These Golden State Warriors

I don't write much about sports anymore, mostly cause I don't really have an interesting perspective to contribute. But I want to write about these 2015-2016 Golden State Warriors just because I want to. Many words have been written about this historic 73 win team who sadly will not be remembered as the best team ever because of their Finals loss. Despite that failure, what I find fascinating is how unique and well put together this team is, with so many players playing interesting roles. Before the championship disappointment, sportswriters were trying to rank this team among all timers. Unlike the showtime Lakers and the '86 Celtics, the Warriors are not stacked with all timers at every position. The Warriors are more flawed, with a real vulnerability in rebounding, than those teams and the Jordan Bulls, but more than make up with their incredible shooting prowess. This imbalance enhances the team's likability - they're less like the big playground bully and more like a kid that somehow always wins at rocks-paper-scissors.

Here's a breakdown of the players on the first non-Boston team I've ever cared about, and an ode to why their greatness should not be diminished:

Stephen Curry
When I fantasize about being a superstar basketballer, while being short, I basically imagine being Steph Curry. He has maximized the scoring potential of a 6'3" shooting guard, raising our peak expectations of the position from a Steve Nash or Allen Iverson. Not only is he the best shooter of all time, but he's so much better than the second best, shattering 3 point records in a ruthlessly Ruthian manner. But it's his amazing handle, the way he can get one step away from his defender who knows not to let him shoot, the way he drives to the hoop and makes difficult layups and floaters look automatic, and the flashy passes he delivers when teams overload on him and forget he's a true point guard. He's not perfect - Curry is sloppy, turning it over more than he should, and with his slight build he occasionally gets exposed on defense.  But with the way he was overlooked coming out of high school (3 star recruit!), going to the small conference Davidson, and even after scoring all those buckets in college (including 30 to knock out Georgetown) being drafted behind 4 guards, and spraining his ankle 5 times, Stephen Curry has overcome so much. Pablo Torre's article on how all his ankle rehab work has made him better post-injury made me realize just how hard Curry has worked. He is this incredible culmination of a phenomenally coordinated athlete with a naturally great shot and an insane work ethic. Through it all, he's managed a very likable mix of self-confidence and humbleness en route to winning 2 MVPs and becoming everyone's favorite player.

Klay Thompson
If Curry is an otherworldly shooter, Thompson is simply a best-of-this-world shooter. At 6'8", his highlight reel includes some blocks and dunks in addition to all those 3's. To have both these incredible shooters on the same team at the same time defies probability and implies that they've pushed each other to shoot better. They're both also sons of former NBA players and relatively unheralded coming out of high school. Klay was the 11th pick in the 2011 draft. Unlike Curry, who was famous as a freshman, I hadn't heard of Klay until the Warriors were starting to get good. When Klay gets hot, he gets really hot, with an insane record-breaking 37 point 3rd quarter this past year. He probably couldn't lead a team consistently like Curry does, but goodness is he deadly on this team.

Draymond Green
Listed at 6'7", Green somehow spends most of his time playing either the 4 or the 5, and among the Warriors starters, is the only good defender. He's the biggest mouth, the most boisterous, and the one with the biggest chip on his shoulder after getting drafted 35th coming out of Michigan State. He does so many incredible tasks on the court, from quarterbacking the defense to rebounding to incredible passing to making hustle players to draining 3 pointers. He was 2nd in the league with 13 triple doubles in the regular season. While his offensive efficiency is low for this team, Green is such a great glue guy that the Warriors really can't win without him. In some ways he's as unique a player as Curry and as important to the team, even getting 2 second place MVP votes this year.

Andrew Bogut
Do people remember that Andrew Bogut was a #1 overall pick? The Australian who played college ball in Utah was sorely missed in the last 2 Warriors losses. He never really fulfilled #1 pick expectations, but he didn't fail either, peaking at 15.9 points/game and 10.2 rebounds/game and 2.5 blocks/game in 2009-10. His stats look low this year as Bogut doesn't feature much in the Warriors' offense and isn't part of their lineup of death, but he does start for a reason. When Green plays on the wing, Bogut is their only real rebounder. His passing, picks and veteran savvy are very noticeable, and on the other side of the ball, Bogut is a main reason this team of shooters is well above average defensively.

Harrison Barnes
Barnes was the guy most valued coming out of high school, winning the Morgan Wootten award (top high school senior) and named a pre-season All-American at UNC before he even played a game. Two solid but not amazing college years had him drafted 7th onto this Warriors' team, where he's never been the major offensive threat. Barnes is the prototypical athletic slashing swingman, the kind of player who led most teams in scoring in the 2000's. He has updated his game for the era, transforming into a 39% three point shooter. So often he's the guy who gets buckets when the Splash Brothers' shots aren't falling. However Barnes played badly at the end of this finals, and he's probably the most expendable starting player of this team.

Andre Iguodala
I find Iguodala's story so compelling. Here's a great athlete who'd competed in the dunk contest, a no. 9 overall pick from Arizona who was once the star player with the Philadelphia 76ers. Touted as the AI to replace AI, Iguodala averaged 19.9 points for a mediocre team in 2007-08. Commentators noted though that if Iguodala was your best player, your team could never contend. Amazingly Iguodala may have listened, transforming his game from a volume shooter to an all-around player and defensive stalwart. The Warriors' fortunes really rose when coach Steve Kerr switched Iguodala with Barnes and let him come off the bench. He anchors their reserves, outclassing opposing bench players and his one-on-one defense frustrates great players, from Russell Westbrook to Kevin Durant to LeBron James. Furthermore, I have been so impressed by his incredible passes. A mediocre team has Iguodala as their best player, but a transcendent team has him as a 6th man. When Iguodala replaces Bogut in the lineup, he completes the Death Lineup, the small terrifying group who can all shoot 3's, making them immune to double teams. Iguodala has been so important to this team, and it's been amazing seeing him change from a ball hogging shoot-first guy into the consummate professional.

Shaun Livingston
Livingston's story is a bit like Iguodala's, a once highly-touted star athlete who has found himself as a valuable chess piece on this Warrior's bench. Livingston was the 4th pick of the 2004 draft coming out of high school. I remember the comparisons to Magic Johnson for this 6'7" guy who played point guard with rare court vision. However his story is unique due to his comeback from a gruesome injury. The disastrous landing that took out every joint and ligament in his knee is one of those graphic injuries that requires a viewer discretion warning. He basically missed the next 3 seasons and bounced around the league after that. His place on the Warriors' the last two years as Steph Curry's backup could not be more redeeming. He's had two injury-free seasons making great passes and occasionally stellar plays, participating for the first time in games that matter. When he shines, he looks like a 30 year old athlete who somehow has 12 years of NBA experience, and you forget all about his injury. Who knows if he really could have played like Magic without that injury - he's never even scored more than 25 points in a game - but the way he's overcome setbacks and contribute to this great team is inspiring.

Steve Kerr and Luke Walton
There are other bench players worth mentioning, like Leandro Barbosa, Marreese Speights and Festus Ezeli, but I'm going to skip right to the coaches. It's no coincidence that the greatest 3 point shooting team of all time is coached by two fantastic 3 point shooters. What they've done with this team has affected the whole NBA, with old school philosophies tossed aside in favor of 3 pointers and "stretch fives", centers who can also shoot. The creative play calls that Kerr employs to get Curry open and open up backdoor cuts when defenders overplay the perimeter has been amazing to watch. Above all, I'm impressed with his willingness to stick with the 3, which has always been thought of as a live and die gamble. The 2002-03 Boston Celtics under Jim O'Brien were the first team I ever watched, and they set 3 point records at the time, firing off almost 24 a game. Rodney Rogers and Walter McCarty were early stretch fives. When they were on they could beat great teams, but they only made 36% of their 3's overall and often got blown out when their shots didn't fall. This Warriors team shoots almost 32 3's a game and makes 41.6% of them. Sometimes they are cold and fall way behind in games, but Kerr continues to trust in the game plan. In Game 4 of the Western Conference Semifinals against the Blazers, Steph Curry was 0 for 9 from 3 coming back from injury. I couldn't believe he was still shooting after clearly not having it, but he kept going and caught fire with 4 minutes left in the game. He then scored an astounding 17 points in overtime and the Warriors won.

Kerr and Walton might not have helped Curry become a better shooter - he was always in a league of his own. But behind the scenes they must have done well with players like Barnes, Green, Iguodala, Barbosa and Speights, who almost surely wouldn't be as deadly from long range on other teams. They've shown that optimizing this fundamental skill wins championships. Alas it wasn't enough this year.

Sustainability

So I work in "Sustainability" now.  I put that word in quotes because it didn't take long while working in this industry to realize that many of my peers hate the "S-word" and consider it a misleading buzzword. It also didn't take me too long to realize that many of my coworkers doing the same job as me might not identify as working in Sustainability.  Also during my short tenure, my team changed its name from Building Physics to Building Sustainability, to capitalize on this buzz.

Here are some quick numbers behind why I wanted to join this field:
-China emitted over 9.7 billion tons of CO2 in 2011
-The US emits over 5.4 billion tons of CO2 in 2011
-The world emitted around 33 billion tons of CO2 in 2011 (all data from EDGAR)
-The UNEP predicts that 44 gigatons of CO2 by 2020 will lead to our world increasing by 2 degrees celsius from a pre-industrial level. We are currently on target for 58 gigatons.  The 2 degree mark is one that many models predicts will render life on earth unlivable
-The breakdown of end-use energy is approximately 37% industry, 20% transportation, residential and services 36%
-Coal is the most common energy source
-16.1% of the world energy consumption now comes from renewable sources. An additional 2.7% comes from nuclear energy.

However, over 12% of that comes from biofuels in some way and 3.3% comes from Hydropower. Biofuels are technically zero carbon because when they are consumed for electricity, the carbon they emit is equivalent to the carbon they absorbed during their life. However, according to jobsandenergy.com, "The biomass-is-carbon-neutral story line put forward in the early 1990’s has been superseded by more recent science that recognizes that mature, intact forests sequester carbon more effectively than cut-over areas. When a tree’s carbon is released into the atmosphere in a single pulse, it contributes to climate change much more than woodland timber rotting slowly over decades."  For biofuels like corn, they can be used more efficiently as food rather than energy.  Hydropower is zero-carbon, but it's obviously a limited commodity and has potentially devastating environmental issues.  The renewable sources that come with the least baggage seem to be solar (heat and electricity), wind, geothermal (heat and electricity) and perhaps ocean tidal energy. These sources have some flexibility in their placement and create clean energy with minimal adverse impact to environmental or human activity. Still, they do have their own drawbacks and are dependent on resources beyond our control such as the weather and need to be placed in areas where these resources are high. None of these technologies are yet economically competitive with fossil fuel.  Lastly, nuclear energy is essentially zero carbon and very powerful, but obviously has its own dangerous consequences and are being phased out of Japan and Germany.

When I look at this current situation of global energy, I do get scared.  I don't know what will happen in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. I worry that the planet will not be so enjoyable during my later life, much less for future generations. We really don't know for sure, as this has never before happened in human history, and the globe is so complicated that the best of models need to be taken with an ocean's worth of salt.  Not everyone believes in global warming, and even I'm willing to say there is a slight chance that the climate change we have observed is not anthropogenic. Slight. Even still, as someone who has lived in China, it's very very obvious to me the terrible deleterious effect that air pollution can have, and my experiences in Beijing are a main reason why I decided to enter this field.

To be sure, plenty is being done and plenty of incredible advancement has been made. At my job, there are plenty of developers who want to create energy efficient buildings and no shortage of projects that are pursuing LEED or other Green Building Certificates. The market is going in that direction on its own. There are large scale projects that seek to create more energy efficient districts and cities, built around mass transit, wind corridors and green space. District cooling/heating technology is improving, where local power plants are used to supply power with minimal loss to the district, and the waste heat that is a necessary byproduct of the generation process is used to provide heating (or cooling in a different process). Similarly, combined cogeneration plants are producing electricity more efficiently.  People are working on improving the grid itself, making it more efficient and less susceptible to peaks and troughs of the human behavior cycle. Car companies are working furiously to produce more fuel efficient cars, including electric cars, driven strongly by consumer demand. There are more and more energy efficient appliances. And renewable energy is growing just about everywhere.  Yes I have noticed that the world at large is more energy conscious, less wasteful and more concerned about the environment.

But when I think of what is left to be done, I get even more overwhelmed.  The world is growing, and energy demand is growing even faster. China is already the largest energy user in the world, but its per capita use is about 40% that of the US.  As rural dwellers rapidly move to the cities and the standard of living improves, the per capita energy demand will increase. At a presentation at work, I saw data on Hong Kong's energy situation. In many ways, Hong Kong is a model city with its very efficient public transportation. However buildings use a ton of energy. I noticed that even if all future buildings in the city use 50% less energy than current ones (an impossibly ambitious number), AND all current buildings are retrofitted to use 25% less energy, the entire island would need to be covered in solar panels to reach a zero carbon figure. It made me realize that though we can put a lot of effort and ingenuity into what we do, we can only do so much.  And energy is such a complicated global political issue, with far reaching security, economic and environmental consequences that very often there are multiple competing factions over any new developmental.

So what needs to change? I think first we need to reduce demand. The cleanest energy is the energy you don't use. I believe that we need to change our culture towards energy consumption and that not enough impetus is given in this regard. You can design an energy efficient building with plenty of natural sunlight and natural ventilation, but if people leave the lights on and run the air conditioning all night, it won't be so energy efficient. Energy data can also do wonders - I do strongly believe that if we were all aware every minute of how much energy we were consuming, most of us would change our habits so that we could see those numbers go down. So that would help. But a bigger question is whether we're willing to give up some of our comforts. 60 years ago almost nobody in the tropics had air conditioning - is that something we can or want to go back too? Will we be willing to give up driving?

There needs to be a drastic increase in renewable energy production and perhaps an even more dramatic advancement in renewable technologies.  Geothermal and tidal energy are relatively new and untapped and potentially limitless sources. Solar and wind have been around for a while but are still improving, and our mapping of solar irradiation and wind patterns make it easier to predict the performance of individual units and help plan projects better. Perhaps the most important driver for these technologies is reducing their cost and making them competitive with fossil fuel energy. If solar panels can be produced cheaply (and cleanly) and the price for solar energy drops and the price for fossil fuel energy rises, the free market forces may allow the solar industry to boom. However, though the I think the scarcity of oil and gas will reemerge as a key issue this coming decade, coal is extremely plentiful.  It appears that government policies will need to be around forever to encourage renewable energy investment and use and discourage dirty coal.

Battery technology also really needs to develop. The ability to capture energy and save it for later consumption without too much loss is crucial to a sustainable world.  The question with solar and wind energy is always, "What happens during a cloudy day? What happens when there's no wind?" The ability to save energy for rainy days is a necessary development to parallel the growth of solar technology. It's also a technology that plays an important role in smart grid models (where energy users can store electricity when they aren't using it, then feed it back to the grid when there's a demand) and for electric cars. More efficient transmission is also vital, so that we can carry electricity from windy and sunny areas to less exciting climate zones.

Who are the biggest drivers here? During my time at Arup, I've been trying to figure that out. From this post, it should be obvious that this is an immense undertaking.  Fundamentally, it seems that we are currently most reliant on scientists.  My company doesn't develop any low energy appliances or solar panels, but as these products come out we pay attention and incorporate them into our design. It's still people in the laboratory that need to make magic happen.  Government of course plays its part in funding the engineers and scientists, and creating the appropriate policies to regulate carbon and encourage green growth.  It will have to play an even greater part in auditing buildings and forcing underachievers to get retrofitted, and in creating large scale eco-city projects.

We also need outside the box answers. I think there could be more human-generated energy going into the grid, such as capturing the energy from revolving doors. Office dwellers could carry weights at the bottom of the lift, take it up to their floors and then drop the weights down some sort of slide, where their energy could be captured. Gym goers could have their elliptical and biking work captured and sent into the grid, or at the least to power their machine.  And then there's this bike designed to clean the air in Beijing. Maybe none of this sounds like a lot but it seems like we need to look at every possible opportunity to be nicer to this planet.

The sad thing is that if we succeed - if we successfully pull off the largest international engineering-social-political-technological-environmental transformative effort ever and dramatically alter the course of human behavior, no one will really know. We aren't too sure about the real consequences of all this carbon in the air, of the broad effects of global warming - we even have people who argue against anthropogenic global warming.  The 2 degrees celsius limit is a fairly arbitrary limit that is now being ignored because we're going to blow by it.  But if we pull off a miracle and stop global warming short of this limit, the end result will be a world similar to how it is now.  Nothing will change.  There won't be blue skies and birds chirping every day. The people who questioned the seriousness of climate change will say "I told you nothing would happen" and the people passionate about sustainability can only trust that we've averted something disastrous and that we will continue to do so for generations.  There won't be a "We Saved the World Party", though that would be awesome.  The best we can hope for is approval from future historians. They will either look back on our era as the people who screwed up the earth for them, or the ones who banded together for something very large and changed human history.