I asked a newcomer to Pop!Tech if the event was delivering on the hype. He replied that the first session had caused his TMJ to flare up from the stress of confronting a dying planet. But thankfully, for every blame-laden finger pointed at my energy-consuming face, there are more digits pointing towards solutions.
Saul Griffith of Whattzon.com breaks down his carbon footprint
with beautiful (and terrifying) information graphics. For starters, you can measure what your personal energy consumption is using the tools at wattzon.com to set a baseline and see how you compare against others. Wattzon says about its “embodied energy calculator”: Every purchasing decision you make has consequences… a significant amount of energy is required to make and deliver to you the stuff you buy and use. This tool allows all WattzOn users to estimate the embodied energy of all of the consumer items in modern life. With this tool well populated, people will be able to see how different products and lifestyle purchasing choices impact their power consumption.
It’s a small step, but it’s in the right direction. If you know what you’re mistakes are, you at least have a shot at correcting them.
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Labels: energy, information graphics, PopTech, sustainability, Web 2.0
Consultants like to tell their audience, "In Chinese, the character for
crisis is the same as
opportunity."
In the English dictionary, however,
crisis is defined as "a point in a story or drama when a conflict reaches its highest tension and must be resolved."
While the Developed World frets over the current multi-nodal RealEstateSubPrimeFinancialMarketTradeDeficit crisis--which continues to suck the value out of most of America's larger financial assets--the rest of the developing world is again struggling to afford the basics, namely, food.
In this case, the Cyrilla [oil supply] and Charybdis [demand for crops] have the same source: the global race for energy.
Time's recent article, titled
The Clean Energy Scam, desn't throw a monkey wrench into the machine behind biofuels as much as it points a finger at the rising world food costs and slash-n-burn behavior it has inspired in the Amazon.
A
rebuttal from 25x25, a non-profit supported financially by the
Energy Future Coalition, laments, "Unfortunately, the story's message of concern is undermined by misinformation about biofuels and an over-simplified analysis of complex systems."
The main law of complex systems remains: Small changes can have large, unpredictable effects.
Food riots which have struck several impoverished countries could spread with shortages and high prices set to continue for some time, the head of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said. A combination of high oil and fuel prices, rising demand for food in a wealthier Asia, the use of farmland and crops for biofuels, bad weather and speculation on futures markets have pushed up food prices, prompting violent protests in a handful of poor states. Jacques Diouf, director general of the Rome-based FAO, said on Wednesday during a trip to India that there was a growing risk of social instability in countries where families spent more than half their income on food.
"This is due to higher demand from countries like India, China, where GDP grows at 8-10 percent and the increase in income is going to food," Diouf said after meeting India's farm minister, Sharad Pawar.
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Labels: culture, energy, global trends, politics, sustainability
