Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’

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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ShopWiki for Christmas

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

For all you last minute Christmas shoppers, check out ShopWiki. It’s an interesting site attempting to revolutionize online shopping by crawling Google for every online store on the internet. This is cool because most online marketplaces and shopping sites have selective stores that that they set up deals with, whereas ShopWiki brings in virtually every store on the web, allowing you to better compare price data and make more informed decisions on what to buy. Furthermore, it has a near flawless user interface and interaction, which is the name of the game in retaining users and making money.

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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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Posted in Energy, Environment, News, Sustainable | View Comments

LOHAS Philosophy of the Future

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

LOHAS – Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability

A holistic philosophy on products, services, businesses, organizations, and humanity as a whole that advocates growth and change through systems thinking. I recently found an amazing write up at the LOHAS website about how this philosophy will help the business culture of the future.

Here’s my favorite excerpt:

For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the ‘industrial age bubble’, based on a ‘take, make, waste’ worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.”

So how do we change? How do we grow?
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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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Posted in Business, Economy, News, Sustainable | View Comments

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