• Doc Searls Weblog · The Data Bubble II

  Great blog post from Doc Searls:

  QUOTE
  Right now it’s hard to argue against all the money being spent (and therefore made) in the personalized advertising business—just like it was hard to argue against the bubble in tech stock prices in 1999 and in home prices in 2004. But we need to come to our senses here, and develop new and better systems by which demand and supply can meet and deal with each other as equally powerful parties in the open marketplace. Some of the tech we need for that is coming into being right now. That’s what we should be following. Not just whether Google, Facebook or Twitter will do the best job of putting crosshairs on our backs.

  John’s right that the split is between dependence and independence. But the split that matters most is between yesterday’s dependence and tomorrow’s independence—for ourselves. If we want a truly conversational economy, we’re going to need individuals who are independent and self-empowered. Once we have that, the level of economic activity that follows will be a lot higher, and a lot more productive, than we’re getting now just by improving the world’s biggest guesswork business.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: doc_searls marketing data

• In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy – NYTimes.com

  Getting people on board with climate change reduction strategies, even the orthodox religious who deny the science of it: money, fiscal conservatism, frugality – an appeal to the virtues prized by those communities:

  QUOTE
  “It is in our DNA to leave a place better than we found it,” he said.

  Elliot Lahn, a community development planner for Merriam, a city that reduced its energy use by 5 percent, said that when public meetings were held on the six-town competition to save energy, some residents offered their view that global warming was a hoax.

  But they were very eager to hear about saving money, Mr. Lahn said. “That’s what really motivated them.”

  Jerry Clasen, a grain farmer in Reno County, south of Salina, said he largely discounted global warming. “I believe we are going through a cycle and it is not a big deal,” he said. But his ears pricked up when project workers came to town to talk about harnessing wind power. “There is no sense in our dependency on foreign oil,” he said, “especially since we have got this resource here.”

  Mr. Clasen helped organize a group of local leaders to lobby the electronics and energy giant Siemens to build a wind turbine factory in the area. When the company signed a deal in 2009 promising to create as many as 400 local jobs, it stirred a wave of excitement about the future of wind power.

  Now, farmers expect to lease some of their land for turbines and rely on wind power as a stable source of income, he said, and land prices are rising as result.

  “Whether or not the earth is getting warmer,” he said, “it feels good to be part of something that works for Kansas and for the nation.”
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  tags: climate_change kansas nyt strategies

• Reality is Overrated as a Motivator – Andrew Winston – Harvard Business Review

  The English language is remarkable: “creation care,” a new-to-me descriptive that makes eco-consciousness appealing to the religious. Well, if it works, I’m all for it…
  QUOTE
  The Climate and Energy Project is cleverly avoiding the climate debate and thus any discussion at all that triggers arguments about the really bad misinformation out there (the article, for example, points out the shocking statistic that only 48% of people in the Midwest agree that there is actually warming going on — whether you think it’s human-caused or not, temperature measurements are clear on this point).

  Instead, Nancy Jackson, Chairman of the Climate and Energy Project, has hit on three alternative arguments to going green: personal thrift, the benefit to the community of promoting green jobs, and a religious appeal to “creation care.” The program has targeted everything from home weatherization to getting the community to lobby Siemens to build a wind plant in the region. They’ve also gotten towns to compete with each other to save energy.
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  tags: ecology economics harvard_business green_strategies

• MaRS Best Practices – Green or Green Wash? Lessons from building North America’s greenest hotel in Toronto on Vimeo

  Must-see video, with Tom Rand explaining clean-tech.
  QUOTE
  Tom Rand, Cleantech Practice Lead at MaRS Discovery District, inventor of the Green Bond, previous entrepreneur and successful Venture Capitalist talks about his journey to build “the continent’s greenest hotel” – Planet Traveler.

  Rand sees the world through green-colored glasses. There is too little time and too much at stake to invest in “green” technologies that do not succeed in effecting a substantive reduction in carbon emissions. Low carbon technologies represent a third-industrial revolution that Rand believes must take place. And soon.

  In pursuing the goal of building the greenest hotel, Rand didn’t waste time quibbling over payback periods on geothermal heat exchangers, or spend months negotiating with government agencies to obtain retrofit grants. In fact, Rand and his partner are making this project work without the help of any grants or subsidies as an example to others that the adoption of green technologies isn’t prohibitively expensive. Day-to-day building operations are responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions: a huge market. And greening buildings are the low-hanging fruit of carbon emissions reduction, ripe for the adoption of new green technologies.

  Rand talks about City cooperation, payback periods, technology and financing options and how to measure the cost savings of green technologies.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: tom_rand cleantech economics ecology climate_change retrofit greenwashing green_strategies green_buildings

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 11|14|10 at 1:31 am. Filed under: links.

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