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Louisiana: LSU1

Our first top was Louisiana State University Petroleum Engineering Research & Technology Transfer Laboratory (PERTT Lab) Well Facility, long name.  They have working equipment and study how rigs really work under pressure, literally under pressure.  They bring in various types of mud and oil to simulate real conditions.


LSU is a leader in oil and gas because this is so much oil & gas in Louisiana.  Much of this is conventional energy, but LSU is also gearing up to work on the unconventional new sources. Petroleum engineering is a growth industry as the new technologies have essentially created vast new sources of energy. Our friends at LSU told me that their students have 100% placement rate.  This is caused by the great demand surge plus a generational change.  Fewer petroleum engineers were minted after the 1980s. Many of those working today are near retirement. There is a shortage developing at the same time that the U.S. is expected to become the world’s largest oil producer within this decade and may become a net energy exporter within my lifetime. What a change!

LSU folks believe in hands-on experience.  With that in mind, they have their own simulation well.  This is a real oil well, but it has lots of equipment that can simulate conditions that students might face in their future.  They even have a hands-on test.  Students are uneasy about these tests because they happen in real time, and they have to make quick decisions.   LSU professors tell the students that it is better to create this kind of time pressure in the lab. You don’t want to have your first test in the real world.

The equipment is used by firms as well as students and academic researchers.  These firms, such as BP and Chevron, pay for the service and their work with students and professors helps everybody learn while pushing the frontiers of knowledge.   There are not many intellectual property issues involved, since much of the research is testing existing technologies and often involved with health & safety and environmental protection issues.  Firms want to share experience about health & safety and environmental protection, since they know that any well that causes trouble hurts all players in the industry, no matter who owns the rig.

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Redundantly repeating myself

There is a lot of repetition in my notes from the Science w/o Borders visit.  That is because people are saying many of the same things.  It seems that the consensus is that the best way to build connections is through faculty exchanges and relationships.  There seems to be consensus that one of the best ways to do this is to work on joint research projects where both sides contribute and both sides benefit.  One of the ways to get this ball rolling is to hold workshops where potential participants can get to know each other and who has what expertise.  Finally, there seems to be a consensus that this system of relationships takes time to construct.  It is robust, but decentralized and grows organically.  We (outsiders) can help fertilize this process, but we cannot really rush it. 

Anyway, my plan is to write notes about what I hear, try to treat each one like the first time.  I understand that that many of the reports will look like many others.  Instead of being a problem, I see this as a confirmation that we are onto the right ideas.  Consensus is not always the way to go.  We all like to imagine that the few mavericks have it right and everybody else is wong.  Experience indicates, however,  that this is usually not true.

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New Orleans walk-about

It is always interesting to take a kind of journey and I like to walk so I walked from the French Quarter to my Marriott Hotel near the Causeway.  I am so far from downtown because of the football game, BTW.  I could not get a hotel nearer the center within government rate because so many people are coming in for the game.  No matter. The walk was good and I had no other pressing business on Saturday. Took me a long time and according to Google maps, it was nine miles, but I cut off a few miles by catching the streetcar.  I took pictures along the way, so I have my illustrated journey. Up top is the start at Jackson Square at the bottom of the French Quarter.

Above is just outside Jackson square. There are lots of street performers and fortune tellers. The most interesting was the Voodoo Bone Lady, above. I don’t know what she does with Voodoo bones.  Didn’t want to get too close, lest I be turned into a zombie. Below is Bourbon Street. The word to describe the French Quarter is raucous.  People were loudly partying, drinking and carrying on.  People walk the streets with big cups of beer and other drinks. And this was just after noon.

Below are little houses on the way out of the French sector. 

Below is Louis Armstrong park. Top is just the pond.  Below that is a statue of Louis himself.  Louis Armstrong was a great trumped player. I still remember him. He sang with a distinctive gravel voice.

After passing out of the park, you enter the 9th Ward, made famous by the flooding of Katrina. There were lots of people just hanging around, but there were also lots of empty lots that probably had homes before the hurricane. I talked to some people about the lost community.  It was interesting and sad. The talked about a community of small homes, homeowners who passed their property to their kids and how the hurricane literally swept it away. They said that some people were returning, but it won’t be the same.  One guy told me that he had set up a kind of phone tree and the old 9th Ward people keep in touch. They have a big picnic in the City Park every year. Meanwhile, services have not returned but wildlife has.  There are deer, rabbits and even wild boar, I was told.  Brad Pitt is running an organization building flood resistant housing in the area.  People were generally happy about that, but that is just one point of light. Rebuilding it taking a while.   Below is … I don’t know what. But the photo is interesting.

I was getting a little worried that it was taking me too long to get back to the hotel. Fortunately, I could catch the streetcar.  I rode from Broad Street to the end of the line.  It cost $1.25.

The line ends in a big cemetery. Evidently, the water table is so high in New Orleans that they cannot bury bodies underground.  They would float up.  So the tombs are above ground, creating a true city of the dead.

It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t take more pictures. At the end of the graveyard was a nice neighborhood in the Jefferson Parish. Legally I was out of New Orleans into a place called Metairie.  It was truly a long walk. I would have taken a taxi, but I found none, so I trudged on, now enjoying the walk somewhat less.  One interesting thing was that the many streets had classic names.  We had Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Claudius & even Nero. The bottom picture I took the next day. This is the causeway that crosses Lake Pontchartrain. It is almost twenty-four miles long.  It looks even stranger at night, with headlights crossing pitch black darkness. Lake Pontchartrain is brackish. Near the north end it is almost completely freshwater. The other end is half seawater. It was flooding from this side that drown so much of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

BTW – I almost made a very bad decision to get a hotel on the other end of that bridge. It was a little cheaper.  I figured, just across the bridge. How far could that be?  Fortunately, I am on the near side. Crossing that thing would be a long and monotonous walks, if you were even allowed to do that.   

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Houston: University of Houston

The work I have been doing in higher education this last year has been a real eye-opener.  The good news is that the American system of higher education is simply the best. This includes our universities community colleges and training. My appreciation of the system was last updated in 1984, when I graduated with my MBA.  I got to know a little more about it when the kids were applying for college, but the experience was limited; the application process doesn’t give you the kind of inside knowledge I have been getting lately.

The “bad” news that there are so many great opportunities and so many permutations and they are so widespread that it is hard to understand and hard to know what to do. It is the proverbial kid in the candy shop story. The other problem is that our higher education system is a protean as it is ubiquitous.  (I love to use the phrase, but opportunities are few.) It is our great strength that our system adapts very quickly.  My observation is that even the people ostensibly in charge at most institutions have only an awareness of most of what is going on. This is by no means a criticism.  In fact, I am impressed by their wisdom. Good leadership trusts people to innovate and imagine better things and then make them realities. I see a lot of spontaneity, serendipity and self-organizing ad-hocracies. Excuse me if I wax whimsical, but the picture is so complex and beautiful that no one can comprehend it in its entirety. Fortunately, no one has to. The parts work together autonomously and organize themselves.  We did Rice University in the morning. I didn’t know much about Rice (discussed in my last post), but I did know there was such a place. I didn’t even know that the University of Houston existed.  This is the complexity part.  But I was greatly impressed with the people I met there.  They told me that they are awarding 300 PhDs a year and they want to expand that to 400.  This is no easy task.  It is possible to grow too fast and, as I have learned to my sorrow, scalability is a problem when you try to rapidly increase quantity while maintaining quality, even when you are rich in resources. It takes about five years to make a PhD and you lose about 30% of them. That means that you have to take in more than 500 a year and you can expect to have more than 3000 in the system at any time. 

This is a challenge. The Houston folks were interested in talking to the Brazilians, since they saw some synergies and ways to share resources.  They also pointed out that they were the country’s largest Hispanic serving institution in the U.S.  They quickly pointed out that they understood that Brazilians were not Hispanics (a frequent cultural gaffe) but that they simply meant that they had lots of experience in cross culture communication and, after all, Portuguese speakers can usually understand lots of Spanish, even if it doesn’t seem to be a two way street. (I don’t know why this is true, but I have seen it enough to know that it is. I can understand most spoken Spanish and can read it fairly easily, even though I have never studied it.  Spanish speakers tend to look at me blankly when I speak Portuguese at them. I would attribute this to my bad accent, except I notice the same thing when native Brazilians are doing the talking.)

University of Houston is strong in health care and energy, as you might expect given its location is the world’s energy center and top health care complex. They also said they were good at getting innovations to market.  One guy said that lots of academics know how to invent but they don’t know how to innovate. He claimed that they were separate skills.  Lots of inventions just are not useful or not useful in their original form. Sometimes the inventor can take his product successfully to market. Often they need someone else to help or do it. 

I think the above is the big take away lesson. Few people possess the requisite combination of stills to be master the technical details, implement them, understand potential uses and how to bring them to market. Even the few people who have all these things often lack the flexibility to change their great ideas as necessary. There really are no great individuals; only great teams. When you look at great people closely enough, you always notice that the team around him plays a big role. Often when the great man fails, we see something has happened in the team around him before the problem was manifest. 

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Houston: Rice University

We spent the morning at Rice University.  It is a beautiful place, a university in an arboretum. They told me that when this place was built a hundred years ago, it was marshland w/o many trees. The trees are mostly live oaks.  They line the streets and fill the space between the buildings. Live oaks have that spreading aspect with branches extending almost horizontally across streets and paths. 

Rice is strong in engineering and sciences, especially in the ones that come naturally to an institution in Houston: oil & gas and medical services.  Rice is already cooperating with Brazil and has Science w/o Borders students.  They have working agreements with USP to share supercomputers and there are people to people exchanges. Our Brazilian friends expressed their interest in doing joint research with people at Rice.

Rice takes Brazil very seriously. They have even established an office called “Brazil at Rice” just to take care of the Brazilians, SwB and others.

Rice is working on a joint PhD program in American studies with Campinas.  Students would spend two years at their home institutions and then a year at the partner.  They would get degrees from both institutions. Campinas has signed onto the agreement and there are currently two Brazilian PhD students at Rice.   Rice is still pushing the agreement through its bureaucracy.

They are have also recently made an agreement with PUC-SP to have Rice students go to Brazil for eight week Portuguese training. The idea is that they would do this in their second year. They told us that eight weeks in country is worth a year in the classroom in Texas.  They like PUC-SP because they are a reliable partner and can provide housing for the students with Brazilian families. Eight students will go from Rice this next year.  Our Rice interlocutors were very interested in FLTAs.  I promised to send more information. 

We talked about the challenges of exchanges.  The biggest problem is course articulation, i.e. figuring out which courses at one university are equal to those of another. It I not just up to the universities in question. They have to answer to their accreditation boards. The challenge of cooperation is tough.  It is hard enough even with close partners and two-way.  It gets nearly impossible when we start talking about multilateral partnerships.

I heard again at Rice what I hear all the time. Universities are decentralized with lots of autonomous sections. The best programs are done professor to professor. These things grow organically and it takes time to build relationships.  People have to learn each other’s strengths and weakness and they have to learn to trust each other.  This produces a flexible and robust system, but not one that can be quickly scaled up.

Short term exchanges are much easier.  Students just make their own deals; actually it is usually professors who make the deals for their students.  What could be done to make things work better?  The best thing to do is to facilitate relationships thought joint projects and workshops.  Rice professor Richard Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, shared with Rice colleague Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Sir Harold W. Kroto of Great Britain for the discovery of 60 carbon structures shaped like soccer balls, nicknamed Buckyballs. They said that these Buckyballs have application in chemistry and engineers. I don’t know about such things but it must be important. I got to hold the Nobel Prize.  It is bigger and heavier than I thought.

After that, it was time for lunch at the truly beautiful chow hall you see in the picture.  It as a useful and good visit that I believe will result in stronger ties between our Brazilian friends and American universities.  The relationships are up and growing. 

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Moments in time

I am heading to Houston today, where I will meet up with a Brazilian university delegation and go to Rice University. After that, we go Louisiana and then Washington. This is a follow-up to our successful visit in February, but this one will be aimed more at the graduate student part of the Science w/o Borders program. On this visit, we are talking emphasizing oil & gas and biosciences.  I look forward to learning something new. 

I missed the first couple days of the program because I had to stay in Brasília for the presidential election.  My colleagues did all the important organizing work, but I add some value by being around and lending my ostensible authority to decisions.  We need somebody around to do that and/or take the blame if things do not work out as they should.  A lot of leadership is intangible.  When it is working well, it doesn’t seem to matter; when it stops working, everything just seems to fall apart.

But now I am on track. The usual Delta flight to Atlanta is getting routine.  I have traveled this year more than any time before.  I have become a gold member.  This is good, since I can choose better seats, but it still sucks. Travel gives time for reflection. Airports are semi-familiar. 

I decided to write a kind of stream of consciousness in my little notebook to give myself a shot of the day.  I transcribed them below. No big insights.

Coming into Houston. From the window it looks very flat and sprawling.  Flight attendant says that we are in the Central Time zone.  It makes me recall my mother. She died forty years ago, but is not forgotten. Strange that this reference would provoke a recall, however.  Central time is 4 hour different from Brazil.  Will be some jet-lag.

Off the plane easily.  Stopped at Dunkin Donuts for food and coffee I don’t need.  I am early and luggage will take a while to arrive.  It seems odd speaking English to clerks.  Not sure English is their first language anyway, but Portuguese would not work.

Passing adverts for MD Anderson Cancer Center.  Reminds me again of Ma, when I see on about a woman cured of leukemia.  When you are thinking about something, you notice connections.

Signed up for Super Shuttle.  At $24 is it much cheaper than the taxis. My travel budget will be cut and it is always a good idea to save money for Uncle Sam anyway.  Fifteen minute wait, they say. No worries. I still have the Dunkin Donuts coffee to finish.  I like it more than Starbucks, but I drink little coffee in general.


Reading “Concrete Planet” book about cement, probably the most ubiquitous manmade material around.  Concrete reinforced with rebar is doomed. The rebar rusts, expanding and causing concrete to crack and crumble.  This gives us hope that many of those horrible “modern” buildings built in the 1960s will turn to dust, but not such a good thing talking about bridges etc.  Romans used concrete better than we do.  Their structures don’t have rebar and have lasted thousands of years.  Rebar seemed a good idea at the time. Go on the shuttle with two guys going to MD Anderson. Guy next to me is a biochemist/biophysicist now semi-retired.  Used to work at  Baylor, now at the University of Texas in Brownsville. Studies proteins and is interested in dengue.  I told him re our Brazilian mission and gave him my card.  He was very interested in getting Brazilian students and researchers. Don’t know how much he will pay attention, however. He was going to MD Anderson for a serious operation.

Both guys got out. Talking to the driver. He has been in Houston for ten years and loves it. Says that people who live in Houston love it, but visitors don’t.  It is not pedestrian friendly and its hard to know where things are unless you live her.  Told me that the many rich Mexicans are moving to an area called “the Woodlands” and building big mansions. They are fleeing the violence and kidnappings of their own country.

He said he used to work at one of the country clubs in the area. Said that the rich people were often odd and told a story about a woman who could not get her car started. When he check, he found she had just run out of gas.  Somebody had always done that for her. I joked that she was so rich that she could just get a new car when the old one ran out of gas.  He didn’t get the joke and told me that they did indeed fill up the tank.   

My pictures show Houston from the CVS, a sundial at the Gallery and my hotel. 

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Four days and three nights of the ungulate

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I could get a sheep to eat the grass. I would save time and money on gardening. It would be ecologically sound, as the animal consumes no fossil fuels and fertilizes its own pastures. Beyond that, sheep are picturesque. I thought it would be a biological version of one of those robotic vacuum cleaners that drives around on the floor, turning round when it bumps into something, but generally working automatically. The trouble is that I didn’t know much about sheep.

I thought they were like big dogs that ate grass, i.e. I thought they would be like a pet and behave like a dog. They don’t. Dogs do dumb things, but compared to sheep they are Einsteins. Sheep, I learned to my sorrow, really are just as incredibly stupid as you have heard. The only thing my sheep did, besides eat and shit (see below) was look in the window and baa. They are a lot louder than you suppose. My sheep generally slept when it got dark, but it did not sleep the whole night, occasionally waking up to remind everyone that it was still out there. It kind of warms up, sometime with a low ummm, which sometimes crescendos to a very loud ummmBAA-AAA. I am not sure why it did that. I think it may have seen its own reflection and thought was another sheep.

But that was not the big problem. I could get used to that; maybe even appreciate the bucolic beauty of it all. On the plus side, it did eat grass, and seemed to like the taller grass better, so it was trimming exactly as I had hoped it would. The other end of the process was not so agreeable.

I was prepared for the fertilizer aspect of the sheep. In fact, I considered that a net benefit, as it would make my plants grow better. I have no problem with manure and happily use biosolids on the tree farms. But I assumed that the fertilizer would be mostly deposited on the grass, where it would do some good. No. My sheep evidently walks around on and eats the grass, but holds most of the shit for when it is standing around on the veranda under the roof. Worse, it seems to want to shit as close as possible to the house and most prefers to go right near the doors or windows. And it shits a lot. I soon found my pre-work period would be devoted to shoveling and washing down the patio; I got a similar task when I got back from work. Despite my shoveling and hosing, it was really starting to stink.

I was going to give the sheep a little more time, but the odor was starting to get pretty strong. I planned to be away for a week and a half. The guy who sold me the sheep told me that it would be okay. Independence was a big advantage of sheep. I travel a lot. If the sheep has shelter from the rain, it can be left along. It just stays out and eats grass. I had to make sure it had water, but probably not even that, since the rainy season grass was very wet. The guy told me that it would get enough water from the moist grass it ate. So, I COULD have left it alone, but I figured that if I left it for a week and half, the shit would be knee high when I got back and the smell would knock the proverbial buzzard off the proverbial shit wagon. My plane was leaving that night. I depend on sweet serendipity and a solution presented itself.

The cleaning woman comes by every two weeks and Wednesday was her day. When she showed up around 7:15, she was surprised to see a sheep in the front yard, but not much bothered. Her rural childhood included lots of sheep & goats. She knew what I was just discovering and seemed to find my dilemma very amusing. Courtesy and the fact that I pay her kept her from laughing out loud, but I am sure my story will engender mirth back in the village. It will also provide a sheep. I asked her if she wanted the sheep; she had some relatives with a pickup truck & when I got home after work, my problem was gone, almost. I am not sure where it went, but I don’t really care. I like to think that my erstwhile lawn mowing manure machine is off romping with others of its kind, stinking up somebody else’s yard for an indefinite period, maybe gracing somebody’s table for a somewhat shorter time. No matter. It seemed lonely by itself. After all, sheep are naturally gregarious. The essence of the animal will persist for a while around my house. But I cleaned off the patio and I expect that the strong rains we get around here will do the rest.

My advice, which I allow applies to few people but that I will give nevertheless, is to avoid buying sheep unless you have a way to keep them far from the house. They stink on ice even just standing around and they seem to enjoy crapping where they sleep, not like a dog. If you must get sheep, you probably want a border collie to “herd” them. Just get the collie. Border collies are the smartest of the dogs, they may at least seem to be happy to see you when you come home and don’t crap all over the place.

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Election night in Brasília

The thing that made the Brasília election night 2012 celebration different from previous ones was the large number of youth participants and their use of social media to reach beyond the physical limits of our event.  We made a special effort to reach out to young people, including bringing thirty-six members of our newly formed Ambassador’s Youth Council to Brasília to participate actively in the event.  The Youth Council includes representatives from all Brazil’s twenty-six states plus the Federal District. Their tasks included thing like updating the electoral map and mixing with other guests, but they also reached back to their home states all over Brazil via social media. Through them, the election excitement reached every state in this vast country, larger than the continental United States.

More than 300 guests confirmed and more than 400 actually showed up for the event hosted at Casa Thomas Jefferson, Brasília’s BNC.  Ambassador Thomas Shannon kicked off the event, talking about the stability of our Democracy and expressing the pleasure of being able to celebrate our democracy with people in a thriving democracy like Brazil.   Guests included local leaders, academics and business people, leavened by the large youth component mentioned above.  Our event featured the usual buttons, quizzes about the U.S. at the IRC, big screen TVs and the perennially popular opportunities for guests to get their pictures taken with cutouts of the candidate.  An exciting new feature was the green screen photos, where we photoshopped pictures of guests into action scenes of related to the election.  Lines to have pictures taken and photoshopped persisted throughout the event.  These pictures are uploaded onto our social media sites for participants to download by becoming electronic friends.

The peak time for the celebration was around 11pm Brasília time (8pm EST), when the place was so crowded it was difficult to move.  We were very fortunate that it did not rain (this is the rainy season here in Brasília) and guests were able to spill out into the open patio areas.  A few people stayed until Ohio was called for President Obama.

Media coverage of the election is massive.  Of course, little of that was generated by our event.   However, major local media reported on our celebration and the local TV Globo affiliate kept a TV crew on site throughout, doing live interviews with the Ambassador and guests.  Members of the Youth Council reported live on their social media platforms, uploading commentary and video interviews with guests.

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A walk in the park

There are some colorful things around here.  Trees are flowering and there are colorful bugs.  I took a few pictures which I am posting here.  They are pictures of my world.  Above is Chrissy with what I think is a Royal Poinciana or flame tree (Poinciana regia). This tree is native to Madagascar, where it is locally uncommon.  However, it is planted all over the tropical and semi-tropical parts of the world, so it is in no danger of extinction.  Below is a sphinx moth caterpillar.  It is really big, maybe eight inches long.  It is a tricky bug.  The part on top that looks like its head is actually its tail and those things that look like feet are not.

Below are burrowing owls. They are all over the place in the park near the lake.  The top picture shows the close up  Below that is a family.  The downy ones I assume are the chicks, but they are as big as the adults. 

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Saving papers harms forest health

Saving paper doesn’t save trees.  This is what I have on the bottom of my emails, “If you feel it necessary to print this message, recall that wood is 100% renewable resource & we grow most of the pulp wood for paper sustainably on American tree farms.” Some people like it; some are offended; most probably don’t notice.  I put it on there against those silly ones that tell you to be careful not to print in order to save trees.

Saving paper does not save trees because most paper is made from pulp trees grown sustainably on tree farms. 

The trees cut for pulp are usually cut as part of thinning operations.  They CANNOT be saved.  If you do not thin your forests, growth slows; health declines and beetles start to attack all the trees.  You could thin the trees and then just leave them on the ground, but that leads to fire danger and insect infestations.  Thinning trees is good for the health of the forest.  It is also good for wildlife, since the thinning allows sunlight into the woods, encouraging the diverse food supplies wildlife needs.  Forest landowners don’t make much money from thinning operations.  Most of the money they make goes into forest improvement, BUT if there is no profitable market (i.e. paper) for thinned wood most forest landowners cannot afford to do it at all.

The bottom line is that the paper industry contributes to healthy forests.  Forests would be LESS robust w/o paper industry demand for pulpwood.  People should put what I have on the bottom of their emails.  If they want to measure environmental costs, they need to measure energy. Below are some of my sixteen year old loblolly.  They were thinned two year ago. We removed about half the trees. You can see that they have easily grown together.

The environmental impact of paper on forest health is a net benefit. The place where paper could be a negative is energy cost.  It takes energy to cut trees, process paper and move it to your office.  This means that NOT using paper may be a good thing in some cases, if energy costs outweigh effects on forest health.

What rarely makes sense is recycling small amounts of paper.  Make the distinction. Recycling bulk paper makes sense.  Recycling small batches does not.  Think of the energy costs.  You have to collect paper using trucks and then put it through a similar process as making paper from wood.  The equation involves the energy needed to harvest timber versus the energy required to “harvest” recycling.  Collecting small amounts of paper, especially paper that is soiled, makes no sense.  Recycling that Starbucks cup almost certainly is worse for the environment than would be making paper with newly harvested trees.  The paper plants are probably closer to the forest than they are to the places where you are tossing those cups.  It will cost a lot to clean these things and paper is heavy. It takes a lot of energy to move. The big problem if you don’t recycle paper is the space it takes in landfills.  This is also not a clear choice.  Wood sequesters carbon until it is burned or decays.  If the paper made from wood sits in landfills, it holds onto that carbon for a long time.  Somebody should do the math on this.

So the common denominator of all this is energy.  Does it take more energy to recycle or make new paper?  Add in the variable that the demand for paper is beneficial to forest health.  Paper making may use trees but it saves forests by increasing forest health.  Speaking of energy, the widespread replacement of paper with electronic files is not ecologically free. 

Data is stored and processed at large computer service farms. Computers in server farms run 24/7, and consume prodigious amounts of electricity, both for the computers and the air conditioning needed to keep them cool.  But this is another story.

The bottom line is that saving paper does not save trees and may actually have negative impacts on forest health.  It MAY save energy and certainly saves money for you or your firm.  We need to balance the needs to have printed materials with ecological and cost concerns.  Just do the right thing for the right reasons. This brings me to what made me think about this.  In the Atlanta airport I saw the machine pictured above.  This is plain stupid.  It purports to be environmentally benign but it making at least three big mistakes.  It saves paper, which is not needed.  To do that it USES energy. Beyond that, it puts in each bathroom a piece of complicated electronics that inevitably requires maintenance.  Whoever bought this made a mistake from the environmental point of view, although probably not from the PR perspective.   Many people see something like this and feel much better about wiping their hands.  Many of these people will probably put some “save the trees” message on their emails.