Archive for the ‘Sustainable’ Category

Nature to the Grid: Bioenergy

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The leaf is the primary site of photosynthesis...
Image via Wikipedia

The clean tech economy is taking off, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what will actually work. What concept will bring it all together?

From a production (energy) standpoint, you’ve got solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, and ethanol. And with consumption, you have to ask how are we going to create products, how are we going to deal with waste, and where are we going to get our food and water?

When you start looking at all these variables, you seem to get to the root of the sustainability problem… it’s very fragmented. There needs to be a new holistic approach that attacks the whole issue. Where do we get our energy, our food, and a new paradigm for products and waste? To us, the answer is quite clear… it’s found in nature, where the essence is growth. Grow our food, grow our energy, grow our resources. It’s all about growth energy… bioenergy.

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Ecolism: Spiritual Entrepreneurship

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

Innately as human beings, we desire 2 things whether consciously aware of it or not: to feel a connection to something greater than ourselves and to be able to benefit other people and the world around us. This is the essence of spirituality. If you can achieve these 2 things in life, you can cultivate true happiness and peace.

Life will always be a mystery, but can’t we agree the point is to be truly happy and free of suffering? And yet pondering this as an intellectual ideal or meditating on a mountain in Tibet for the rest of your life won’t cut it. We have to somehow feel it and incorporate it into the reality of our lives, which for good or bad largely centers around making money to provide a means to function in society. To many, money is perceived as the root of all evil and focusing on making a lot of it couldn’t possibly allow you to connect to something greater than yourself or benefit other people. It’s too competitive and you have to focus only on yourself or else you’ll be exploited by those that do.

But what if this is all wrong? What if focusing on spiritual growth, connecting to the force that powers you beyond your ego, and cultivating a sense of importance in benefiting other people, will actually give you an edge? What if the world is going through a dramatic shift from a linear system to a cyclical system, a renewable system, where a more, more, me, me mentality will lose, and a holistic, spiritual mentality will win? What will help traditional capitalism transcend into a new form of governance we like to call ecolism?

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Obama’s Energy and Environmental Team Completed

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

President-elect Obama has proven pragmatism and decisiveness with the completion of his energy and environmental team. He apparently understands the issues and is ready to lead.

His team includes:


Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy: Nobel physics laureate and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis

Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor


Obama’s first stated target is to reduce U.S. GHG emissions to the level of 1990 by 2020. This is an incredibly bold goal and the wheels need to be put in motion immediately. The first course of action is deciding on a carbon tax and/or cap-and-trade system.

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Recycle Bank

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vassallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

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Women think differently

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

I was looking through the Clean Tech group on LinkedIn and found a cool article from Sami Shiro talking about a recent law in Norway passed that mandates 40% of all executive boards be women. He went on to discuss how this new way of thinking could help us with our sustainability dilemma. By creating a holistic goal if you will, you force/allow the companies to figure out their own way to get there. Sami gave the two examples of businesses and homes becoming carbon neutral by 2020 and 75% of water usage recycled by 2015. Non-compliance would have strict consequences such as mandating homes/businesses to buy appropriate technology to reach the target after a set period of time. In the case of the Norway boards, if they don’t reach their goal in 2 years, the company will be shut down!

I found this fascinating… is our world starting to wake up? Is the man’s way of thinking becoming outdated and even under-evolved? Very linear, physical, territorial, power obsessed… and yet now we’ve reach the edge, we’ve maxed out our world. There’s no more land to take over, nothing left to conquer, nowhere else for people to live, and no more resources to fight over other than oil (and this will be the last hoorah). Something has to change, and it starts with our thinking. I’ve been doing a lot of GT’ing about how that can happen, and the best thing I’ve come up with is a swift shift in global power from male to female.

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