You see this cloud has appeared and spread relatively rapidly, but it’s a very localised phenomenon by natural standards. Yet it’s shown how vulnerable our developed-world lifestyle is to rapid change.

When talking about sustainability I’m often told how adaptable our species is, and how technology will provide solutions to all our problems, but here is a dust cloud from a modest eruption and there’s nothing we can do but wait.

And wait for at least one more day, or possibly weeks, nobody knows how long it could go on, it all depends on the volcano and the wind. It’s this enigmatic power of our Planet that fills me with wonder; despite our technological prowess we’re never in control.

Apologies to locals who’s lives are seriously affected, I don’t mean to belittle your life changing problems, but it’s a good thing to discover the fragility of our position when the lesson comes from something we can expect to go away… we hope.

But it’s interesting to note that this sort of thing isn’t a surprise, apparently melting ice, and climate change, could make this sort of thing increasingly common.

We write down the environmental and ethical values we consider to reflect our lives. I’ve was informed that this is a Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) plan, apparently.

I suspect that this may be construed as a little anal, but if we actually have to write something we’ll have to ask explicit questions like:

• What should we be doing?
• Why do we believe in these things?
• Will we achieve what we expect?
• Do our actual actions reflect these stated beliefs?

I suspect we’ll discover some uncomfortable facts about the reality of our past actions. We may have to change the way we do things in the future, but I hope it’ll give us a framework for these decisions.

Then came the Credit Crisis and the market slump associated with the attendant global recession. Suddenly oil was relatively cheap again, and that brief period filled with innovative spirit seemed to turn to scepticism over the economic impact of carbon taxes. Nations became absorbed in their own relative competitiveness rather than the impact their actions would have on all of us.

Political posturing, and I’m looking at all you NGOs too, has turned climate change is a charged topic. Whilst the majority of people don’t care at all, those that do tend to be entrenched believers or sceptics; the depth of feeling seems to approach religious intensity. Unfortunately the real issue is masked by this squabble over carbon: we waste valuable resources by thoughtless pursuit of an unsustainable lifestyle, and one day we’ll by neck high in rubbish with little left to show for it.

I live in the UK and I’m guilty of doing my part to wipe out our species. Whilst I’m one of those that try to minimise my purchases and recycle whatever I can, a grossly unpatriotic position in the current economic climate, the standard of living I enjoy is plainly unsustainable. Those in other countries have just as much right to experience a similar standard of living, but that would accelerate our decline.

Alternative lifestyles are going to have to be adopted if we’re to experience more than a hellish existence on this planet, but the alternative needn’t be a poor compromise. It’s possible that there are better ways to live with a lighter footprint – and it’s not just about carbon – if we choose to look for them and consider our actions:

• What to buy and why I need it?
• Where does it come from and how much do I need?
• What I eat and how it’s produced?
• How many children I chose to have and what will their impact be in the future?
• Where I look for work and how our companies operate?

But how does this relate to my Copenhagen disappointment?

In the end I concluded that I’d no right to expect such a meeting of politicians from diverse cultures to achieve anything significant. I believe that modern government isn’t designed to produce results, it’s intended to generate a safe level of inertia that keeps us from civil war, and in this it’s been supremely successful for centuries.

Even during periods of party political unity – mostly during world wars – government hasn’t driven progress, it’s the actions of the individual, or small groups, that have made the difference, with government usually very late to the game.

And this is where my regret led me; political action and public protest isn’t the answer, the future lies in the decisions we all make as individuals about our lives at home and as part of the corporate world. Governments can’t change the World, but we could.

The exiled Shah of Iran was reputed to have said Oil is too valuable to burn… There are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s sake!.

He was right, fossil fuel based products are the basis of our modern lifestyle; pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, and huge range of products we rely on daily use oil and coal as a feedstock, and yet we squander this resource to burn for heat, power and transportation.

Without recycling we’d end up burning or burying these commodities, and using even more to replace what we’d just thrown away. I suppose one day we can resort to mining the old landfill sites for the valuable plastics they contain.

It strikes me that the climate change argument appears to be primarily over the concern for wasted money, but money is negotiable, we’ve all witnessed how effortlessly it can be created and destroyed. The natural resources we discard every day aren’t so easily manipulated, once they’ve gone, they’ve gone, money is a virtual resource, we can always make more.

Whilst the Brightbox Rails hosting stack is very focused, my general purpose hosting has been based on CentOS, a free flavour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the WHM/cPanel server management interface; a scatter gun approach I don’t like: it was time to change.

Keep the servers clean.

I find that removing complex GUIs and reverting to command line management results in cleaner servers, with more control over software baggage and file structure.

On top of this I found that most clients have little interest in accessing the server, preferring that I take care of everything. I’ve no intention of entering the reselling business, so exit cPanel, the extra cost, and the hassle.

Standardise to maintain quality.

I’ve standardised my Ruby maintenance scripts and wanted a set of VMWare Fusion based staging virtual machines for deployment testing. To reduce the workload, and the chances of mistakes, using a single operating system seemed logical.

Since I started using Ruby on Rails, I’ve converged on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as my server operating system of choice: I find that it is a neater implementation of Linux, especially when it comes to Apache configuration.

Competitive pricing.

At around the same time as these thoughts were flowing through my head, Memset changed the way they implement their VPS leading to better specifications and significant reduction in price.

Initially I was sceptical, it looked too good to be true, but I have completed migrating my existing websites and Subversion repo to a VM1000 and it has run well over the last couple of months. I haven’t run any performance tests, but subjectively these websites seem a little more responsive, and all at a quarter of the price!

A good result.

This is great news since I’ve been wanting to supplement my LAMP based work with more significant applications using Ruby and/or Java stacks, and running all that on a single low resource server is not a good idea.

To sum up I’m still happy with Memset…… probably happier, since the price reductions have made it possible to experiment freely without having to use a US based host with an unclear commitment to environmental impact.

The problem is that current approaches aren’t truly global in scale. Climate change is a macro scale problem, and as a global phenomenon it should be approached with clear singular broad brush targets in mind to which a value can be attached.

With a clear valuation, carbon can become as well established as any other asset class trading on international markets, driving badly needed investment and innovation; it’s an integral part of our energy intensive economy which can only increase in value. A few years ago most investors couldn’t consider gold to be an accessible asset class, enter the ETC.

The actual valuation price of the initial offering can be debated at our leisure in the same way as every other in the market, at least the system will have started doing it’s work.

I’m hoping that the forthcoming meeting in Copenhagen will result in a more realistic approach and scale of carbon trading, let’s hope Tony Blair’s recent optimism about the meeting isn’t misplaced.

Many schemes are accused of selling carbon reductions resulting from projects that were going to happen anyway. This implies that the offset has no value unless the offset finance was essential for realisation. Climate Care and the Carbon Neutral Company are two companies at which this charge has been levelled.

Another highly criticised tactic is reforestation and afforestation, often at temperate latitudes, and sometimes using intensive forestry techniques. These plantations are so dense that they offer little advantage ecologically, and frequently cause significant harm.

Although the prevention of deforestation is a critical goal for Climate change proponents, the most valuable resources being lost are from tropical regions. Temperate woodlands cannot be considered an adequate replacement for topical forests: the ecology they support is not as diverse, and they are seasonal in their growth.

There are a huge range of options and, from a personal perspective, many contradict their intended goals and my personal ethics, so I’ve yet to decide whether offsetting is right for me.

I currently favour the World Land Trust’s ‘Carbon Balanced’ scheme. I’m already a Trust supporter: they provide finance to purchase land without taking ownership and involvement from the local inhabitants.

Critically for the offsetting question, they are directly addressing the problem of protecting valuable existing tropical habitat, rather than trying to replace what’s gone, and they attempt to achieve it in a way that helps to combat poverty.

There appears to be some debate about the validity of such a single figure with respect to Climate modelling, but as a metric for Climate change policy I don’t see a better option.

The following global temperature chart is taken from the website of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre.

Sure enough, it clearly shows the temperature falling over the last decade! Worrying, until I started to look at these data from the perspective of an investor.

For these purposes this annual data is too fine grained. Whether your returns are financial or environmental, they will require a time scale of decades to become apparent, and at this resolution the trend is clearly rising.

The annual data form an interesting trend in terms of Climate modelling, but the real relevance of a broad metric like this is in establishing policy and the investment necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

So the fine grained drop in global temperature is academically interesting, but irrelevant for purposes of policy; it’s a matter of choosing the appropriate resolution.