Climate
Control Commander
Shell's David
Hone takes on global warming
"Delay
is simply not an option," says David Hone on the subject of tackling carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions. What's so startling about that statement is that Hone
is Group Climate Change Adviser for Shell International. His mission is to help
Shell understand and recognize the issues it faces as a result of the need to
address climate change and also to represent Shell on this issue in external forums.
Coinciding with increasing global energy usage (witness China and India)
is a growing awareness that energy consumption practices are closely linked to
significant environmental effects, in particular on the climate. "It's extraordinary
that some people don't think there's a problem involved in putting carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere," says Hone, who blogs on climate change for Shell. "Anybody
who knows even a bit of chemistry knows this is an important issue."
The
rub is that CO2 emissions are pretty much an unavoidable by-product
of burning oil, natural gas, and coal. Those emissions, increasingly, are seen
as very bad actors in the steady increase in the planet's surface temperatures,
which in turn is slowly but dramatically changing life on Earth. "Even though
there's no direct evidence that Hurricane Katrina was caused by climate change,
I think it's events like that that have caused people to sit up," Hone says. "It's
people like Al Gore, who have put out pictures of the Arctic and the sea ice reductions
that are taking place there. People have recognized that it's important. And I
think more so in the U.S., there's been an appreciation that energy is not something
that's free to use forever."
Hone's personal interest in the environment
dates back to his high school days. "I still have a copy of an article I wrote
in 1974 for my school's science magazine on the destruction of the ozone layer,"
he proudly notes. He attended the University of Adelaide in his native Australia
and earned a degree in chemical engineering. That led to a job offer, in 1979,
from Shell, where he's been employed ever since, first working at a refinery near
Melbourne, then in the lube oil group in The Hague, and next as an oil trader
in London. For the past eight years, he's been Shell's go-to guy on climate change.
A
powerful plus for Hone is that Shell's CEO, Jeroen van der Veer, considers climate
change a serious issue, one he takes personally. In fact, Hone's job was created
at the CEO's instigation. "I meet with him frequently," says Hone. "Most people
who work here are concerned about CO2, but they also see the conundrum
the world is in. It's completely dependent upon fossil fuels, yet it has an issue
around climate change. How do you make those two ends meet?"
Is there irony
in an oil company's involvement in trying to solve climate change? Hone doesn't
see it. "This is ultimately an energy issue. It's directly about the products
that we're providing. So we have to be part of the solution as well. Personally,
I can't think of a better place to try and drive that change. And I think the
other thing is that the oil and gas companies have the capital and the momentum
to be able to actually get that change going."
One potential solution is
finding ways to efficiently trap and safely store the CO2 that fossil
fuels throw off. To solve that puzzle, Hone suggests looking straight at Big Oil:
"At the end of the day, no one's going to deliver on safe storage facilities for
carbon dioxide but the oil and gas companies. Who has the know-how, the resources,
the money? The oil and gas industry. So we are part of that solution."
Hone
is optimistic about what lies ahead. "The petroleum industry has an exciting future,"
he says. "Even in a carbon-constrained world, the products we produce have an
important role in society, and that's not going to change irrespective of what
anybody wants. It's part of our future for a good chunk of this century."
—
Robert McGarvey
Symphony of One
With
his all-digital Fauxharmonic Orchestra, Paul Henry Smith conducts great works
with no musicians
Last
November, a unique musical experiment took place in an intimate performance space
in New York. The Fauxharmonic Orchestra took to the stage and played a nine-minute
piece called "Gridley Paige Road," an adagio for strings composed by Matthew Quayle.
Immediately afterward, the 21-piece Baltimore Chamber Orchestra played the same
piece. The audience and critics were invited to compare the two. And the results?
Well,
before getting to that, you might want to know more about the Fauxharmonic Orchestra.
On stage, it isn't very impressive looking; it's basically a man in a sweater
and spectacles waving a Nintendo Wii remote while shifting his weight on a Wii
Fit Balance Board.
You might wonder why the guy in the sweater feels the
need do this. To answer that you need to know 45-year-old Paul Henry Smith, creator
and music director of the Fauxharmonic. Smith, who lives outside Boston, was trained
as a conductor and musician — as a teen he studied with Leonard Bernstein. Later
he researched digital orchestra technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Media Lab. That intersection of music and technology has kept him enthralled.
The basis for the sounds produced by the Fauxharmonic is the Vienna Symphonic
Library, a commercial software package that includes more than 4 million sound
files — snippets of, say, an actual viola playing a scale — along with an interface
that allows composers to manipulate those samples into something approximating
symphonic sound. "It's not a very glamorous process to watch," Smith says of tweaking
the sounds to prepare for a performance. "It's insanely detailed and repetitive,
and it drives everyone in the house nuts."
Smith was initially prompted
to take an interactive approach when a soloist he was working with felt restricted
singing along with a prerecorded track. Smith looked for a way he could conduct
a digital orchestra so that the soloist could set the tempo and leave pauses.
"The magical part of music is its spontaneous aspect," he says, "reacting and
shaping the sounds in real time, without knowing precisely how loud and how slow
and how fast you'll be at any moment."
One option was to play the accompaniment
on a keyboard controlling a computer while the soloist played, but Smith found
that unsatisfying. "I'm trained as a conductor. I like to wave my arms around."
The Wii, as it turned out, filled the bill. "It's easy and cheap," he says.
"I just go to Toys "R" Us and get a controller for 40 bucks." Once programmed,
the Wii Remote can adjust the tempo and permits pauses through arm motions. The
balance platform allows Smith to control volume and tone color — for instance,
when he leans to the left, the violins come up; leaning right, he gets more from
the basses.
The next step was to take the performance live. At last November's
demonstration concert, Quayle's adagio came off with no glitches and had a rich,
full sound thanks to the cutting-edge Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 5 loudspeakers.
A New York Times critic was impressed, but noted the Fauxharmonic does not yet
approach the sound of a true orchestra, stating, "the confrontation was less Muhammad
Ali versus George Foreman than Bobby Flay pitted against a George Foreman grill."
Smith says that misses the point. "It's got flaws and warts," he acknowledges
of the current technology. "But I want to know how far can I push it and how good
can I make it."
Smith especially takes issue with critics who insist he's
not truly creating live music because the sounds are all electronic. "Jimi Hendrix
strumming a guitar was a live musician playing something that's electronic," he
says. "And that will happen with this technology. Humans are going to be enthralled
by its expressive possibilities, and they're going to play things no one can imagine
right now. It's a major step in the evolution of musical instruments."
—
Wayne Curtis
Team Spark Plug
Astros
ace Roy Oswalt fires on all cylinders
Houston
Astros pitcher Roy Oswalt wants to set the record straight on something: He did
not, as is sometimes reported, undergo a miraculous recovery from an injury to
his throwing arm as a result of being struck by lightning. The shock actually
happened when Oswalt grabbed a spark plug wire on a truck he was fixing. Just
ask his wife, Nicole. She'll confirm it.
That's not the kind of story you usually
get from a superstar athlete these days. Then again, we're talking about the only
major league baseball player to ever have a "bulldozer clause" in his contract.
Indeed, as a reward to Oswalt for winning the sixth game of the 2005 National
League Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, Astros owner Drayton
McLane rewrote Oswalt's contract to include a Caterpillar D6N XL bulldozer. Oswalt
uses the vehicle to do landscaping work on his ranch.
That might sound like
the kind of down-homey stuff press agents used to spin for big-league ballplayers
of yesteryear. But in Oswalt's case, it's not hype at all. He really is the small-town
kid who made it big in professional sports against long odds. And he's managed
to cling to the values on which he was raised.
"The most important thing
to me is to be who you are, not who you're not," Oswalt says. "A lot of times,
guys get up to the bigs and they try to be something they're not. They start looking
at the names on the backs of those jerseys, and it messes them up."
Oswalt's
not into reading the names on opposing hitters' jerseys. At 6 feet, 192 pounds,
he may appear scrawny compared with many big-league fireballers, but he's earned
a reputation as a fearsome competitor. From 2001 through 2008, Oswalt won more
games (129) than any other pitcher in the major leagues. His career winning percentage
(.668 through 2008) is the highest in Astros history.
How does an undersized
hurler like Oswalt amass such impressive stats? Through commitment and preparation.
"A lot of guys don't do the kind of off-season preparation I do," he points out.
"They're looking toward their first start. I look toward the last one. This is
a marathon, not a sprint."
Off the field, Oswalt tries to apply the same
philosophy that's made him so successful in baseball. "I'm not a flashy guy,"
he says. "What you see is what you get. I try to be the same person every day."
As for that incident with the spark plug, doctors think the jolt may have loosened
some scar tissue in Oswalt's pitching shoulder. "All I know is, I couldn't lift
my arm without terrible pain before that, and when I was finally able to let go
of that wire, the pain was gone," he says.
— Michael McDermott
Continental
is the official airline of the Houston Astros.
Photographs: Peter Searle (Hone); Matthew Garrett (Smith); Sports Illustrated/Getty
Images (Oswalt)
