that sound levels are the same whether you’re addressing a remark to a person who is 2 chairs to your left or 15989kms away (Sydney to New York if you’re curious).

If telepresence solutions are to ultimately play a significant role in providing a viable alternative to regular corporate business travel several current problems must be overcome. For a start right balance needs to be struck between “Wow!” and “What technology…was there technology?”. Organising a telepresence call must be no more difficult than organising a meeting with your colleagues down the hallway, never mind being easier than booking a flight (and transfers, and hotels, and making sure that your toothpaste and shampoo is in 100ml tubes…). Telepresence vendors also must do more to engage with users to educate them on what types of communications work well using the technology, and which should rather be done face to face. I cannot imagine for instance that firing a staff member would be appropriately performed over telepresence - though we’ve heard reported cases of that being via SMS so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear it happens.

2009 may well be the year that telepresence comes of age. Corporates with extensive deployments have certainly pointed to the ability to achieve financial ROI for the investment in the order of a 10:1 saving on the costs as a result of avoided air travel. Therefore the financial justification should alone be enough to convince more organisations to examine its use. ThinkingString recommends that companies with extensive travel budgets revisit the technology as today’s experience is a far cry from that of only a few years ago. Just don’t be wowed when you walk into the room!