Sep 9, 10
Hacking The Auto X-Prize
The Progressive Automotive X-Prize is the latest high-profile contest from the folks who kick-started space tourism with the original X Prize. The goal of the Auto X Prize is "To inspire a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles that help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change." Most entries to the contest are hybrids, electric cars, super-efficient combustion engines, and the like. But Jim Mason of All Power Labs, a homebrew gasification-and-biochar...
A Month's Worth of Blogging, Condensed into a Single Column
It's been a crazy month, with talks to give and essays and books to write, and money to raise, and I've really fallen behind in blogging. So here's a month's worth of things I've been meaning to post about: Screw your IQ -- what's your Buxton Index? "The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans." ... This is an interesting concept: and one that helps explain a lot of attitudes and...
Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, Biochar
This week's cartoon describes biochar -- a product that can be made from agricultural waste and other organic material. Biochar, which mimics the charcoal component in a rich black soil called terra preta created by indigenous farmers in South America, promises a way to achieve a net reduction in carbon dioxide while feeding nutrients back to the soil. While biochar offers encouraging possibilities for waste reduction, carbon sequestration and sustainable agriculture, it's worth noting that...
Reader Report: Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship
By Kristin Hayden I've just returned from a very inspiring three days in Oxford, England, at the
Corporate Political Transparency: The Green Business Rating We Really Need
Much is made of various measurements of corporate progress towards sustainability: Company X has reduced its carbon footprint by 10 percent, Company Y has introduced a line of recycled products, Company Z will offer new and more efficient technology in 2012. But the reality is, there's one measurement that matters more than all of these put together, and it's almost never mentioned in the green business press: where a company spends its lobbying budget. See, a huge number of companies make...
Shepard Fairey: Notes Toward an Affirmative Art
In the 1980s, about the time Shepard Fairey took up skateboarding in a big way, Abigail Solomon Godeau published an article called “The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style.” The article was later published in a book called The Contest of Meaning that probably had some currency at the Rhode Island School of Design when Fairey was a student there. In her article, Godeau relates the tragic tale of the Russian Constructivists. These somber men...
Open Intellectual Property as Sustainability Accelerator
It's the job of the world's poor to get rich, and the job of the world's rich to redefine wealth. That is, the biggest task facing the developing world is development and human well-being, while the biggest task facing the developed world is making prosperity sustainable so that as billions of more people become prosperous, we're still able to protect the planet's biosphere. Critical to this division of labor, though, is the idea of rapid diffusion of sustainable innovation from the...
Green:Net on SmartGrids, Hurdles and the New Networked Car
By Mary Catherine O'Connor At Earth2Tech's Green:Net technology conference Tuesday in San Francisco, Jesse Berst, managing director of Global Smart Energy, asserted that the smart grid is not nearly as difficult to define as many make it seem. But what will be difficult is clearing the hurdles to building out the smart grid quickly. He said the smart grid has three parts: smart devices, two-way communication (which makes those devices smart, and pulls and pushes the...
Heirloom Design
Can we live sustainably while still enjoying our stuff? Buying better stuff (and less of it), and keeping it for longer is one realistic strategy for making that possible. But we know that won't work with most of the stuff we have now. Whether it's clothes, computers, appliances or even homes, throwaway culture in the developed world -- accompanied by throwaway design -- makes for stuff we not only don't want to keep, but that we often can't continue to use even if we try. Enter a new meme:...
The Wall Street Crowd and the Transparency Revolution
There is a great cluelessness afoot in this land. It's padding around in Europe and Asia as well, but here in the U.S., it's staggering around with giant clomping feet, and its favorite stomping grounds are the economic punditry centers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Consider this article by Joe Nocera about the AIG scandal. In it, Nocera argues that the anger over the AIG bonuses is irrational and self-hurting. He's completely missing the point on both accounts. For most Americans,...
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