Sustainable Development
Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to [...]
Disclosure: I’m an advisor of the CO2 Impact team. I’m quite excited about the work that Boyd Cohen and his wife Elizabeth Obendiente and the team are doing and happy to see that they’re getting the coverage they deserve. They have a great article written about them on Care2.com’s site. You can read the article [...]
I was asked recently what I had learned from my informal survey of the local BC cleantech sector. This was my response and I was encouraged to share it more widely. I’d love your own thoughts on the following. Dear (Friend): You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time [...]
Aside from the continuing use of the annoying “save the planet” meme (the planet will be fine – it’s really “save the humans from an ugly step-down crash”) this is a great talk that Adam Werbach just gave recently tothe Teens Turning Green conference. Adam is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, author of [...]
Jamie Oliver pleads with us to stop killing our kids with crappy food: www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html Blaise Aguera y Arcas will blow your mind with the next generation of augmented reality mapping tools. Makes Google Maps look like crayons and paper. www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html Running more effective board meetings. Not rocket science but good basic article. www.cloudave.com/link/running-more-effective-board-meetings-at-startups It turns [...]
Check out the newly launched Climate Action Plan Indicators tool from the City of Berkeley that is based on Vancouver’s own Visible Strategies‘ “See-It” application. It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals. Congrats VS team and City of [...]
Here is a cool project from Google.org – a cloud based platform for monitoring the health of the world’s forests over time. I’m glad to see Sergey’s continued influence at Google on not just “doing no evil” but on working on tools and platforms to address some of humanity’s largest issues.
30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 – May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.
Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA: [my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.] “It’s all about the infrastructure” by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations The cloud sounds romantic but it’s 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. [...]
I think I have found the magic number. Every fifth article from Mark Morford is so brilliant, insightful, and articulate that I need to post most, if not all, of it here for my readers. Today is the day for another. In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of [...]
I’m intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS. Does anybody have any information on negative [...]
Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés: When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 – 8:30 pm Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC SUSTAINABLE HOMES Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted [...]
(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.) I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city. One key component of the [...]
The 19th Annual Angel Forum came to a successful close this afternoon. Thirty-six companies in the software, manufacturing, communications, internet, and medical device sectors presented to 70+ investors over the course of a full day of sessions. Each presenting company was given 10 minutes to pitch their company, market, team, market problem, solution, and investment [...]
Here are some of the gems from this week’s excellent article:
My mother, she had this car. It was …
Here is an interesting article from Wired Magazine about a company called Hydrogen Solar that can convert solar energy to hydrogen at about 8% efficiency. They are currently undergoing trials in Guildford, England.
Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a [...]
I love stories like this one at the Christian Science Monitor about Chris Anderson, a New Zealand scientist using crops to clean up contaminated mines. (Thanks Z+Partners for the link.) In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Wired talks about the demand outstripping supply for both diesel vehicles and hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and how that will likely lead to diesel/hybrid vehicles. The problem is that diesel is still fossil-fuel based, stinky, sooty, and toxic. VW has also publicly declared that they are reversing their stand on hybrid cars and will [...]
I am extremely interested in this field of bio-energy and am excited by all the possibilities of using microbes to convert solar power into useable hydrogen as well as to store energy similar to traditional batteries. Here is a great Wired Magazine article on some of the upcoming possibilities.
If you have a love of architecture, green homes, virtual reality, and Dilbert, and you have a good half hour to waste spend, I recommend that you visit Scott Adam’s new Virtual home tour at http://www.dilbert.com/duh and be prepared to be blown away. The house design was the result of thousands of Dilbert readers collaborating [...]
I saw one of these Smart cars down at the Concord Festival on the weekend and had the chance to sit in it. It was incredibly roomy up front for the two passengers. I totally fell in love with this car. There is not much room in the back. Less in fact than I had [...]
I thought that corn being turned into bio-diesel was cool but Toyota is experimenting with using sweet-potato-derived materials for some parts of new cars. The biomaterial is strong, light, and totally biodegradable. Maybe when we’re done with our cars, we’ll be able to break them into parts and toss them into the farmer’s fields…
I made up the term for myself because I like adventures, following angel and venture finance trends, building businesses, social entrepreneurship, and environmentally sustainable capitalism. But currently there is no word for capitalists who are socially and environmentally aware and who want to use capitalism as a force for good in the world. Pan-capitalism? Omni-capitalism? [...]
This looks like an interesting energy project being opened in Toronto. Enwave Systems has built a three pipe system that pulls low-temperature water from the bottom of the lake Ontario, extracts the coldness from the water (the process is not mentioned), and then puts the water into the drinking supply. I would be interested to [...]
It’s Deja vu all over again. Renewable energy seems to be the topic of the day. Some odd combination of forces are driving interest in renewable energies (many of the things that I discussed in my previous posting on bioproducts). The web is cluttered with noise about bioproducts, solar energy, and other non-petroleum based energy [...]
Everything old is new again. It’s all about timing. These are only two of a few choice phrases that may describe something that is afoot here in British Columbia. Some major global, national, and provincial forces are in play that are driving the development of a new (to us) association that may be created in [...]
I love Craig Venter for his long view, his burning curiousity, and his adventurous spirit. And probably because he pisses so many people off in the scientific community for being a dilletante. And yet, he has done more for the development of the various *omics (genomics, proteomics) than almost all others to date. This article [...]
Richard Smalley recently testified to the U.S. Senate on how how nanotechnologies and distributed power grids are the future of power.
