Green Ambition

On my jaunt out to San Diego last week, I picked up a copy of Seed Magazine, which takes stylistic cues from Wired and other culture magazines, and applies them to the world of science, producing a sort of hipster-Scientific American, I guess. I've read the magazine a few times, and have generally found it to be decent. In the June 2007 issue, I was specifically drawn to the cover story, "The China Experiment," promising a detailed look into technology initiatives native to China focused on improving the environment. While the article contained a couple of interesting facts (15 of the top 20 cities on the World Bank's assessment of "most polluted cities" are in China), a number of quoted platitudes ("It's historic," says Kishan Khoday, head of the UNDP's energy and environment program in China. "It's going to take efforts on all angles of the issue to get it done"), by and far the most interesting parts were the anecdotes of specific initiatives that have been undertaken to green China, sometimes in unique ways. For example:

"For the Olympics, a designated weather modifciation office will reduce air and ground pollution before the Games by shooting rockets filled with silver iodide into the sky to make rain. Beijing's Science and Technology Department has been experimenting with hormone therapy and cross-breeding to produce flowers that can withstand a Beiging August. "I'm sure that during those three weeks it will be crystal-clear in Beijing," energy analyst [Jim] Brock says. "They're playing with all sorts of things."

A weather machine? It's the sheer audacity of the project that is both terrifying and encouraging. Perhaps when they focus their energy on climate change or clean energy production. On a less sinister note, the article also mentions the growth of market for locally-implemented solar power solutions - where in villages and small cities with inconsistent grids, local entrepreneurs have seized a market opportunity to create stores like the "Solar Supermarket" dealing in solar generators, heaters, and cookers that provide cleaner energy to poorer populations.

On a separate note, CNN.com carried a story today about Google.org announcing an initiative to develop plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that would far out-pace current standards for mgp. While it seems doubtful that even $10 million is sufficient to make a dent in the problem, Google's commitment to innovation in new problem spaces continues to impress. More over, the dual focus on technology innovation and thinking about new ways of addressing the market are also very encouraging:

Google said Tuesday it is getting in on the development of electric vehicles, awarding $1 million in grants and inviting applicants to bid for another $10 million in funding to develop plug-in hybrid electric vehicles capable of getting 70 to 100 miles per gallon.

The project, called the RechargeIT initiative and run from Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, aims to further the development of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles - cars or trucks that have both a gasoline engine and advanced batteries that recharge by plugging into the nation's electric grid.

"Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a safety net," Dan Reicher, director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org, wrote on the organization's Web site. "In preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30-plus mpg higher than that of the regular hybrids."

The project also aims to develop vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, allowing cars to sell their stored power back to the nation's electricity grid during times of peak demand.

Slowing Online Sales

Like you, the NYT headline caught my eye last week "Online Sales Lose Steam!" What could it mean? Recession? The resurrection of the brick and mortar? The mom and pop? Bookstores? Record stores? Dubious, I bookmarked it - but before I could issue a takedown, Slate.com beat me to it.

While Jack Shafer gives the story the rod from a journalistic perspective, I'll issue my one and only piling-on: which is my general dismay at the way both market researchers and consultancies (like Jupiter, the issuer of the data) and the NYT are able to take the data-rich markets and behaviors of the web and gin up sensationalist stories that don't really add up to much. Do I have lots of evidence of this happening? No, not right now. Does it irk me, nonetheless? Yes.

Is City Living Too Dear?

RM sends an article describing a project by the organization Best Foot Forward to systematically measure the Ecological Footprint of the city of London. The article, which is part of a sequence of articles on "Megacities," posits that city dwellers contribute a disproportionate load to energy and resource consumption, and that the growing move to urbanization, generally, and "Megacities," specifically, represent an increased ecological concern

Urbanites, even in poor cities, tend to have the money to consume more than their rural brethren, Rees says, so cities tend to have outsized ecological footprints. However, he notes, public transportation, efficient heating, streamlined services, and other things that are economical in cities but not elsewhere can ease urbanization's impact on the environment. “Cities do enable—if we organize them properly—the displacement of private cars in favor of public transportation, cogeneration, recycling, and remanufacturing,” he says. “In general, high-income cities increase the ecological footprint because of rising incomes and rising consumption, but we could—through intervention in the economy, appropriate planning, densification, and tax policies—turn it around. But so far we are choosing not to do so.

”The number of urbanites has tripled since the early 1960s and now represents half of the world's 6.5 billion population, which approximately doubled during that time. Meanwhile, our global footprint has more than doubled since the early 1960s, when it took up half the planet's renewable resources. It now exceeds the Earth's resources by about 25 percent, meaning that we are degrading the planet's ability to support us. If you think of those resources as a bank account, we are no longer living only off the interest. We are spending capital.

In sending the article, RM mentioned that he was surprised at the assertion that urbanites were bad ecological citizens, citing his impression (one that I share) that cities tend to be more efficient consumers of resources, due to economies of scale, generally, and the enabling of specific public policies, like those mentioned in the article, for which cities allow.

So how to disentangle the assertion of urbanites as bad actors? Well, the first is to understand the comparison. When comparing the Environmental Footprint of an urbanite to a ruralite, I think the assertion probably holds true. Let's consider a developed economy comparison of an urbanite in a city like New York or London to their rural counterpart - it is probably true that the urbanite both consumes net more products and services as well as requires those products and services to be imported in to the city and disposed of out of the city, whereas the ruralite may consume more locally produced products, and be able to dispose of them more efficiently (if not, necessarily, any more safely). Similarly, in a developing country standpoint, the challenge often may be that those ruralites are, in fact, rural poor, and simply do not have the economic capability to consume at parity with their urban counterparts, even the urban poor. In both cases, the impact is likely to bias the comparison against the urban population.

The challenge in that comparison lies in the fact that, at least as far as modern economies have grown, people get drawn to urban centers based on the ability of cities to create wealth, jobs, and opportunity. The logical conclusion of a finding that rural living is more sustainable that urban living - which would be to encourage more people to live in rural settings - does not hold at scale, because rural economies generally can't sustain the population mass, and therefore, those populations migrate to urban centers. Hence, global trends towards urbanization.

I think the more salient and actionable lessons from the analysis are to focus on patterns of consumption (among both rural and urban populations, but probably exaggerated among urban populations), trying to align consumption more closely with sustainability (i.e., how can we convince people to simply consume less) and separately, investing in public policy that continues to increase the efficiency by which products and services can be delivered to urban markets.

And a last note - the greater difficulty in the urban vs. rural comparison above is that it is probably not the demographically relevant comparison. Rather, of a greater concern is the trend to suburbs, exurbs, and other types of "cities" where citizens have the "richer" consumption patterns of urban environments, but benefit from none of efficiencies in delivering those services created by dense, urban environments. This rapid development of suburbia, and the patterns of living and consumption there are the demographic trend probably warrants the most concern.

How Advertising Runs the World, part 1 of Infinity

Wired: How should we think about Google today?

[Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google]: Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system -- Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values -- all that kind of stuff.

from the May 2007 issue of Wired magazine.

"We are in the business of monetizing our services through advertising." - Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President, Connected Life Division , Yahoo! Inc.

at TIECon 2007, discussing how Yahoo! plans to make money from its emerging suite of mobile services.

Stating nothing but the obvious, but it is interesting to hear how two of the most exciting, fun, and revolutionary companies of the past ten years view themselves. Yes, both Google and Yahoo! have been on the forefront of innovating new products and business models, and continue to either build, acquire, or incubate cool new products seemingly every quarter. But at their core, and certainly at the core of their revenue streams, they each understand themselves in clear terms: as effective channels for delivering ad content to consumers.

No news here, and my purpose is only to set the table for a series of future posts exploring my love/hate for the advertising industry (where $150 billion a year is spent, annually, in the United States alone). Some of the questions I am looking to pursue:

- Are the metrics and core theses for advertising (from impressions to purchases, from direct marketing response rates to brand value) well grounded in data? Still valid as advertising finds new mediums and channels, like the Internet? Do those questions matter? [In short, No, no, and no].
- Can advertising be art? Is this redeeming?
- What are the real insights in how Google (and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo) have brought advertising to the internet?
- Is advertising an effective medium for achieving non-commercial goals?
- What happens to advertising in a world where content becomes increasingly diversified?

My admitted biases are that I enjoy advertising (when it is used to create campaigns that are artful, funny, or cool), that I think advertising can be highly successful (when it creates a meaningful brand or transparently puts meaningful product data in front of consumers), that I think advertising is generally deceptive, dishonest, unimaginative, base, and boring, that I think advertising is increasingly ineffective (who even looks at banner ads? or watches ads on TV?), that the need to circumvent the disdain that consumers have for ads, in terms of interrupting their consumption of media, will have few positive and numerous negative consequences. And so on and so on.

What I'd love to hear from you are any perspectives or questions that you'd like me to consider as I start thinking more closely about advertising, and more helpful to me, any interesting data points or analyses that you could send my way. Dear readers. All four of you.

Wanting Less, Needing More

I spent the weekend in Santa Clara, attending TIECon 2007. TIECon is the annual conference of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), a global networking association primarily for technology entrepreneurs from the South Asian diaspora. Due largely to the success that Indian entrepreneurs (I'll use Indian as politically insensitive shorthand for South Asian) have had, and particularly in Silicon Valley, the conference was able to host panels and keynotes comprised of a who's who of Silicon Valley tech all-stars, including Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Vinod Khosla of KPCB and Khosla Ventures, Matt Cohler of Facebook.com, Meg Whitman of eBay, etc., etc.

While I wasn't able to attend the conference wire-to-wire, I did sit in on a number of keynotes and panels, mostly choosing to focus on mobile and alternative energy. Lots of interesting stuff I'll deep-dive into further in future posts.

Among the notable trends was the excitement and focus that the conference paid to opportunities in alternative technologies, including a keynote by Vinod Khosla touting biofuels and solar thermal arrays (see slides here) and a panel moderated by Ajit Nazre of KPCB in which a number of exciting green technologies were discussed, including representatives from NanoSolar, Amyris Biotechnologies, and Tesla Motors.

The panel was of particular interest to me, as it brought together five very prominent entrepreneurs who are actively trying to build successful companies in the alternative energy space. I was pleased to hear a well-moderated and very candid and thoughtful exchange which highlighted the difficulties of innovating in the clean tech space (due to long cycles of innovation vis-a-vis information technologies, up-front sunken investments in excess of $20-30M to get a business of the ground, and uncertainties in both technology innovation and the structure of the marketplace), the interplay between technology and entrepreneurial drivers of innovation and the important role of policy in helping to internalize external costs and create the transparent prices and costs in the market, and the passion and moral perspective that many of the entrepreneurs brought to their ventures, above and beyond their belief that an open market opportunity existed, on which they could capitalize.

All of this was very exciting to hear, but one consistent and vexing problem always remains unaddressed when business people discuss potential solutions to environmental concerns. The problem arises because innovation, either in core technologies or in business processes, when driven by entrepreneurs, requires a market in which demand, and strong demand, exists. Demand for their products, be they energy, new housing materials, alternative vehicles, or whatever, is necessary in order to create and sustain a market-driven engine for innovation.

And while this is not inherently bad, and in general, most likely an accurate reflection of a consumerist society, it fails to leave much of an opportunity for the idea that consuming may be a key factor in addressing environmental problems. Consuming less is not, in general, an outcome that is well-supported by markets, by capitalist systems, or by entrepreneurial societies. Consuming less then becomes an ethical question, relegated to academia and the fuzzy world of non-profits. The question that I am left with, then, is how to inject this thought into the entrepreneurial debate. Can it be a part of the conversation? And if so, at whom should the question of Should we consume less? be aimed?

Would be interested if any other folks had thoughts on this, and I will try to uncover some better examples of how the ethic of consuming modestly has been injected into commercial discussions successfully. Until then, the best I can leave you with is Bill McDonough's excellent Cradle to Cradle, which should be read by all business students, in my opinion.

It Ain't Easy Being Green

My Indulgent Lifestyle
The world is going to shit, and I'm part of the problem. There's no doubt about it. I'd like to think I'm part of the solution, but it's just not realistic. Consider: If everybody in the world lived a lifestyle like I do (small, walk-up apartment in New York, no car, subway to work everyday, modest consumption of convenience goods), it would take over 6 planets to sustain our resource needs.

This assessment courtesy of the Ecological Footprint assessment quiz, available from MyFootprint.org. The quiz, which takes less than 10 minutes to complete, helps evaluate what the environmental impact of your lifestyle and consumption habits, captured by the Ecological Footprint indicator. If you've got a second, take the quiz, and then come back and read on.

A Little About the Ecological Footprint
Ecological Footprinting is a methodology of evaluating how big an impact each individual has on the earth (it is also useful for measuring impact for other "units" like cities, companies, and nations), in a set of simple and discrete composite indicators. Based on principles of resource accounting and material flows through systems, Ecological Footprints (EF) try to estimate the impact that each and every individual has on the global environment, specifically in terms of resource use. Initially developed by Dr. Mathis Wackernagel as a PhD thesis, and later refined at Redefining Progress and currently the Global Footprint Network, Ecological Footprints have been widely employed as a tool for helping people (students, concerned community members, business people, government leaders) better understand exactly how resource-intensive our lifestyles can be. While the EF can help you better conceptualize your environmental impact, it is even more beneficial in helping you understand how you might reduce your impact -- by making discrete (though rarely insignificant) changes in your life.

The EF is a great heuristic tool, and among other things, helps set a common standard measure to help judge whether you are doing better or worse in terms of environmental impact over time. That said, it should be noted that Ecological Footprinting is a very imprecise science, reducing and generalizing complex ecological concepts for the sake of comprehensibility. Additionally, the methodology, particularly as it is expressed in simple quizzes, cannot account for every variable in a person's impact on the environment. For example, the Ecological Footprint does a poor job accounting for the impact of persistent toxins in the environment - materials which, once entering an ecosystem, cannot be absorbed and processed by the ecosystem. Similarly, any given EF is a snapshot in time, and will not account for improvements in technology that may make it more efficient to extract resources from nature and process them into the goods or services you consume. To learn a bit more about the methodology itself, see the Global Footprint Network.

As a quick point of disclosure, I spent four months working on the first Ecological Footprinting quizzes while a research assistant at Redefining Progress in 1999.

What My Ecological Footprint Tells Me
I find the best way to take value from the EF quizzes is to first complete the quiz as faithfully as possible, and then go back to the quiz and vary your responses, in order to find out what aspects of your lifestyle have the greatest impact on your Ecological Footprint. In my case, my base EF was a whopping 29 acres -- much bigger than the half-acre lot I grew up on, with its little vegetable plot in the backyard.

So what about my lifestyle causes this impact? There are a few discernible factors:

• I eat meat fairly regularly. Meat is an energy and resource intensive food to raise, process, and deliver to market, particularly when compared to a diet consisting of less meat and more grains and vegetables.
• I live alone. While I don't have a particularly large apartment, living by myself does proportionally increase my share of household related impacts (electricity and water consumption, household waste) when contrasted with multi-person households.
• I travel, by plane, a lot. For both work and pleasure, I travel. Not surprisingly, the environmental cost of air travel is quite significant (think about the equivalent fuel you might consume driving to all of the same destinations to which you fly).

What, then, is good about my lifestyle? Well, when your EF is 29, not a ton. But some positives include:

• Commuting via mass transportation and foot. The shared energy burden that public transportation allows can greatly reduce your footprint, and, of course, biking and walking are the most efficient ways of getting from point A to point B.
• Living in a big city. Although this isn't well captured in the MyFootprint quiz, living in urban centers can significantly reduce your environmental impact, when compared with living in the suburbs or in traditional houses not specifically retro-fitted to be environmentally friendly. In cities where residential and commercial uses are mixed, where public services are shared, and generally, efficiently distributed, individuals are able to consume a proportionally smaller share of resources.
• Shopping smart and shopping less. Being aware and trying (although not always succeeding) to shop for products that are locally grown/made, to cut down on energy associated with transport, have minimal packaging, and generally, not buying a lot can help your impact profile.

Those modest good points aside, the average American has an Ecological Footprint of 24 acres per person, requiring 4.5 hypothetical planets to sustain this level of consumption, if we believe that everyone in the world is entitled to pursuing similar happiness. So what to do about it?

Lifestyle Choices
Already implicit, I would hope, in the EF quiz are changes that an individual can make to lower their total impact. Unfortunately, the choices are rarely as simple as "Paper versus Plastic." More often, these choices are much more core to major lifestyle decisions: where to live, what car to drive, what to eat, how big a house to own. While the choices aren't easy to make, the environmentally healthy choices are generally clear: live near where you work; walk, bike, or take public transport, if possible; buy hybrids and fuel-efficient cars instead of SUVs; eat locally grown food, with as little packaging as possible; eat meat as infrequently as possible; own a smaller house that is equipped with energy-efficient features.

Can You Be Green and Be Happy?
One of the unfortunate bugaboos of the environmental movement is that it is comprised of a bunch of dour, nay-saying party-poopers. The tendency to frame environmentally positive choices as being negative, in terms of requiring a person to make a sacrifice in the quality of their lifestyle, is another unfortunate hallmark of how people understand environmental decision-making. Many environmental choices, however, are net-positives in terms of quality of life, and should be framed as such: a diet richer in grains and vegetables will be healthier than a diet that is red meat-heavy; living closer to work means less commute time and more personal time; mixed use communities tend to be more vibrant and active than commuter suburbs.

That said, it would be naive to think that every environmentally positive decision will also make a person happy. And, of course, the lifestyle choices listed above will only work and last if they are in line with what is fulfilling to an individual in their life.

To read more about how to make personal lifestyle choices that are more green, see Slate.com's Green Challenge.

Personal Choices vs. Political Choices
Unfortunately, for most people living in the U.S., it is very difficult to live with modest environmental impact by making personal choices alone. Unless you are willing to put a good deal of effort in to making your house energy efficient, not drive much, and have good luck aligning your work life and personal life, chances are you'll end up a net-consumer of environmental resources. Certainly this will be true if you are an "average American."

What this requires, for those of us who care about the environment and sustainability, is to be active in advocating political and economic outcomes that can make it easier for everybody to be environmentally more responsible. Such political and economic choices might include promoting community development policies that focus on mixed-use communities, functional downtowns, and useful mass transit systems; supporting a locally-focused food economy and creating incentives for local business to provide good and services locally; buying and promoting alternative energies, including hybrid cars and cleaner energies from the power grid.

The list goes on, and I'll try to spend more time in later posts talking about both personal and political choices that can have a positive impact on the environment and quality of life. Of course, as someone with an EF of 29, I offer this not as preaching, but as part of my own quest to find a happy medium between choices that enrich my life and choices that are environmentally responsible.

How Many Friends Does Obama Have (on MySpace?)

Well, ENW sends me an interesting link this morning to techPresident, "a new group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign."

So now we get a running commentary on the collision course of two of America's most narcissistic, frustrating, and illogical social phenomena: presidential politics and social media. Grrreat.

Actually, in addition to the somewhat funny, though certainly not irrelevant features you can find on techPresident, like the monthly change in MySpace friends of leading candidates (Clinton up 38%, Obama down 66%) and the Flickr ticker of candidate photostreams, there is quite a good bit of interesting commentary and anecdotes on how campaigns are using social media, to good effect and, well, less good. Worth a look.