Gil Friend’s Blog
Factor 10? Big whoop.
[WorldChanging]: The insulation, along with high-efficiency windows and other energy-saving features, results in the buildings requiring only about one liter of oil per square meter for annual heating -- 5% of the average home requirement in Germany, and well below...
Mapping Sustainability
[AltFunction]: I think a lot of communication around sustainable development and corporate responsibility suffers because we rely on the printed word too much and don't use good images and diagrams enough.This Pattern Map does a good job of using the inherent...
Green Guerillas?
John Robb is not a proponent of terrorism and guerilla warfare, but he is an astute analyst of it. Neither the White House nor the anti-Iraq War folks are paying him enough attention, IMHO. Here's what he said recently about potential vulnerabilities of our current...
Global warming and… ants! Very many, very tiny ants
[New Scientist]: Global warming might shrink ant workers by as much as a third, says Michael Kaspari at the University of Oklahoma, US, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who carried out the study: 'And since ant species with small workers...
‘Long Tail’ vs. ‘Bottom of Pyramid’
[The Long Tail]: The Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) argument is essentially based on commodification. Take existing goods and services and make them an order of magnitude or two cheaper, either to buy or to make but ideally both. Typically, this means reducing goods to...
Don’t blame me. I know nahtink….
Now please pay me anyway. [Right Reality]: David Batsone passes along this gem from The New York Times: The criminal liability that chief executives now face is an odd outgrowth of the same logic that won them such huge paychecks in the 1990's. Of course they were...
Pointers
I've just posted Natural Logic's seasonal update on our web site. Check it out! Also posted, my periodic 'Sustainability Sundays' posting at WorldChanging. This time: What do sustainability reports really tell us?
Toxics – Mercury, ‘cap and trade,’ smoke and mirrors
[San Francisco Chronicle]: EPA to issue new rule on mercury emissions; Not all power plants will need to cut pollution The rule is certain to be contested in court by environmental groups, who charge that it places the financial interests of power companies over...
Toxics – Body burden
The Oakland Tribune (which has been appearing, unsolicited and unwanted, on my doorstep for months) has never been one of my go-to media sources. But they've impressed me this week, with a three part series on the body burden of toxic chemicals carried by at least one...