As project managers, we often find ourselves at the fulcrum of decisions in which we must take diverse viewpoints into account and make key project decisions, sometimes in the ‘heat of battle’.

For example, does this sound familiar?

Quality Engineer: “We need 5 weeks to do this verification test!”

Product Manager: “They can do that testing in 2 weeks.”

Quality Engineer: “Actually, now it looks like we need 6 weeks!”

Product Manager: “Let’s skip that test altogether, it adds no value!”

So you know this to be true.  We constantly have to make our best judgments based on what we hear, what we benchmark, and we always try to base decisions on facts and not emotion.  That is ‘the way’ for a good PM to work.

A few months ago, the press was pretty bad for climate scientists.  From what you were hearing, it sounded like they made up the whole of climate change.  They were fudging results, sending fake emails, and if you believed some people, were the devil incarnate.

The problem is that now many folks have ‘written off’ the warnings of climate scientists because of that bad press.

Now it turns out that several independent agencies have – with the exceptions of a few minor mistakes of judgment – cleared the findings of the scientists.

In this story, from the BBC, for example, the conclusion of a Dutch government panel was that there were “no errors that would undermine the main conclusions” on probable impacts of climate change.

We urge you to make up your own mind.  One way to do that is to get informed.  And one way to do that is to check out this very well-researched, and heavily hypertexed “discovery of global warming” by physicist turned historian Spencer Weart.

One other resource we’d like you to check out is “The Six Americas”

It’s all about audience.  And whether it’s regarding climate change or scope creep, project managers need to know their audience.  In this case (well, this is EarthPM after all) it is indeed about climate change.

Studies at George Mason University determined that there are really six different audiences – or mindsets – about climate change:

• The Alarmed
• The Concerned
• The Cautious
• The Unconcerned
• The Doubtful
• The Dismissive

The full report is summarized in this compact PDF.

But you can see in the image below that the audience is split along these six mindsets and if you wanted to get your green project message across you should understand each audience.  Again, this could be true for ANY message.

So consider your audience, collect facts, and look at aspects of your project – including green aspects – in a fair and balanced way.

According to today’s Portsmouth Herald, in an article by Rich Beuchesne headlined “Chief: Go Green”, Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, of the Surui tribe indigenous to the Amazon Rain Forest, is on a high tech quest to help stop climate change and global warming by protecting the rain forest.  “A green economy, we believe, can bring great benefit, clean air and water, and it can also deliver the food we need.”  He further states, “So we’re not saying that the forest has to be untouchable, but it needs to be used sustainably to bring a better future for our people.”  That is what we are saying about project management, and this effort is certainly a project; we’re not saying that greening projects is a must, but what is a must is that sustainability be considered all along a project’s journey.

The Amazon leader has teamed up with Google (Earth), one of the companies we deem “At the Top of Their Game” in our new book.  Google Earth is  mapping  the tribe’s sacred and cultural sites where tribe members hunt and fish as a “way to show the world my culture.  Information is power” says the chief.  The philosophy is spreading to other tribes in the region, too.  The chief also teamed up with Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) to create an economy based on sustainability practices”, something else we at EarthPM strongly believe in.  “Three years ago, my people began discussing carbon credits as part of this sustainability message,” said Chief Almir. “Many people believe this will not work, but I see it as an opportunity to better manage our forest and, by extension, to manage the world.”  Exactly!

A couple of more things he said that particularly resonate with us, “There’s been a lot of deforestation in the name of development of our country,” he said. “When we sat down and talked about our future, we saw how important it was to bring our knowledge to the rest of the world.”

Many people “do not believe in the message of sustainability, so we bring scientific research to prove it can bring a healthy economy and well-being to the world.”

Chief Almir’s 1,300 tribe members are all vested in a green future, he said.  “We get courage and strength to do what we do in the belief that in the long run, we are right in what we are fighting for,” he said, “to create that green consciousness for our future. Resistance can be done through armed struggle, but we believe it works better through awareness.”

We’ll be listening and watching for more information coming out of the region.  You can also check out ATC’s website, and here’s more information on Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, including a video.

I’ve just finished reading a new novel by author Ian McEwan.  McEwan is well-known for novels like Amsterdam and Atonement.  Atonement was made into a very successful film.

McEwan’s new book, however, takes on Climate Change – in a way.

It features a repulsive character – British physicist and Nobel Prize winner Michael Beard, who you will learn to despise, even though he’s the main character, and has the future of the earth in his hands, pursuing a unique new approach to solar power (I won’t give it away), and trying to demonstrate it for the world, but mostly for his own purposes.  So there’s a sort of tension throughout the book, a conflict for you, the reader, as to whether or not you should “root” for this character in spite of his nearly infinite flaws and generally disgusting behavior.

But since this is not a literary site, I will leave the real reviews to the professionals, and that’s why for that purpose I link you to these reviews from The Guardian and The New York Times.

What I wanted to focus on was a speech that Beard gives about 40% of the way through the novel.  In this speech, Beard is presenting to a room full of very rich, and very skeptical investors.  He himself is nearly ill from overeating before the lecture, and he’s so unsure of the reaction, he’s planned, quite literally, a quick exit through a gap in the curtains and off stage.

Here is some of Michael Beard’s speech:

The planet is sick.  Curing the patient is a matter of urgency and is going to be expensive – perhaps as much as two percent of the global GDP, and far more if we delay the treatment.  I am convinced, and I have come here to tell you, that anyone who wishes to help with the therapy, to be part of the process and invest in it, is going to make very large sums of money, staggering sums.  What’s at issue is the creation of another industrial revolution.  Here is your opportunity.  Coal and then oil have made our civilization, they have been superb resources, lifting hundreds of millions of us out of the mental prison of rural subsistence.  Liberation from the daily grind coupled with our innate curiosity has produced in a mere two hundred years and exponential growth of our knowledge base.  The process began in Europe and the US, has spread in our lifetime to parts of Asia, an now to India and China and South America, with Africa yet to come.  All our other problems and conflicts conceal this obvious fact – we barely understand how successful we have been.

So of course we should salute our own inventiveness.  We are very clever monkeys.  Bu the engine of our industrial revolution has been cheap, accessible energy.  We would have got nowhere without it.  Look how fantastic it is.  A kilogram of gas contains roughly 13000 watt-hours of energy.  Hard to beat.  But we want to replace it.  So what’s next?  The best electrical batteries we have store about 300 watt-hours of energy per kg.  And that’s the scale of our problem – 13000 against 300.  NO contest!  But unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of choice.  We have to replace that gasoline quickly for three compelling reasons.

(paraphrasing and summarizing here…)

1. The oil must run out.

2. Many oil-producing areas are politically unstable

3. (most crucially) burning fossil fuels is putting carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, is steadily warming the planet, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand.  But the basic science is in.  We either slow down, and then stop, or face an economic and human catastrophe on a grand scale within our grandchildren’s lifetime.

(Beard continues with a segment on how nations are not virtuous, and greed trumps virtue, and focusing on the audience and their greed).

Oil and coal are energy carriers, and so, in abstract form, is money.  And the answer to that burning question (how will we slow down and stop the use of fossil fuels) is of course where that money, your money, has to flow- to affordable clean energy.

Imagine if I were standing in front of you 250 years ago – you, a collection of country gentlemen and ladies – predicting the coming of the first industrial revolution and telling  you to invest in coal and iron, steam engines, cotton mills, and, later, railways.  Or a century or so later, with the invention of the internal combustion engine, I foresaw the growing importance of oil and urged you to invest in that.  Or 100 years on, in microprocessors, in personal computers, and the Internet and the opportunities they offered.  So here, ladies and gentlemen, is another such moment.  Do not be tempted by the illusion that the world economy and its stock exchanges can exist apart from the world’s natural environment.  Our planet, Earth, is a finite entity.  You have the data in front of you, you have the choice – the human project must be safely and cleanly fueld or it fails, it sinks.  You, the market, either rise to this and get rich along the way, or you sink with all the rest.  We are on this rock together, you have nowhere else to go…

(Beard goes on for several more minutes promoting the rationale for investing in alternate energy forms, then gets specific about solar power).

Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in a heavy rainfall.  This man is dying of thirst.  He has an ax in his hand and he is felling th trees in order to suck sap from the trunks.  There are a few mouthfuls in each tree.  All around him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the forest is vanishing.  So why doesn’t he tip back his head and drink the rain?  Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types.

The rain is our sunlight.  An energy source drenches our planet, drives its climate and its life.  It falls on us in a constant stream, a sweet rain of photos.  A single photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron and so electricity is born, as simple as that, right out of our sunbeams.  This is photovoltaics.  Einstein described it and won a Nobel Prize.  If I believed in God, I would say this is his greatest gift to us.  Since I don’t , I say, how auspicious are the laws of physics!  Less than an hour’s worth of all of the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy the whole world’s energy needs for a year.  A fraction of our hot deserts could power our civilization.  No one can own sunlight, no one can privatize or nationalize it.  Soon everyone will harvest it, from rooftops, ships’ sails, from kids’ backpacks.

(Beard relates a story that happened to him that very afternoon which helps explain the idea of realizing too late that we have the solution to our own problems in hand).

The problem lies within ourselves, our own follies and unexamined assumptions.  And there are moments when the acquisition of new information forces us to make a fundamental reinterpretation of our situation.  Industrial civilization is at just such a moment.  We pass through a mirror, everything is transformed, the old paradigm makes way for the new.

As I said, I don’t want to spoil this book for you, and think you’ll like it (although for a novel about the sun, it is very ‘dark‘.)  If you’ve liked McEwan’s other books you will like this one and if you want a book with a scientific thread throughout but with lots of drama and intrigue, it will provide that for you, too.

Enjoy.

Whether your TV tastes run to Fringe, 24, or the serials, like My Friend Flicka, or The Lone Ranger, there is always a recap from previous episodes.  So here goes.  “In our last episode,”  I talked about how Steve Fludder from GE and Richard Cohen from Bank of America are embracing green efforts because they are good for the bottom-line.  In this post I will look at the view from “big oil”.  Peter Voser, Royal Dutch Shell, was interviewed for ECO-nomics.   U.S. CAP (the U.S. Climate Action Partnership); he believes that market-based energy legislation is needed in this country and others and only by participating with the other stakeholders will it be effective.   His thinking is that to be effective, “energy legislation (must) drive supply security, drive lower fuel emissions, drive new jobs and preserve old jobs.”   “We will quite clearly look out for natural gas developments, which we see as a long-term source of energy that has a lot of positives.” (new projects)

We all think of Shell as an oil company, but they are big in the natural gas industry, too, having started 30 years ago and continue with innovation. (new projects) “By 2012, we will have more (natural) gas production world-wide than we have oil.”  His answer to the question of what will be needed as far as answering our environmental problems, his answer is “From a global perspective, the demand for energy will double by 2050. So we will need most of the energy forms that we know today.” Look for my next post about an alternative source and it’s not wind or solar, but something very different.)

Finally, his thoughts about future transportation; Mr. Voser thinks that by 2050 we will go from 1 billion cars world-wide to 2 billion cars, and about 40% of those will be electric.  That leaves about 1.2 billion to be fueled by other forms.  So hybrids, low-carbon-fuel cars, and more efficient engines are needed (all new or continuing projects)

There is much more in this Wall Street Journal section that we find very interesting, including a view from “big oil”, and a top ten ranking of “clean-tech” companies.  Look to future posts for some more information on these and other topics.

Earth Day is (at least in the US) 22-April of this year.

Here at EarthPM we’ve actually found some entertainment and informative value in the following videos produced by physics teacher Greg Craven on climate change.

What’s intriguing about these videos is that they speak to familiar project management tools in Risk Management and decision-making which are applied here to climate change.  Not only are familiar tools used but a few new ones are introduced.  We really urge you to look a the two introduction videos, see below.

An introduction: Part 1

An introduction: Part 2

Did you like these?

Well- he has a series of 7 videos on Risk Management (tied to climate change), we provide links to the first three here:

Risk Management – Part 1

Risk Management – Part 2

Risk Management – Part 3 (of 7)

You can get the rest by going to his channel at YouTube. Or, you can visit Manpollo.org, a site focused on this work.

Oh, and we almost forgot.  Like us, Greg wrote a book.  You can find it here on Amazon.