Category: climate
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Why should we improve public transit?
Photo: Luxembourg Station. Recently a reported asked me: “How do you make a case that we should spend money on public transportation?” What a great question. It gives me an opportunity to systematically list all the arguments for that. I would put those into three buckets: (1) Economic benefit. There has been much research on…
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Why do we need to fix the T?
Photo: Longwood Station, Brookline, 2023. Recently I was asked if I have any opinions on the announcement that MBTA was shutting down the Green Line in order to fix the “slow zones”. I can think of at least three benefit, and a big negative. Let me state the negative first. If the shutdown is too…
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How has the work-from-home world affected the environment?
Photo: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, summer 2022. The net impact of work-from-home on the environment is actually quite complex, and depends on a number of factors such as commuting patterns and energy consumption at home and at workplace, both before and after the switch. But let’s first discuss where the potential positive and…
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How do sustainable supply chains improve the continuity of supply and protect the environment?
Photo: Woods in Sherborn, MA, Summer 2023. Recently I was asked by my School’s PR people to reflect on a few questions regarding the relationship between business practices and sustainability. They asked some excellent questions, which prompted me to write something down. Below is the first part. The question is: How do sustainable supply chains…
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Choosing the right fuel (II): Total cost
We have discussed the cost of using different types of fuel. Now let’s step back and talk about what are the total cost involved in marine shipping. For marine shipping, the following costs are relevant: Fuel cost, including initial purchase, energy conversion, distribution, operations and maintenance cost. Ship building/retrofit cost: How much does it cost…
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Choosing the right fuel (I): fuel and carbon cost
This is a series of post on my work in the field of green marine fuel. First of all, for marine companies that are considering switching greener fuel, choosing the right marine fuel is no easy task. To me, there are two major hurdles. First, there are many possible pathways. Here is a partial list:…
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Steps to calculate the carbon footprint of a supply chain
The steps of calculating the carbon footprint of a supply chain is straightforward: 1- You need to map out your supply chain. This also defines the boundary of your calculation. 2- Collect activity data at each level of your supply chain. For example, an oil company may start at the exploration and drilling stage, and…
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How much do you pay charging an EV on a monthly basis?
I always knew it is a bit cheaper to drive an EV as opposed to a gasoline car (not the owning part, which deserve a separate calculation, but just the day-to-day cost of using it) in New England where I live, but I never bothered to quantify that saving. That is, until today. As you…
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EV in 2022 and Beyond: More Good News, but Uncertainties Too
Recently I was asked to reflect a little on the recent EV movement, so I dug a bit on the latest statistics. 2022 is not over yet, so the latest number we have is from 2021. I was encouraged to find that while everyone was focusing on the COVID in 2021, EV sales actually nearly…
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A Small Innovation, A Big Saving for the Environment
Just a couple of days, I received my new iPhone shipped from Apple. What I was impressed with was not the phone – the phone was good by all means but it was the clever packaging that I was impressed with. You see, in order to create proper cushion for the items shipped in a…
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Green Ammonia is a promising renewable marine fuel
It was in the news that “Amazon’s new net-zero carbon pledge is focused on the oceans, as shipping giants pursue alternative fuels“. That is absolutely the right move. Ships emit about 2% of the total GHG a year, compared to 12% in road transportation (see detailed numbers in my early article), but in absolute volume…
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EV is not just about making cars. It is about the Supply Chain.
JB Straubel, Tesla co-founder and its former chief technology officer, recently gave an interview, where he warned that some auto manufacturers may have not thought through when they announced that they were going to switch to 100% EV by a certain date. Indeed, if you look at how a car is made, whether EV or gasoline ones,…
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Understanding CO2 Emissions for different freight transport modes (renewable as well as non-renewable)
One of the most important questions to ask in transitioning to renewable modes of transport is simply: How much less CO2 are we going to emit by switching to renewables? The other important question is: How much does it cost? I have been researching on that question quite a bit. And I found quite a…
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Carbon foot-printing problem is first of all an information problem
Carbon foot-printing problem is, first of all, an information problem. In a recent report released by World Economic Forum, the first challenge in reducing carbon emission is informational: There is just not enough transparency and clarity on who is emitting how much across a supply chain. Because of those informational barriers, companies will benefit from…
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Road Transportation is the Single Largest Decarbonization Opportunity with a Clear Path Forward
My apology for the unwieldy title. But I chose the long title to highlight one thing: Although there are many decarbonization opportunities with large impact, road transportation offers the clearest path forward. Let me elaborate. First, let’s examine the areas where we need to reduce our carbon footprints. There are lots of high-quality research and…
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The Sustainability Perils of E-commerce (II): Fast and Furious (Fuming)?
In an early post, I talked about the upsides and downsides of e-commerce logistics on the environment. The main idea there is that e-commerce can potentially reduce CO2 emissions if customers end up driving less in their own cars. However, because of the small batch size of typical e-commerce orders, delivery trucks end up drive…
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The Carbon-reducing Effect of E-commerce Delivery
In an early article I discussed the perils of higher carbon print in online grocery shopping (mainly from a paper by Van Loon et al (2015). However, let’s not forget that the paper did find that when it comes to delivery using dedicated vans carrying a large basket size (as opposed to just a few…
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The sustainability peril of E-commerce (I): Small batches lead to more emissions
Recently I have been discussing with David Steven of Boston Strategy International, a world expert on sustainable supply chains, on the topic of carbon foot printing. One of the interesting points we talked about is the impact of the growth of the E-commerce sector on global carbon emissions. Researchers have been studying this for a…
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The Dawn of the Modern Power Grid Started Right Here in Massachusetts (and It was Clean Energy!)
Electrification is indeed the single great achievement of our society. And yet, I was delighted to find out the modern power grid actually started in Massachusetts, a state I live currently. In the late 1800s, technologies started to converge to build an electrified society. In 1882, Edison’s direct current (DC) system was built in Manhattan.…
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Measuring the Carbon Footprint of a Supply Chain: 3 Scopes
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol has established a set of standards to measure and manage GHG emissions. To me it seems to be the dominant framework in measuring the carbon footprint of an organization and/or a supply chain. The key to understanding the GHG protocal is that it includes three scopes: Scope 1: Any emission that…