EnvironmentalCalculations can help with most
any environmental decision one may confront. Such decision junctures
may range in scope from minor, e.g., planning a menu for an event,
through more impactful decisions such as planning a menu for a
restaurant or a public cafeteria, designing a garden or replacing an
appliance, to major decisions that dominate individuals' footprint,
like reconsidering your home heating and/or cooling, electric or water
heating systems, choosing a new car, considering a home or a
construction lot purchase, or building a new home or redoing an
existing one.
Key Requirements of Successful Recommendations
EnvironmentalCalculations is guided by the
view that practical resource conservation and footprint minimization
are entirely circumstance-specific; nothing is given or
obvious,
everything must be calculated for the
specific set of circumstances at hand. (A
more detailed version of this view is
here.) This view becomes particularly relevant and important in
junctures that require making decisions suspected (or known) to have
significant environmental consequences, such as the ones mentioned
above.
In many such junctures, the scope of options makes the decision-making
process overwhelming. Even such seemingly (and sometimes genuinely)
simple choices as replacing a dishwasher, may turn complex; should I
emphasize water economy? electricity? locally sourced materials or
labor? And so on. (This need for
a decision metric is discussed
here.)
In some simple cases, if you know your objectives precisely, such
readily accessible sources as
Consumers Reports or
goal-specific guides published by
governments or
various organizations)
will do the trick. In most cases, however, even deciding on the
specific set of objectives you wish your decision to optimize is a
weighty environmental decision, and may well also include
a subjective element
reflecting your own preferences and emphases.
At least in those cases, if you want to be confident your efforts and
money accomplish the most, you will probably need to consult an
environmental scientist. Intellectually/scientifically, what is
required is a broad environmental perspective firmly rooted in
theoretical geophysics and applied mathematics, and in practical site-
and circumstances-dependent optimization. My solid geophysics and
applied mathematics background meets and comfortably exceeds these
requirements.
In addition, sound advice about many landscape-specific decisions such
as some of the ones mentioned above also depends on a hard-to-define
and characterize set of abilities one can only acquire informally, in
the woods, imperfectly summarized as the ability to read the
landscape, to integrate large and minute landscape features into a
coherent story about how this landscape works. Combining my scientific
training with growing up on a cattle farm (in an Israeli
Kibutz) and working
in it most of my youth; spending years in military field units (also
in Israel); running a beef cattle herd in one of Israel's most
desolate mountains; and a lifetime of vigorous outdoor pursuits
including hiking, climbing and rappelling, biking, sea kayaking,
windsurfing, I have perfected the ability to truly read and understand
the workings of a landscape.
- Gather the necessary information: The precise nature of
this preliminary step varies widely. In some cases, it simply entails
sifting through technical specifications of competing considered
products, and combing the scientific literature for substantiation of
claims made by manufacturers. In more complicated cases, gathering of
novel, original data—addressing, e.g., weather or climate data,
heat flux measurements, emissions or radiation at specific and
unprecedented settings—is necessary. Finally, some decision
junctures cannot be addressed by either existing information or newly
gathered data. In such cases, it is necessary to develop a novel
mathematical computer model.
- Compare alternatives: This is the crux of the matter and
the basis for the final recommendations. Employing the mathematical
tools of Optimization Theory, the considered alternatives are
allowed to compete (virtually) against one another in performing the
desired task(s), with the resources used by each alternative carefully
tallied. The alternative that uses the least resources of the type(s)
specified by the client is declared the winner, and forms the basis
for the final recommendation.
- Assess results' sensitivity to assumptions made: In nearly
all cases, some needed information—e.g., rate constants of
various physical processes, material properties of involved
materials—remains imperfectly known. In addition, in many cases
involving energy cost minimization, the cost of energy is crucially
important to determining the most attractive alternative. Worse yet,
energy costs must be known deep into the future, which is of course
unknown. In all of these cases, the sensitivity of the
results—the recommended alternative—to uncertain input
parameters of the types mentioned above must be carefully quantified;
a recommendation cannot possibly be considered robust unless it proves
the winner under a wide, broadly inclusive, range of imperfectly known
parameters.
- Final written report: Each job concludes with an extensive
written report. The structure is mostly uniform:
- Executive Summary: outlining the bottom line recommendations.
- Recommendations: describing in more details but succinctly the
alternatives considered, their performance in each of the metrics
considered, and conditions under which the optimal choices may change.
- Methodology: describing in technical details the exact analyses
performed, the ranges of values considered for each involved
parameter, and the numerical and/or statistical methods used.
- Appendices: In some analyses, the scope of the technical details
may require relegating some arcane details to a series of appendices
that—jointly and along with the Methodology section—render
the entire deliberative process fully transparent and reproducible to
the user.
Each report is also accompanied by a digital complement (typically in
the form of a platform-independent CD or a zip archive), allowing the
user complete reproduction of the results. The content of this
complement caries from case to case, but always includes all the
computer code used, the input data, and any other technical
information used, including sources and references.
Last modified on
GMT by Gidon Eshel