Environmental Labels

One of the ideas behind nutritional labels is that the government doesn't keep us from eating food that is bad for us, but they do make sure that we are informed about it if we want to be.

Now if people want to eat themselves into the grave you can't really stop them. But if people want to eat healthy they can do that easily.

The same thing can not be said about people who want to try to 'live green.'

Certainly people can try simple things like turning off the lights, composting, and not wasting water. But when it comes to making purchases it can become a bit more murky.

I propose, in the same way foods have nutritional labels, other products have environmental impact labels.

Now there are a lot of issues with this that I am going to address. The first one is exactly how do you quantify environmental impact. I believe that such a label should contain the following information.

Manufacturing Emissions: This is how many pounds of CO2 that were produced in the manufacturing of the product. Not only does this include the emissions from the factory where it was built but also the emissions from factories that built required parts. It would also need to include emissions caused by electrical power consumed by the factory. This last number could be reduced easily if a company purchases power from a 'clean' source. This number would be calculated by monitoring the emissions from a factory over a years time and dividing by the number of the product produced.

Transportation Emissions: This would be a measure of, on average, how much CO2 is created in transporting a product from the factory to the store. This is obviously going to be higher for products made oversees. This could perhaps encourage people to buy local. Of course unless labels were printed for each region it would not specify how much emissions were produced getting the product to your particular store.

Manufacturing Biodegradable Waste: Manufacturing is going to produce a certain amount of waste. Luckily some of it may be biodegradable or at least semi-biodegradable. In some cases the waste may even be recyclable. This category as well as the following waste categories would include waste produced earlier in the manufacturing chain in producing any parts or materials that go into the product. This type of waste would have the least negative impact on the environment and a conscious consumer would want to see most of the waste fall into this category.

Manufacturing Regular Waste: The measures how many pounds of non-biodegradable, but non hazardous waste are manufactured in the production process. This would include plastics, metal slag, and the like. While its not great to have this stuff filling our landfills for hundreds of years, there are worst types of waste.

Manufacturing Hazardous Waste: This measures how much hazardous waste is produced. Basically any type of dangerous chemical byproduct that needs special handling would fall into this category. Its inevitable that some products will produce hazardous waste but people would want to avoid products that seem to produce excessive amounts of this type of waste.

Packaging Waste: How much waste is there in the packaging. This might not be a necessary entry as it should be obvious by looking at the product.

Product Waste Breakdown: A listing of the type of waste that will be produced when the product is thrown away. This is more to help put things into perspective with the manufacturing waste scores.

Power Consumption: A clear label of how much power (if any) this product consumes. Rather than just looking for an 'energy star' label a consumer could clearly be able to find the 'peak,' the 'average,' and the 'standby' power consumed by electronics.

These are the only major categories that I can think of that I would want to see on the label and that could easily be measured. They could be given as both straight up values, and also in percentage form measured against the weight of the product.

Note, this isn't requiring companies to meet any types of standards in terms of being 'green.' With these labels they can be inefficient as they want. What it is requiring is accountability. Companies need to keep tabs on how much they are polluting and also need to consider how much their suppliers are polluting. A company may have incentive to switch to a 'cleaner' supplier in order to improve their numbers.

One issue with this is that it would require a fair bit of governmental oversight to ensure that numbers are being accurately reported. Now some of this oversight could be paid for by fining companies for cheating or misreporting.

Another issue would be the international complications. Do you disallow products that lack this information from being imported? What happens if a company wants to buy steel from another country that does not track the environmental impact of their actions.

One option for that last example at least, is that the company buying the steel must assume 'worst case' environmental impact from the steel if they can not get solid numbers. This could perhaps lead them to encourage their supplier to start keeping track of things.

In the end though there is one major problem. It is a similar problem that nutritional labels have. An environmental label can only have a real impact if people actually care. Of course, part of my hope is that the label would make it easier to care.

American Politician

So to celebrate this 4th of July, this post is regarding the time honored American tradition of voting.

One issue many people claim to have with our government is the difficulty that third party candidates face in getting recognition.

My proposal is for a TV show in the same vein as American Idol. The idea would not be for the show to replace voting, but rather to increase awareness. 

The show would start with 30 some odd third party presidential candidates. The first episode would be designed to let the viewers know a bit about each candidate as a person. The next one would give a brief overview of their political stances. After that each following episode would focus on a particular issue and the candidates would make their views known.

There would be no first party candidates on the show. Furthermore to prevent people from rallying behind party names, the contestant party affiliations would not be revealed until a few episodes in. Granted people could just look them up online, but most viewers wont.

After each episode people would vote by texting their favorite candidate. As the show went, a candidate would  be eliminated each week Near the end when only a few candidates remained they could engage in head to head debate.

Viewers would also be able to vote on which issues they would want to see on the show.

Now there are issues with this. I'm not necessarily sure that this is the way I would want my president selected, but thats not the goal. The voting mechanism could also end up having the voting being manipulated, but once again, that is why it would not be official.

Contestants would agree not to do outside campaigning while the show was running. As a nice twist the network that is hosting the show could contribute commercial time to the campaign of the winning contestant.

It might not have any impact on politics in America. In fact such a show could further contribute to the sensationalizing of politics. However, it just might have a positive impact and maybe could make some network money.

Identification and the Intenet

We trust the government to do a lot of things. One of these things that receives little objection and that we do not think about is identification. Society relies on birth certificates, social security numbers, and drivers licenses to identify individuals.

However none of these help much with identification on the internet. You can not see these 'documents' in person to assure their authenticity and you can not look at the person to make sure their picture matches.

Yet identification is of critical importance on the internet.

If a person is banned from a forum, nothing is really to stop them from just creating a new profile. Online polls can be spamed by the same person over and over again. The ease of having dummy accounts leads to an increase in spam.

But at the same time anonymity is valued on the internet. Well I put forward that we can have the best of both worlds.

Image that the federal government instituted a Internet ID or IID service. To register you would need to go in person to your DMV. You would create a username and password that would then be associated with your identity.

Now if a website wanted to check your IID, they would have a button on their signup page while you are filling out the signup form. The button would redirect you towards the governments IID website. There you confirm your identity and the IID site sends back either an 'ok' or 'not ok' message to the original site. The IID will only send an 'ok' message if two things happen:
1) The IID site is able to verify the users identity.
2) The IID site checks a database checks a database to determine if the user has already created a profile on the site.

All the original site knows is if the IID site was able to confirm your identity. They don't know who you are, but they know that this is your first time creating a profile. They are never exposed to your IID profile name or password. You are still anonymous.

Using this would not be required. It would simply be a service offered up by the government. Websites may choose to make it a mandatory part of their registration process, but that is up to them.

I suspect private companies have likely tried doing something like this before. The problem is, the system needs to be unified and trustworthy if people are going to bother signing up for it. Hopefully people would not be worried about the government selling their personal information (because it all ready has a lot of it).

People could even create some sort of public profile that could sit on top of their IID. They would not need to use their real name, but this profile (essentially a 2nd username and password) would be tied to their IID. Sites that support this Universal IID (UIID) could allow people to login in with their UIID without first registering at the site. Personally I hate having to register at a site I am only going to use once. This would help mitigate this annoyance.

Now there is one problem with this proposal. The 'www' part of most urls. The internet is world wide. If a website required an IID verification to login, then citizens of other nations would have no way of logging into the site. If they allowed people not from the US to register without an IID, then what is the point of the whole thing.

If we allowed other nations to participate in the IID system we would need to ensure that they are being rigorous about checking people's identity when they first register. If they were being lax in this the entire system would be undermined.

I do not know how to deal with this problem. Perhaps I could think of a way with enough thought. It may also be that there is no way to implement such a system without isolating our websites from the rest of the world. And that would certainly not be acceptable.