Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
from Adam Pasick:
Crunching the numbers on a vegan in a Hummer
(Updated below with Michael Pollan's response)
You want some petroleum with that Big Mac?
from Adam Pasick:
Nike, the albatross, and sustainable design
A dead baby albatross is a tough act to follow.
Nike's Lorrie Vogel took the stage at Poptech this week to talk about the company's sustainable product design efforts.
Immediately preceding her was an devastating presentation from photographer Chris Jordan, who shared a series of photographs from Midway Atoll of baby albatrosses who had died from ingesting plastic from the massive Pacific Garbage Patch.
from Adam Pasick:
Victims of the Pacific Trash Gyre
Have you ever seen 500 people stunned into a complete and devastated silence?
Photographer Chris Jordan shared a sobering tale of his journey to Midway Atoll with the Poptech conference on Thursday, where he captured horrifying images of baby birds killed by plastic from the Pacific Trash Gyre. The crowd, which had been listening to a day of Big Ideas, was dumbstruck.
If you've never heard of the Gyre -- also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex -- odds are you will hear a lot more soon. It is an oceanic trash pile in the north Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas, trapped in a remote, circular current. (Check out this explainer from Good)
As Jordan explained, it's not a floating garbage dump as you might imagine it. Most of the debris is made up of tiny pieces of plastic and other litter which is floating in a suspension beneath the surface of the water. Some researchers have found that water in the Gyre holds six times more plastic molecules than phytoplankton, the single-celled organisms at the bottom rung of the marine food chain.
I think this is an important issue. Especially disturbing to me is that much of what is in the gut of the pictured birds looks like it could be medical waste – test tube caps and so on. At the very least, the stuff looks fairly homogeneous, which would seem to me to be inconsistent with a generalized plastic waste gyre in the Pacific. The question is, is the stuff in the pictures from some sort of (possibly) illegal localized dumping?
Introducing the Reuters Global Green Portfolio
As part of Reuters new Green Business section, we have chosen a diverse group of companies to serve as a proxy for the emerging green technology sector. Over the coming months we’ll be discussing each of them at length, and rebalancing our portfolio to reflect trends in the industry.
Click here to see our portfolio in action. You can track our performance against benchmarks, comment on our choices, and create a portfolio of your own.
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Comverge, Inc is one of the leading demand-response companies, known for their role in limiting electricity use during peak demand, employing technology to manage large companies’ power usage and control their costs. Their software can automatically adjust an air conditioner’s temperature or turn off a swimming pool pump when power supplies are tight, reducing prices for suppliers and end users by lowering end user demand at peak times.
What I like about this new index is that it is international, which reflects modern trading and investment practices. A few tweaks here and there, based on the recommendations above, plus a few added small-cap companies (which would better represent the sector overall) and this could be a cited index.
Green Business round-up
earth2tech: Smart Grid Stimulus Spending Capped Too Low
With more than $4 billion in stimulus funds allocated to the smart grid, utilities argue that the cap on spending for any one smart grid project is too low.
WSJ Environmental Capital: Al Gore: Passing the Climate Bill a ‘Moral Imperative’
Al Gore came back to Congress today to warn about the perils of climate change and throw his weight behind draft energy and climate legislation.
Five to watch in the Business of Green
With government money flowing and traditional industries fading, 2009 is set to be a watershed year for green business. Reuters News and Venture Capital Journal have selected five decisionmakers who will help to decide the course of technology, energy usage and climate change in the years to come.
Founder, Khosla Ventures
Khosla grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite spending his childhood up in an Indian Army household with no business or technology connections. He eventually became a founder of Sun Microsystems and then joined legendary venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
In 2004, Khosla, driven by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenage children and a desire to be more experimental, formed Khosla Ventures, funded entirely with family funds. His goals remain the same – work and learn from fun and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, build impactful companies through the leverage of innovation, and spend time as a partnership making a difference. He has made investments in companies working on waste water and water desalinization, solar, geothermal and cellulosic ethanol.
Good for Green. Why doesn’t anyone talk about blue? Our Oceans are dying. The water is getting to warm and levels to high. The hothouse gas reduction goals governments are about to set subsequent to Kyoto are woefully inadequate. CO2 should be reduced around 40 percent by 2020 or 2021. The EU and the U.S. want to set targets of 15 or 20 percent. The Cod are almost gone and the Salmon are not far behind. We have waited to long and now drastic action is required. Those living in the West have been comfortable for along time at the expense of those living in the developing world. It is now our turn to sacrifice.
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Mankind has had a positive carbon footprint since domesticating animals and plants 6000 years ago.
I’m in favor of reducing emissions for political reasons, not environmental ones. Energy independence would be fantastic for my country.
But the idea that reducing emissions will save the world is delusional. At best, it would just delay climate change, since reduced emissions are still emissions. The only way to stop or reverse any climate change is to develop atmospheric scrubbers. Plants do it. We can do it.