As the next iPhone slipped out, Apple will probably begin restricting access to prototypes and unreleased products. What’s curious though, is that apparently Steve Jobs has personally been monitoring who’s walking around with unreleased devices all this time. More »
William Henry “Bill” Gates III dropped out of Harvard College in 1975 in the fall of his junior year. Barely 20, he went on to build the computer giant Microsoft, an entrepreneurial feat that earned him billions and helped to usher in the Internet age.
Gates came back to Harvard today (April 21), this time for less than an hour at Sanders Theatre, where hundreds of students were packed in like lines of software code. It was the last stop on a three-day, five-campus tour.
“When I dropped out,” Gates said to a few whoops and cheers, “I told my dad I’d be back.”
It was his first visit to Harvard as a full-time philanthropist, and Gates came armed with a burning question: “Are the brightest minds working on the most important problems?”
Defining who the best people are is not easy, though many of them are at Harvard and other great universities, Gates said. And defining the biggest problems is not easy either, he said, though they certainly include abject poverty, unequal opportunity, overpopulation, farm efficiency, and finding sources of low-cost, nonpolluting energy.
Anyone can name “eight or 10 problems,” said Gates, but are “the top innovators” addressing them?
A few breakthroughs and some modest efforts on the part of the world’s gifted can add up to great gains, he said. But maybe our minds are elsewhere.
Gates told the story of a recent two-day visit with friends. The conversation kept coming back to two things: college basketball and investments — what was new in stocks, derivatives, mergers, and other financial instruments.
Gates had to wonder: “Couldn’t we be having that same conversation about what makes a great teacher?”
The Seattle-born billionaire loves a good book, movie, basketball game — or investment — as much as anyone, he said. But there is a social cost.
“A lot of our best minds are going to sports or entertainment or finance,” said Gates, and the genius of science is often turned toward remedies for baldness in a world desperate for cheap vaccines.
There are exceptions and signs of hope, he said, mentioning the work at Harvard of George Whitesides (nanoscale science) and Paul Farmer (medical care), “an exemplar,” said Gates, “who’s drawn a lot of people into global health.”
And 324 members of the Class of 2010 at Harvard — 18 percent of seniors — have applied for jobs with Teach for America.
In his own college days, said Gates, few people were aware of, for instance, food and health problems on a global scale. Nor were they aware that their careers could be steered toward doing good.
“I fell into computers at the age of 13,” he said of his career path, and loved the idea that computers “scared other people. That attracted me.”
As it turned out, that kind of work has social merit, said Gates, offering the world new ways to get information through personal computers and the Web.
But there is still an imbalance between what people do and what the world needs, he said. Gates suggested to a questioner later, “The allocation of IQ to Wall Street is higher than it should be.”
With a businessman’s incisive brevity (his talk lasted 24 minutes), Gates focused on two major problems: global health and American education. He discussed how much can be achieved in those areas by bringing the brightest minds to bear on them.
Global health has improved in the last five decades, and some progress can be attributed to rising wealth, said Gates. In 1960, about 20 million children under age 5 died from preventable diseases. Last year, fewer than 9 million did.
The biggest reason for declining death rates came from one of medicine’s strongest weapons, vaccines, though they remain “a tiny part of the investment we make in medicine,” said Gates. (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $10 billion to develop and deliver new vaccines in the next decade.)
About half a million people die each year from flu-like rotaviruses. There are vaccines but “no large market,” said Gates. “It wasn’t getting out, it wasn’t getting done.”
Once a country’s health picture improves, parents tend to have fewer children. Add in improvements such as female literacy, farm productivity, and other “catalytic” steps, and escaping “the poverty trap” is possible, said Gates. He cited the efficacy of early, inexpensive aid interventions in South Korea, Mexico, and Brazil.
As for American education, Gates said it has slipped from the gains of 1945-1975, and now 30 percent of entering high school freshmen do not graduate — a figure that is 50 percent for minorities.
“We really need to improve this,” said Gates. “The other rich countries are doing a lot better,” and they spend less.
But there is room for hope, he said, pointing to research being done at Harvard and elsewhere on what makes the strongest teachers, and how to pass along their best practices.
In education, online learning will help improve the situation, with links to videos on key concepts, along with ways to develop online advising, forums, and testing. “That’s a very doable thing,” said Gates. “Technology is going to have a role there.”
And innovative education does not have to cost a lot, he said, referring to his sometimes controversial support of charter and nontraditional solutions.
“Every time I get discouraged,” he told one questioner later, “I go to a KIPP school and say: This can be done.” KIPP stands for the Knowledge is Power Program, a network of college-preparatory U.S. public schools that Gates said now number 82 — and that send 95 percent of their graduates to four-year colleges.
A lot of other problems cry out for innovation and modest investments, he said, including energy and good governance. But underlying such matters is a single “meta-question,” Gates emphasized. “How do we get the brightest people onto the biggest problems?”
The audience members at Sanders had a few questions of their own.
Which is better, asked one man: Take a high-paying job and give to a good cause, or take a job in the nonprofit sector?
“Both models work,” said Gates, who outlined one scenario: Work, but study one problem or country, and devote extra resources to that. “Then when you get lots of time,” he said, “you can get even more involved.”
Some of the queries were — don’t we all want to ask? — self-serving. One questioner asked Gates to meet him on vacation in 2012. Too busy, said the billionaire. Another touted a friend’s nontraditional malaria cure. “It’s definitely a long shot,” said Gates, though long shots sometimes work out.
Another man, a would-be applicant to the Harvard Kennedy School, got even more personal. “So my question is: Can you pay for me?” he asked Gates. “I’m one of the best students in Kazakhstan.”
The billionaire dropout was ready. “I applaud your boldness,” he said.
by Erich Pica
Photo: lanier67 via FlickrWith the arrival of this year’s 40th anniversary of Earth Day, it is encouraging to see more and more people, young and old, buying into a meaningful environmental ethic in their personal lives despite daunting environmental challenges. By carrying reusable grocery bags, taking public transit and recycling, to name just a few examples, we are all becoming increasingly aware of the need to be environmentally responsible. If you’re a smoker, there’s another very important step that would be a “twofer” win for your health and for the natural world: Quit for good!
Surprisingly, many of us don’t know that quitting smoking is another way to help combat climate change, and to significantly reduce the incredible amount of waste and litter due to carelessly discarded cigarettes butts in streets, waterways, and public areas like parks and beaches. While tobacco is the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S., responsible for more than 400,000 deaths each year, it is less known that cigarettes also play a major role as toxic, hazardous waste in our already-overburdened environment. Astonishingly, the remnants of cigarette smoking represent the most prevalent form of litter collected across the world.
According to data from the Ocean Conservancy, in 2009 more than 3 million cigarettes or butts were picked up internationally from beaches and inland waterways as part of the annual International Coastal Cleanup, including more than 1 million from U.S. beaches alone, making it by far the most littered item. We applaud the commitment by those national, state, and local environmental groups taking the lead in cleanup efforts.
We know that tobacco kills people, but do we ever wonder about the fragile ecosystems that are also affected by the toxins in these tobacco products? Tobacco growing leads to soil degradation; the wood used in the curing of tobacco can contribute to deforestation; and pesticides used to produce tobacco crops can harm the environment.
On the climate front, which most people believe to be the biggest environmental threat facing the planet, cigarette production and consumption contribute to global warming. For example, deforestation in order to grow tobacco and provide wood for curing it means fewer trees available to absorb carbon dioxide.
Smokers may be tossing their butts without even realizing their impact on the environment. It’s possible that smokers think that because tobacco is organic, its waste is harmless. However, that’s not the case. Both the plastic filters and the remnants of the tobacco are poisonous to children and other living organisms. They contain nicotine, heavy metals and other toxic compounds.
Tobacco industry research reveals that consumers might have misconceptions that cigarette filters are readily biodegradable or inconsequential as waste because of their small size. But biodegradation can take years, and even under ideal conditions filtered butts simply break up into small particles of toxic waste.
Smokers can help the environment by taking the simple yet effective step of not littering in the first place. Cigarette butt waste cleanup is very costly. An economic cigarette butt litter audit in San Francisco, which found the annual cleanup cost to be more than $7 million annually, led its City Council in 2009 to impose a 20-cent-per-pack “litter fee” on cigarettes sold in the city.
The sure-fire way to combat this growing problem is for more Americans to quit smoking, and for those of us who don’t smoke to support them. Quitting is a great way to live a longer, healthier life, just like having cleaner air in our homes, neighborhoods, work places, towns and cities. It is a tough addiction to break, but, with help and a plan, one can succeed. We hope that this 40th anniversary of Earth Day helps to remind smokers about cigarettes’ impact on the environment, and serves as a motivator to quit in order to leave a legacy of a more beautiful, healthy planet for future generations.
Erich Pica is president of Friends of the Earth, U.S., the U.S. voice of the world’s largest grassroots environmental network, working to protect our planet and its people.
Cheryl Healton is president and CEO of American Legacy Foundation, which is dedicated to building a world where young people reject tobacco and everyone can quit.
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In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day seems more relevant than ever because this is the 40th anniversary.
In a 2009 interview last year, our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:
I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.
Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. So if every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:
I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.
Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.
How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don’t think I’m ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn’t drill for oil there. But that’s not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet’s next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.
I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has completely eliminated their feeding habitat — the polar ice, probably by 2020, possibly sooner — polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?
I am a cat lover, but you can’t really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie “Alien”? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.
Apparently there are some plankton that thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don’t see how I’m in a position to march on the nation’s capital to protest their extinction. I won’t eat farm-raised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.
If thousands of inedible species can’t adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like kudzu, cactus, cockroaches, rats, scorpions, the bark beetle, Anopheles mosquitoes and the malaria parasites they harbor. Who are we to pick favorites?
I didn’t hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn’t wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the earth, he wouldn’t have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn’t have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.
All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for — sharp cuts in greenhouse gases — is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren’t so good at articulating that perspective. I’m with them.
The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.
This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.
So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.
The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.
Two years ago, Science magazine published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of soil aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California. The Hadley Center, the U.K.’s official center for climate change research, found that “areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.” On our current emissions path, most of the South and Southwest ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl.
Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere contains today (see Tundra, Part 1). On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century — so much for being “perma” — and that amplifying carbon-cycle feedback will all but ensure that today’s worst-case scenarios for global warming become the best-case scenarios (see Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return). We must save the tundra. Perhaps it should be small “e” earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.
As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps as much as two inches a year by century’s end (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100” and here). If we warm even 3°C from pre-industrial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 100 feet higher (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”). The first five feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to occur this century on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don’t consider this to be an abstract issue.
Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, they will be gone by century’s end.
So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can’t go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world’s great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word rival, after all, comes from “people who share the same river.” Sure, desalination is possible, but that’s expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we’ll need even more carbon-free power.
Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water — too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do Pro-Life Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.
We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn’t it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens,” at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.
What the day — indeed, the whole year — should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can’t preserve ourselves if we don’t preserve a livable climate, and we can’t preserve a livable climate if we don’t preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.
We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.
As a penultimate thought, I suspect that many environmentalists and climate science advocates will have their own, private name: “I told you so” Day. Not as a universal as “Triage Day,” I admit, but it has a Cassandra-like catchiness, no?
Finally, perhaps we should call it “science day.” We don’t have a day dedicated to celebrating science, and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?
As always, I’m open to better ideas….
Qualcomm’s stock fell $3.43, or 8 percent, in after-hours trading today, following the release of its second-quarter financial results that provided a mixed outlook for the year.
Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) was able to raise its 2010 forecast because of a strong Q2 performance that beat analysts’ expectations, but then, warned that the third quarter would be hurt as the competition pushes chip set prices lower. Separately, the San Diego-based company said it was bullish on strong 3G handset sales.
Second-quarter revenues totaled $2.66 billion, up from $2.46 in the prior year; profits equaled $774 million, compared to the prior year’s loss when it had to pay a large settlement to Broadcom. Qualcomm reported earnings per share of 46 cents. When adjusted for special items, Qualcomm reported 59 cents a share in earnings, which beat Wall Street estimates of 56.5 cents, according to Reuters.
Since Qualcomm makes chips for devices, it’s often used as a test to see how the overall industry is performing. The company raised its guidance for the year based on the strong second quarter, but said its third fiscal quarter could be hurt by the competition, which is pushing prices lower. The company expects fiscal 2010 revenues to fall between $10.4 billion and $11 billion, and for the average price of all its CDMA handsets in the market to cost between $182 and $188. The midpoint of of $185 is slightly lower than their original estimate of $187, and is much lower than previous quarters when devices had a mid-point around $200.
One of the company’s subsidiaries, FLO TV, continued to be a drain on its bottomline. Expenses for the “QSI” division increased 133 percent year-over-year, primarily due to an increase in selling and marketing expenses related to FLO TV. FLO is building a mobile broadcast TV network, and just recently has been marketing it directly to consumers rather than relying on carrier partners, like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless. As part of the push to educate consumers about mobile TV, it bought three commercial slots during the Super Bowl to promote the service. Expenses related to flow and the whole QSI division totaled $134 million during the quarter, which contributed a 5 cent diluted loss on GAAP results.
Release (PDF) | Earnings Call.
Filed under: Aftermarket, Performance, Europe, Hatchback, Volvo, Racing
Volvo and Polestar are set to officially unveil the C30 Polestar Performance Concept Prototype this weekend. Designed to be an exercise in what would happen if a race team was allowed to do what they do best without the burden of a regulatory body looming over them, the wicked hatch is about as far from what’s available at your local Volvo dealer as you can get.
The base C30 gets its power from a 2.5-liter, 227-horsepower turbocharged five-cylinder, and the Polestar version bumps that same mill up to a heavenly 405 ponies thanks to a larger turbo, massive intercooler and custom internals. The pistons, connecting rods and camshaft are all unique units build just for the project.
The Haldex all-wheel drive system stays in place, though mechanical differentials, front and rear, have been fitted to add a little control to the chaos. Polestar also dropped in a quick-ratio steering rack and an Ohlins suspension. Brake work gets handled by epic Brembo six-piston calipers up front and four-piston units out back.
Obviously Volvo doesn’t have any plans to bring a Polestar C30 to production, though it is cool to see a road-going version of a Swedish touring car come to life. Hit the jump for the press release.
[Source: Volvo]
Continue reading Volvo teases C30 Polestar Performance Concept
Volvo teases C30 Polestar Performance Concept originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Guinness World Records, the global authority on all record-breaking things, has officially recognized Modern Warfare 2 “as the most successful entertainment launch of all time.”
by Mary Bruno
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Mary: Hello and
welcome to Grist Talks, our regular series of conversations with really smart
people about really interesting topics. I’m Mary Bruno your really smart and interesting host. And I’m joined today by really smart and really
interesting panelists. But before I bring them into the conversation, let me
first introduce today’s topic.
On January 27th, commissioners at the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission decided in a close 3-2 vote that publicly
traded companies really ought to disclose any climate change-related risks and
opportunities that might affect their bottom line. So for example, do ski
resorts have a plan for dealing with warmer, dryer winters? Have insurance
companies calculated the budget impacts of more severe weather or a rise in sea
level? Has the healthcare industry prepared for an expansion of certain viruses
and bacteria? Inquiring, responsible investors needed to know, hence the SEC’s
vote, and I quote “to prove public companies with interpretive guidance on
existing SEC disclosure requirements as the apply to business or legal
developments relating to the issue of climate change.”
So what does it all
mean? That’s why we’re here today.
We’re going to be talking about impact
of this “interpretive guidance” on day-to-day corporate practices and on the
U.S. economy in general. But we’ll also be looking at the impact of the SEC
decision on climate change itself. Could it, for instance, mark a turning point
in the struggle to arrest climate change? Could these new SEC guidelines give
corporate America, and maybe the rest of us too, a little nudge, maybe a shove,
to start thinking and planning for the long term? If so, it would be an
immense, an important cultural shift. Because let’s face it, the ability to think ahead—way, way, way,
ahead—is an obvious first step in tackling a problem as complex and
multi-generational as climate change.
So with that, I am very pleased to welcome our three
panelists:
Investor, Julie Gorte, Senior Vice President for Sustainable Investing
at New Hampshire based Pax World Management Corporation, which, if you don’t
know, was the first socially responsible investment firm in the U.S.;
Economist, Kristen Sheeran, Executive
Director of the Economics for Equity and the Environmental, or E3 Network, in
Portland, Ore., and co-author of the book, Saving Kyoto;
And futurist, Sara
Robinson, a fellow at both the Campaign for America’s Future and The
Commonwill Institute, which are located in Washington D.C. and San Francisco,
respectively.
It’s a great pleasure to
have you all with us today. Julie Gorte, let’s start with you.
Investors have been pushing the SEC for some kind of leadership or
direction on corporate disclosure of climate-related risks, for 10 years,
right? So why is this issue so important to investors? Why, if it is so
important to investors, has it taken so long to get some action? And while you’re
answering those questions, can you also describe for us who and how the
investment community has been lobbying all this time?
Julie: The most proximate answer to that
who and how question is that there were 22 of us that petitioned the SEC
in September of 2007 to issue this guidance. And those petitioners included the treasurers, controllers, or financial officials
representing California, Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New
York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. There were also two
asset managers, including my firm Pax, and three nonprofits that joined in this
petition.
This was not the first time that the SEC had heard that
we wanted some more interpretive
guidance or action on climate change. We’d been saying so for quite some time.
The Investor Network on Climate Risk, which includes all of the above mentioned
entities as well as many more asset managers and asset owners, was formed in
2001. Part of our platform right from the start was that we
needed some public sector action, including guidance or action on the reporting of
climate change risks and opportunities. If I go back a
decade, there were very few
in the investment community that paid attention to it accept in the socially
responsible investment world. In the years since 2001, the investment community has become much more interested in and aware of climate change.
There was a
report in the early 2000s from the Association of British Insurers noting that
the damages, or losses—insured losses—from severe weather had doubled and
tripled over the previous two-to-three year period, and that they were expected
to continue to rise on a rather dramatic scale as a result of climate
change. So when the insurers get concerned, because that absolutely is their bottom line, a lot of other investors started
paying attention.
Now we’re seeing reports from all the mainstream analysts that provide research to everybody else
in the financial community—you know, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Societe
General—covering climate
change, originally just with respect to the big emitters like utilities and
energy companies, but then sort of branching out and saying “well, here’s how
it could effect this sector or that sector.” And pretty soon it got to the
point where we recognized that there are no sectors, really, that don’t have to think about climate change.
You mentioned health
care companies and the expanding landscape of morbidity and mortality. You’ve got Bell South with I don’t know how many thousands of
wires strung all over the hurricane alley down in the South. So, what we’re
really seeing in investment is that the consciousness of climate change as a
financial issue has increased, and is still increasing, and I think that was part
of the critical mass that led to the SEC issuing this guideline.
Mary: So no
sector left behind-I like that. Publicly-traded companies are already required to report anything considered “material”
to their investors. So, why did
it take so long? Why was it so difficult to convince the SEC on climate-change
related risks and benefits? Were there certain stumbling blocks? And what or
who finally made the SEC take action?
Julie: Well, the
SEC is kind of like a super-tanker: it doesn’t turn on a dime, and it probably
shouldn’t. I think it does wait for issues to reach the level of concern or
consciousness among a significant number of financial institutions before it acts.
And that’s true of a lot of public policy. There was also an election, if you remember, a couple years ago that changed
the makeup of all the executive [branch of government], including the SEC. So, we did have sort of a political
change in America, as well as a rising tide of investor concern and sentiment
regarding the materiality of climate change.
Mary: So, there has been this growing awareness on the part of the investment community that
climate change was an issue that was material to the success
of the businesses they were thinking of investing in. Has that awareness
and urgency, before the SEC ruling at least, spilled out at all into the
corporate community? Or is it just investors that are on board with this?
Julie: Oh, no.
[Awareness and urgency] has been growing in the corporate community as well. The financial
community is just kind of a mirror of the rest of society in many ways. So, if go back, for example, to 1997 to the third conference of the parties
in Kyoto that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, you could probably have used one
hand to count the number of companies that actually reported anything with
respect to climate change publicly. That would have included B.P. and Shell and a couple of other leaders, not
too many. Since then, we’ve seen the insurance and reinsurance industries
really start to run the bases on this issue, partly
because they have to; they have long-term liability with respect to storms and fires
and floods and droughts. A lot of the companies that were
big emitters were aware, even back in 2000, that at
some point, and certainly in 2005 when the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, [that they’d have to take account of climate change]. The awareness among U.S.
companies was, “well, we may not have a law right now but there probably will
be one someday and we should probably get ready to see what our liabilities
are.”
Mary: Kristen, do
you have anything to add to that?
Kristen: Sure. There’s this misperception amongst many that corporate America is
opposed to actions that would deal with the climate change problem head on, and
it’s simply just not the case. With the exception of the fossil-fuel industry
and a few others who have very vocally opposed any pro-active measures in the
U.S. to deal with climate change threats, most of corporate America realizes
that the greatest risks of climate change come from its physical impact rather than
from regulations per se. Whether you’re talking about big companies like
Microsoft, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, these are just a few examples of
businesses that have come out and openly supported immediate and aggressive
actions to prevent climate change and have lobbied Congress in that regard.
What business hates most is uncertainty. Business in America has been
asking our elected leaders for clear and consistent rules, and clear and
consistent pricing over carbon so they can plan ahead effectively.
Mary: Clarity-it’s
what we all need right?
Kristen: Clarity
and certainty.
Mary: Julie, let
me get back to you for a couple of quick questions. So the SEC action isn’t a
law, right?
Julie: That is
correct.
Mary: So, will it
be enforced? How does it get enforced? Can companies just choose to ignore it
if they want to?
Julie: They can [choose to ignore it],
yes. The law says that companies must report material actions to their
investors. You ask any corporate lawyer what materiality means and
they’ll say, “well, I can give you a long definition, but the short one is
nailing jelly to a wall.” There’s always some doubt as to what materiality is,
or what an investor would consider material, and the SEC has always resisted
setting a numeric threshold: it’s not 5% of your earnings or your assets or
something, although that’s often used as a rule of thumb.
The SEC has been
issuing guidance on the reporting of environmental liability for over thirty
years now, so they’ve done this before. You know, if you have big Superfund
cleanup liabilities, or asbestos liabilities, or something like that, you’re expected to
say so to your investors. So what this SEC guidance does, is basically signals that the SEC sees climate change as something that could
have a material impact on a sufficiently large number of publicly-traded
companies that it’s worth considering in its own right. How would it be enforced? It would be
enforced pretty much after the fact. If, for example, we had a coal company
that decided that climate change wasn’t material, and then we got a law that
significantly limited emissions and established a carbon-trading regime and the
stocks of the coal company fell 25%, that company’s investors could come back and lodge
a securities fraud lawsuit and say ‘you should have told us about this and you
didn’t.’
Mary: Let me move
to you Kristen. Were economists also out there lobbying or arguing for some
sort of regulatory change? Do economists lobby?
Kristen: Economists, in general, tend to be very apolitical. But economists, especially
those involved in the E3 network, have become increasingly vocal in warning
that the economic damages from climate change will be significant, and that
immediate and significant investments in things like reductions in energy
efficiency and renewables will make good economic sense, especially when you
compare those actions to the potential costs of inaction. There’s something that Julie
just said that I really want to underscore. This ruling really demonstrates
that the SEC, and the private sector more generally perhaps, is a lot further
ahead than our own government at this point in really coming to terms
with both the risks and opportunities present in the climate crisis. From
an economics perspective, getting businesses to recognize and systematically
account for the implications of climate change is important. But what
economists more generally are lobbying for is a more broad-based and consistent policy
framework that could help provide the right incentives to these businesses to
make those changes.
Mary: Is there consensus about
what impact the SEC ruling will actually have on day-to-day corporate business
practices and operations? Is it just going to mean longer annual reports? What’s
going to happen?
Kristen: It’s
hard to say what impact this specific ruling will have. But I think it’s safe
to say that there’s no doubt that climate change, and the realities of
grappling with climate change, are going to change business as usual in
America. Planning for climate change, by definition, means planning for the
long term. It means having different attitudes and practices with regards to
risk and the environment. One thing we’ll see coming out of this is that firms
will no longer be able to relegate the environment to an afterthought.
Sustainability, it’s clear, is no longer about marketing green products to your
high-end consumer, or making sure that your workplace is more
resource-efficient, or being civic-minded; it’s about being smart and strategic
over the long-term. What we’re starting to see with this SEC decision is
the elevating of long-term environmental concerns to the same realm as things like
labor and capital to decision-making. This shift has been a long time in the
making because long-term environmental concerns have been relegated to the back
burner for quite some time.
Mary: Julie, how
do think this SEC action is going to affect investment decisions at Pax’s World
and other, maybe, more or less “enlightened” firms? And do you want to
speculate quickly about what impact you think it might have on the corporate
community and the economy in general.
Julie: One of the things that the financial market is not at all short on is
ego. There are a lot of people in finance who are basically born on third base
and go through life thinking they hit a triple. And if they don’t know
something, it is, by definition, not important. And what they know is what
companies report to them. If you give them information on a lot of companies, they will find a way to do really interesting things with it. What this will do is increase the trend of raised awareness toward climate
change. Once that awareness is raised, investors start to act on that
information. They say, ‘if you’re in this sector and aren’t aware of climate change, we
don’t think you’re a terribly well-managed company.’ So you’re a little less
willing to pay more for their earnings. The great secret about financial
markets is that, in some sense they [create] a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we all, as
investors, think that companies that are environmentally well-managed are going to perform better, we’ll pay more for them
and they will trade at a premium. They will be worth more
because of their environmental management. It’ll take a while. But giving people this information,
giving them another way to distinguish well-managed companies from the hoi
polloi is going to lead to that outcome.
Mary: So it could
unleash a cascade of sustainability.
Julie: Yes.
Mary: Kristen, when it comes to the SEC ruling and then, longer term, from
climate change itself, some businesses are going to be winners and some are
going to be losers, right? The impact, of course, will vary based on the
type and the size of the business in question. But given that, can you predict who the winners and losers will be, both short- and
long-term?
Kristen: There are two kinds of climate-related risks
that this SEC ruling is basically taking into account. On the one hand there’s
the risks that stem from the physical impacts of climate change. And on the
other hand, there are the risks that are embodied in the impacts of regulating
carbon and how that [regulation] is going to affect a firm’s operating costs and its
competitiveness.
The industries that are most vulnerable to the
physical impacts of climate change, we’ve talked about some of them already, include industries like agriculture, forestry and paper products, tourism,
real state, offshore energy development, and, of course, insurance. But
companies that use fossil fuels intensely in their production, like the
electric utilities that invest in high-emission power plants, or companies that
produce carbon-intensive products, like car companies that continue to produce
gas-guzzling SUVs rather than more efficient hybrids or diesel engines
are also examples of companies that are going to find themselves at a competitive
disadvantage in the future because of regulations on carbon and the resulting
decrease in demand for carbon-intensive technologies and products.
At
the same time, companies that demonstrate that they can meet this new demand
for low-emissions technology are gong to be at a competitive advantage.
And these are the companies I think we’ll see emerge as winners in the new green
economy. One of the
most beneficial things that might come out of this ruling is that it’s going to
help people begin to envision exactly which companies will or will not succeed
in a carbon-constrained world over the next 25-to-50 years. We talk
to people about how business-as-usual has to change, about how the economic
system has to be transformed in order to really meet the climate challenge. You
run up against the limits of people’s imaginations and their ability to think long-term about what that would look like? ‘What
kind of car am I going to be driving?’ ‘Where am I going to live?’ ‘What kind of
industries are my kids going to be working in?’ This is the first step in
systematically beginning to identify that these are the industries that are
poised to advance and these are the industries that are going to struggle in a
carbon-constrained world.
Mary: Sara, let
me loop you into the conversation here. We’ve been talking, thus far, about
the impact of this one, specific SEC decision’s effects on corporations and
investors and the economy in general.
But as a futurist, what is it going to mean to the rest of us? For the regular people, like the college student who’s pulling
coffee at Starbucks, or the single mom who’s stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, or the unemployed auto worker, public school teacher—you name
it. Is my life, or my habits, or my community going to change at all in the
next year, or 10 years, or 20 years? Can you look into the crystal
ball and tell us how?
Sara: This [ruling] is part of a very important inflection point. After 20 years of talking and educating each other about
climate change, we’re finally reaching the point where the doing is happening. Julie talked about turning supertankers. Changing our minds,
changing our attitudes, our beliefs about things is comparatively low-cost
compared to changing the entire financial and physical infrastructure of our
society, which is really what this is about. And so we’re at that point. When
the SEC makes guidances like this, it helps change the entire way money flows.
And that in turn will change the structures we live by. So, yes, within five
years I think investments will be flowing differently. Governments and
businesses will be making big decisions, high-stakes decisions that they
haven’t been willing to make on this kind of scale until this point. This does open the door. Changes will begin to happen more quickly because these [corporate] institutions
are big; they control a lot of our resources. Individuals residences are only about 15% of the carbon problem; business is 85%. When
business begins to change, that’s when the problem begins to get solved. I’m
very excited about the prospects here.
Mary: Kristen,
you pointed at one point, earlier in the conversation, that an accounting for environmental risks has been largely absent from long-term corporate planning. But isn’t long-term planning central to corporate
success? Does corporate America just not take climate change seriously? Have
the captains of industries just been sticking their heads in the sand on this
one? Or is corporate culture just not really designed at the moment to think
more than two or three quarters out?
Kristen: Long-term environmental risks have largely been absent from the forefront of
business priorities and decision-making, and they’ve been absent, largely, from
economics that then models those business decisions. In part, it’s
because all of us have had this default assumption,
whether we made it explicit or not, that we didn’t have to worry about
long-term environmental problems because between technological change and
economic growth would be able to negate
most, if not all, negative environmental feedbacks. And here we are talking
about an environmental crisis where the impacts are largely irreversible, at
least within a human time frame. It forces us to realize that we can’t wait for
technology to save us; we can’t just assume that being richer in the future
will insulate us from these feedbacks. We need to take proactive actions in the
present.
We could, of course, also point to all sorts of other things that
encourage institutional short-term decision-making. The current system of pay and rewards for corporate leaders, for example.
When a CEO’s pay depends largely upon stock options and dividends, it’s no
surprise that she’s going to make decisions based on short-term profitability
rather than long-term considerations. The SEC ruling really won’t change that, but at
least it’s going to give investors the information they need to determine which
firms are going to remain profitable over the long-term.
Mary: Julie, what’s
your view on that? On that kind of short-term thinking that has come to
dominate Wall Street, and American businesses, and certain investors, probably,
for at least the last couple of decades? Why do you think it’s become so
entrenched?
Julie: It’s really embedded in our society. We have
fast food, continuous polling in Congress. It’s all stuff
that tends to focus you on the right here, right now. What I call the wolf at
the door problem. If the most important thing in your life right now is that you
don’t have a job, you’re not going to be very worried about climate change. Climate
tends to be more of the termite in the basement problem. Termites will eat your house just as surely as the wolf will blow it down. But
you can’t wait until the termites have eaten the parlor floor until you act,
because by then it’s too late. We have greenhouse gases that persist in
the atmosphere for up to a century in many cases. It’s
something we have to start on now and get the payoff later. That is not
terribly in step with our current society.
Mary: Sara, let
me get back to you. When I think about our ability to think long-term as a
species, the Mayans built these huge temples, the Egyptians built pyramids, the
Europeans built cathedrals. All projects that took generations to
complete. The person who launched these projects—the pharoah, the archbishop—had to know that they certainly wouldn’t be alive to see their completion, nor
would their grandchildren, or their great-grandchildren. So
humans obviously possess the capacity for very long-term thinking. Are
there more contemporary examples of long-term planning that you could provide that would give us some hope in that regard? Or has that ability to plan for the long term somehow atrophied? If it has atrophied, why did it happen and how can we get it back?
Sara: First of
all, Americans are world-class planners; we are in league with those [temple, pyramid, cathedral] people. We
tend to do it on a very fast basis. We’re acute responders. We do it in the
E.R. What we don’t do in the long-range, we can do a lot, and very quickly, in the
short-range. We know how to organize and prioritize in a way that nobody in the
world has been able to do. We proved this in World War II: we were arming the
world and fighting a two-front war and we had these logistical tools. We had
this magical ability to plan that on a scale that nobody else really
could. It’s a gift that we have and we
take it very much for granted.
I think it’s going to come back to the fore. In
terms of longer-term thinking, the societies that you described were all monarchies
of one kind of another and in a democracy it’s harder to hold a vision for the
longer term. You need to assign the role of vision holding to the institutions
of your societies rather than to an individual like a king or a series of
kings. The way you do that is you embed it in your educational system and in
your religion. There are institutions that are foundational, that carry forward
our values and priorities from generation to generation. And as long as these institutions keep teaching
new generations you can hold the vision. Our education system, our
media, and to a very large extent our religious institutions, have a big role
to play here in holding that vision for as long as it’s going to take, which is
the rest of this century.
Mary: Let me
stick with this topic for a second. On the question of how does broad cultural
change usually happen, Sara, who and what are the reliable agents for this kind
of change? You mentioned religious and educational institutions. Is it ever business? In this SEC instance, could the corporate
community actually be a leader in this cultural shift toward a more strategic
long-term approach?
Sara: They’re not
a leader, but they’re an important follower. Change usually happens on a lot of
levels at once, but it always starts with a fundamental shift in our assumptions
and our visions about how the world should work. So the first thing, you have
to change the world, change the story. Most of us are aware that our
foundational assumptions about economics don’t work anymore, and
we’re actively looking for new paradigms. So, for the last 20 years, our documented
storytellers in religion, media and education, have been telling us that we
need to change our views around this, meaning our priorities around climate
change. And this is why 70% of us now get it; most of us are on board. But
that’s the talking stage; doing is harder, and doing only really happens when
you get business and government involved in actively taking these new values
and basing their decisionmaking process on them. I think that’s what we’re
seeing now. It’is that inflection point where business and government begin to get
on the side of change and that’s when we really start to see those changes
taking place on the ground.
Mary: Kristen,
let’s say that in the wake of this SEC ruling, American corporations stand up
and embrace climate-change related planning in a big way. What can we expect
the U.S. to look like in say, 30 or 50 years? What businesses will
dominate? Which will decline or disappear? Can you read the tea leaves a little
on that?
Kristen: Well,
it’s hard to say for sure. One of the challenges all along in thinking about
the post-fossil fuel economy is that fossil fuels provided such a quick and
easy and cheap energy source and there’s likely not going to be a single silver
bullet that comes along and replaces that. So we’re going to have an energy
system based on massive advances in energy-efficiency, as well as
different renewables—geothermal, solar, wind, etc. So
we’re likely to see a mixed of different energy sources and we may see a more
decentralized, more community-based energy production.
When you think about what’s actually going to have to happen in the U.S.
economy, say by the year 2050, to really get us on track for making a dent in
the climate problem, for doing what the scientists say we have to do to
minimize the worst risks from climate change, we’re looking at some pretty
significant transformations. By 2050, we need a minimum of 80% reduction in our
greenhouse gasses, and to achieve that we’re either going to have to convert
most of our energy system over to a mix of different renewables, or make some
really quick advances in carbon capture and storage by the midpoint of the next
century. We’re going to be investing in reforestation and prevention of deforestation.
Our companies are going to have to take a leadership role in both developing
the new technologies, but then also exporting and sharing the technologies for
renewable energy production with the developing world. These are huge changes
that have to take place in a relatively short period of time. But the good news
on the climate front is that it’s economically and technically
possible. What we really need is the political will and the public will to do
it at this point.
Sara: And if I
could add something here, one of the great things here about this ruling is
that it should, in the long-run, make our businesses stronger and more
innovative. Whenever we step outside of our usual assumptions to look for new
risks and threats, we also very often notice the new opportunities that we
would have never seen if we hadn’t been pushed out there. So by forcing
businesses to get real about their risk exposure, we’re also pushing them to where they’ll be able to see and position themselves for new opportunities
as well. So this is a competitiveness issue and investors hopefully reward
that.
Mary: Sara, when
you talked before about how we’ve done this before when America geared up for World
War II, for instance, with phenomenal results. Did that experience in World War II translate into
a planning culture, post-World War II? And again, how did we lose that ability?
Sara: We’d always been good at planning, but
World War II forced us to get good, fast. And what you found was, throughout
the military, from the highest general down to the supply clerk, everybody had
to learn to think strategically, three-steps ahead. ‘What am I gong to need
down the road?’ All of America went through this process, and when the boys
came home, these same skills got applied into creating post-war America. You
saw this in the way wives ran their households, and in the way bureaucrats ran city
governments. Suddenly, you had these planning departments, at the county
level mostly, that were planning out 10, 20 years. What schools are we
going to need? Where are we going to get our water? What kind of roads are we
going to need? People were thinking ahead.
The G.I. generation was amazing at
that. It’s what enabled them to put a man on the moon. Just sticking it out there, as
JFK did in 1960, and saying ‘we’re going to do this in ten years,’ with
technologies that didn’t even exist at the time. He said, ‘we’re going to put a marker out
and in 10 years we’re going to do this.’ And there was a tremendous confidence
in their own ability to hit that mark.
That was our parents and grandparents. It’s still in us. It’s still there in our culture. We’ve gotten away from it because we’ve been living
off the fat of the prosperity that all that planning created. So we’ve had a wide
margin for error. If we get something wrong, it’s not that big a deal; the
consequences aren’t that severe.
Buit we’re at a point now where Gallup is
telling us the number one concern of American families is paying off debt and
saving for the future. Families are starting to hunker down and come back
together and get serious because we don’t have that margin for error anymore.
The consequences for failure are high and getting higher. We have proven in
the past that we can focus wonderfully well under those circumstances, and I
have faith that we can do it again.
Mary: We only
have a few minutes left, so I’d quickly like to hear from all of you on this
last question. When
historians look back, in, let’s say, 50 years on how significant this January
SEC ruling is in terms of addressing climate change and sustainability, are
they going to say it was “no big deal” or that as Sarah pointed out,
it was “an inflection point?” Kristen?
Kristen: History books will look at this period of time
in our history as one of momentous social change. And with most social change,
when you’re in the middle of it, it’s sometimes hard to see how much of it is
actually going on around you. But I think when we look back 50 years from now
we’ll see this as the period of time when we finally
righted the ship.
Mary: Julie?
Julie: Fifty years from now, we’re either going to have 600 parts per million
carbon in the atmosphere or we’re going to have 300 ppm or so. If we’re in the
latter condition, that is, if we do manage to curtail our emissions and curb this
problem, then yes, I do think we’ll look back on [the SEC ruling] as one of the things that
caused the inflection point. This was the decade during which investors,
governments, citizens really started getting it, and really started
changing their behavior as a result. If [that doesn;t occur], then we’re going to look back
on this period of time and say “oh shit”—or add the epithet of your choice—we should have
seen it coming, we should have done something, this wasn’t enough.”
Mary: Sarah, as the futurist I’ll give you the last word. The SEC’s ruling in January: big deal or tiny blip on the radar screen?
Sarah: The SEC ruling is one piece of a larger shift that’s happening. As I said, it’s an inflection
point where we’re moving from talking to doing, and the doing is starting to
happen very quickly. I think over the next 10-20 years, as the money flow
shifts, and the way we think about it really begins to shift in terms of policy
and the larger decisions we make as a culture, we’re going to be
surprised at how much progress finally gets made. It seems so slow until now. But we’re really hitting that point. It’s really going to move.
And Julie is absolutely right. Looking back 50 years there are really only
two scenarios: one is that we responded correctly and got it right. The other is that we didn’t
and the results will be really quite awful.
Mary: And we’ll have to leave it
at that. Thank you to our panelists: Julie Gorte, Kristen Sheeran, and Sara
Robinson. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in. This program was produced in conjunction with The Climate Desk, a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact of a changing climate.
Related Links:
Will an SEC ruling convert short-term greed into long-term sustainability? [UPDATED WITH TRANSCRIPT]
How Dirty Are We Willing to Get?
Can federal courts help tackle global warming?
The Sony Ericsson Satio, announced last May, is can now be purchased at SonyStyle USA for $650. If you don’t remember, the Satio is a S60 5th edition Symbian OS cell phone with 12.1 megapixel camera (and xenon flash), and has full 3G and Wi-Fi support. The touchscreen on the phone is a 3.5 inch, 16:9 display that has 16.9 million colors, which is nothing short of wonderful. We also loved how the phone comes with a 8GB MicroSD card, and has thoughtful features such as FM radio, GPS, A2DP stereo Bluetooth, and a Webkit browser.
The Satio has been moderately successful since its debut and is available on several carriers around the world on a subsidized plan for quite a while now. Sadly, this is yet another highly advanced handset from SE that is arriving in the USA far after it was announced, and at a heavy price as its unlocked. It’s pretty crazy how the XPERIA X1, XPERIA X2, Aino and now the Satio have all sold here in the US without being available in a low cost, packaged plan from a major wireless carrier.
The Satio faired pretty well in our “Sony Ericsson “Satio” vs. Apple “iPhone 3G S” Specs Comparison” post.
Sean Murtagh and Natalie Mead had planned on a London wedding when they returned from a trip to Dubai. But after Eyjafjallajokull’s enormous cloud of ash, they spent their nuptials stuck in a Middle East airport. Fortunately, there was Skype. More »
by Tom Philpott
Where your food comes from: a phosphate mine in Florida run by the fertilizer giant Mosaic. Mosaic is two-thirds owned by Cargill, the globe’s largest agribusiness company, with interests in meat, feed, biofuels, and more. Photo: Susan Dracket, via FlickrAs Grist’s recent special series showed, our reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has serious ecological, geopolitical, public-health, and agricultural consequences.
Yet N isn’t our only fertilizer problem. To grow robustly, plants need sufficient access to three key macronutrients: N,P, and K, or nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.
In non-industrial and organic farming systems, recycling these nutrients is a paramount task. Think compost, which harvests the nutrients in plant waste and returns them to the soil—along with a nice dash of soil-building organic matter. In industrial ag, the idea is to introduce huge new amounts of isolated NPK every growing season.
One main problem with N, of course, is that isolating it in a form plants can use is incredibly energy intensive. Here in the United States, the globe’s most voracious per-capita user of N, we rely on natural gas as our main fuel for N production—even though natural gas is increasingly scarce and harvesting it is increasingly ecologically devastating. (In China, the world’s largest overall user of N, they rely mainly on coal for N production: a chilling fact to consider.)
While N production consumes massive amounts of fossil energy, the other two main fertilizer elements, phosphorous and potassium, are literally mined. Thus, like our transportation system, our food system depends on finite resources.
Think about that next time you hear someone call ethanol made from industrial corn—far and away our biggest gulper of N, P, and K—a “renewable fuel.” It’s also worth remembering when some industry hack or USDA chieftain insists that industrial agriculture is the only way to “feed the world.” “Oh, yeah?” you should reply; “for how long?”
From what I can tell, potassium—known as potash in its fertilizer form—isn’t in short supply. (It should be noted, however, that when fertilizer prices spiked in 2008, industrial-ag powerhouse Brazil was considering cutting through “environmental red tape” to mine potassium under the Amazon rainforest.)
Unfortunately, though, phosphorous is in short supply, as recent articles in Foreign Policy and Der Spiegel make clear.
Here’s Foreign Policy:
By 2008, industrial farmers were applying an annual 17 million metric tons of mined phosphorus on their fields. Demand is expanding at around 3 percent a year—a rate that is likely to accelerate due to rising prosperity in the developing world (richer people consume more meat) and the burgeoning bioenergy sector, which also requires phosphorus to support crop-based biofuels.
But there’s a problem….
Our supply of mined phosphorus is running out. Many mines used to meet this growing demand are degrading, as they are increasingly forced to access deeper layers and extract a lower quality of phosphate-bearing rock (phosphate is the chemical form in which nearly all phosphorus is found). Some initial analyses from scientists with the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative estimate that there will not be sufficient phosphorus supplies from mining to meet agricultural demand within 30 to 40 years.
Moreover, like oil, mine-friendly phosphate rock is geographically concentrated—indeed, even more so than petroleum.
Nearly 90 percent of the world’s estimated phosphorus reserves are found in five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States. In comparison, the 12 countries that make up the OPEC cartel control only 75 percent of the world’s oil reserves.
Already, geopolitical tensions are rising. Morocco is the site of 37 percent of the globe’s known phosphate rock reserves. Not a great situation, FP observes:
Many of Morocco’s phosphate mines are in Western Sahara, a disputed independent territory that is occupied by Morocco and the site of growing international human rights concerns. Reflecting these concerns, U.N.-sanctioned export restrictions on phosphate and other resources are now in place, though the efficacy of the bans is incomplete.
During the global food crisis in 2008, China—which also has large phosphate reserves—banned exports of the key fertilizer ingredient. As phosphorous prices rise and supplies tighten, you can expect nations with reserves to impose high prices—or even, as China did, hoard supplies.
One additional problem that neither Foreign Policy or Der Spiegel mention: phosphorous mining, at least in Florida, is an ecologically devastating process that leaves behind, um … radioactive waste. I wrote a post on this very topic back in 2008. Get this:
For every ton of raw fertilizer produced, the industry generates five tons of phosphogypsum, a radioactive material the U.S. Environmental Agency considers hazardous waste. With limited options available, the phosphate industry is storing more than a billion tons of phosphogypsum in stacks that tower up to 200 feet high—a problem that grows by 30 million tons every year.
You really should read that post. It’s all about the environmental nightmare of phosphate mining; and the EPA’s sad inability to enforce even its own lax standards around it. There’s some good ol’ fashioned political cronyism in there, too. And a huge Cargill angle!
So what to do? Of course, I would call for a shift to organic farming—organized efforts to conserve and recycle nutrients through composting programs. Subsidies could be reconfigured to reward farmers for reducing fertilizer use (they are now rewarded for gross output—giving them incentive to overapply fertilizer to maximize yields); municipalities and regions could ramp up composting programs and find efficient ways to get that compost back to farms.
And potentially, the toxicity problems with human waste could be resolved; and the vast amount of valuable nutrients now flushed into sewers could be returned to fields. Right now, our phosphorous- and nitrogen-rich waste is mixed with all manner of industrial effluent and turned into a vile substance called “sludge” (or, to use the industry’s preferred phrase, “biosolids”). But if it could be kept separate from industrial waste and composted in a way that truly takes care of pathogens and other nasties, it could become an excellent resource. As the 19th century French novelist Victor Hugo memorably put it (lifted from the Der Spiegel piece), “There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital.”
Well, I don’t make policy—I just comment on it. Policymakers have of course not grappled much with the fertilizer problem. Der Spiegel points to a pilot project in Austria, operating on the site of an underused fertilizer plant near a now-depleted phosphorous mine. (Europe, it should be noted, imports nearly 100 percent of its phosphorous. Thus the rigors of “peak phosphorous” already haunt the Continent.) Someone has had the idea of refining sewage sludge from Vienna to extract its phosphorous.
When it is delivered to the pilot plant, the sewage sludge ash is unfit for use as a fertilizer, because it contains excessively high levels of heavy metals like cadmium. As gears groan and conveyor belts squeak, the ash, combined with chemical additives, is moved into a rotary kiln, where a hissing natural gas flame heats it to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit). After half an hour in the rotary kiln, the ash, which has now passed through two purification steps, has a phosphate content of about 16 percent. It is then enriched with other plant nutrients, like potassium and nitrogen, to yield the final product: urban fertilizer. [Emphasis mine.]
Ah, another fossil-fuel (and chemical-) intensive process. Moving toward a food system that recycles nutrients—honoring what the organic-farming pioneer Sir Albert Howard called the “law of return”—will be difficult. But finding industrial means that truly solve our fertilizer problem may prove more vexing still.
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Michigan woman faces down meat industry, wins [VIDEO]
Ask Umbra interviews Dirt! The Movie director Bill Benenson
Earth Day gets a bad rap. Some people
complain that one day isn’t enough to help this precious planet that sustains
all of our lives. Other people are
annoyed that we get flooded with tips on how we should be green, leaving us
guilty and overwhelmed.
I
for one say “no” to a guilt-ridden, obligation-filled Earth Day. Instead, let’s have some fun!
That’s what we’re striving for with our
Yahoo! Earth Day program. On our Earth Day microsite and Yahoo! Search, we’re highlighting some of
Earth’s biggest puzzles.
Ever
wondered why ladybugs have spots? Or what’s the world’s only immortal animal? You can find the answers to these questions and more using
Yahoo! Search or by visiting earth.yahoo.com.
We’re
also featuring common things people search for such as how to turn your old electronics
into cash and global
warming myths and facts. And just to balance out all the noise about
what we should do, we’re highlighting what NOT
to do for Earth Day. Bet you
didn’t know that organics aren’t always best.
The
Earth doesn’t really care about national borders, so we’re excited that 22
countries around the world are helping raise awareness of Earth Day by changing
their Yahoo! front page logos and linking to relevant Earth Day information. Our employees are getting into the
spirit of fun, too. 17 offices
around the globe are holding celebrations.
For instance, in our Sunnyvale headquarters, we’re holding a
Search Off where employees will challenge each other to find answers to green
trivia questions using Yahoo! Search.
The first one to find the answer wins an eco-friendly prize. Everyone at the celebration gets free
gelato — green tea, pistachio, or mint-chip (because they’re all green!).
And
here at Yahoo!, we agree that Earth Day shouldn’t be just one day. That’s why we’re proud to run the #1
environmental destination on the Internet: Yahoo! Green. Every day of the year, you can find ways
to improve your life and the world.
We also have a vibrant Twitter
and Facebook community so you
can keep up with the buzz every minute of the day. We even held a lively Twitter party earlier this
week where people could ask and answer questions about being green.
Now
I’m off to find out if earthquakes are really on the rise or if it just seems
like they are. I hope you’ll join
me at http://earth.yahoo.com.
*Ranking of green sites
based on Comscore, March 2010 data.
This November, Texas oil companies hope to dupe California voters into repealing their own clean energy bill; AB32. The oil companies’ ballot measure had $966,000 in funding up through the end of March. Now they have doubled that, bringing the total to $1.9 million – supposedly to save California jobs.
Among the most recent additions, one mysterious conservative front group from Missouri – with only $30,000 in funding – somehow mustered $498,000 to save California from itself. But an in-state oil company, LA-based Occidental Petroleum openly added its own $300,000 on Friday.
As of the end of March, 89% of the funding has come from the oil industry, with nearly three quarters of that just from Texas oil companies. The petition gathering is being handled through The Tea Party, another (perhaps unwitting) front group for the fossil energy industry, as a subsidiary of Freedomworks, the Dick Army (mostly energy) lobbying group.
It is sure to increase voter turnout this November.
The Samsung Omnia II was released late last year with an awesome spec sheet, and buggy software(from my experience.) Well Samsung is working on an update and it will include Windows Mobile’s finest software… Windows Mobile 6.5.3. This comes from Samsung Hub, who reports that Samsung Sweden has confirmed the WM 6.5.3 update for the Omnia II, which I am sure many O2 Owners are happy to hear.
The update is rumored to be released the second half of May. That means you have to wait merely months before you can do the update to a better, stable, faster world of finger friendly touchability. This update is not WP7S or anything close, but its something that I am sure many Samsung Omnia II owners would find important, and maybe will fixes those issues that I experienced when I had the device for testing.
Via: unwiredviews
There has been much talk about fragmentation across the Android platform over the past several months. A few weeks ago, we published an article discussing two ways in which Google might put an end to the problem – one of which was slowing down the release of OS updates (which should become less necessary as the platform approaches stability).
To briefly recap the release schedule to date, version 1.5 was released toward the end of April 2009, followed by 1.6 the following September (4.5 months later). Just over a month later, version 2.0 was released in October of 2009 followed closely by 2.0.1 in December and 2.1 in early January of 2010. No doubt it’s been a fast journey for Android, and difficult for many to keep up at such a quick pace of development.
That being said, we get to the crux of the article: Android 2.2. There have been rumors of an OTA update for the Nexus One coming down the pike. Similar rumors suggest that this update could be an upgrade from Eclair to Froyo (Android 2.2). To add fuel to the fire, AndroidandMe is reporting that they have seen analytics reports suggesting that “Google has already begun testing on their next firmware – Android 2.2.” AndroidandMe is quick to admit that this type of data can easily be faked, but that upon further research (read: speaking to the infamous “people familiar with the matter”) sources have confirmed that the next iteration of Android OS is being tested.
Some suspect that we will see 2.2 on or about May 19, which by no coincidence at all is the date of the Google I/O developer conference – the perfect time to release a new SDK. Here are some of the rumored features for the update (thanks to AndroidandMe):
It’s only been about three months since the release of OS 2.1, and just after rumors of the end of fragmentation approaching, we are starting to hear rumors of the next iteration of Android (a potential cause for added fragmentation). I’m not sure what the implications of OS 2.2 coming out in May would be, I just hope that it doesn’t add to the problem and further alienate consumers debating the switch. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
Via AndroidandMe
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
At its f8 developers’ conference in San Francisco this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform whose developmental state may already be quite far along. Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes, gets channeled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact.
“Today, the Web exists mostly as a series of unstructured links between pages. And this has been a powerful model, but it’s really just the start,” said Zuckerberg. “The Open Graph puts people at the center of the Web. It means that the Web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things. I am friends with you. I am attending this event. I like this band. These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web. And today, with the Open Graph, we’re going to bring all of these together.”
The model Zuckerberg is discussing is essentially a published API for users of any service to associate themselves with something — not just something they like, as he said at first, but also something they’re working on, including documents. Those associations then become facts of the Facebook database.
On Monday, Betanews reported on ‘Connections,’ the types of associations that a Facebook user may establish between himself and something or someone he wishes to be associated with. As demonstrated at the time, Facebook now enables individuals to create Facebook pages that represent things or perhaps celebrities that they and others may like — not a page by those celebrities as much as about them, similar to what Wikipedia provides now.
As independent Facebook developers were introduced to, for the first time today, existing Web pages outside Facebook can also be enabled to become the center of those associations, by adopting the company’s new Open Graph Protocol. The protocol involves the use of special properties in the <META> elements of Web pages, whose collective purpose is to classify those pages for Facebook. In an extremely hypothetical example, a fan site for the movie Manos: The Hands of Fate might include the tags <meta property="og:type" content="movie" />, followed by <meta property="og:title" content="Manos: The Hands of Fate" />.
Surprisingly, a check of the accepted object types for things users may like shows that Open Graph will enable sites to declare themselves the centers of attention for video games, movies, TV shows, and albums (collections of songs gathered together onto a disc, originally reproduced using an analog needle apparatus), software or “apps” is not listed, and neither is “device” such as “iPad” (although it could conceivably be classified as product). If Betanews wanted to be a Facebook “like” site for beta software (I know, it’s a stretch, but bear with me), it might be a difficult concept to explain using the current set of Open Graph tags.
“The Open Graph protocol…is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants,” reads Facebook’s official explanation today. “Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.”
Visibility in Facebook pages about the declared subject is one benefit to the Web site master. Another is the ability to communicate with users, via Facebook, who have declared they like the site’s subject matter; and to receive analytics and statistics about how Facebook users are interacting with your pages.
If you think about it, it sounds like a sensible solution to the problem Yahoo faced two decades ago: cataloging commercially-oriented Web sites by subject. This system invites the masters of those pages to do the cataloging, with the payoff being a direct connection to the Internet’s center of social activity.
Google’s YouTube is already part of the process, with its latest round of changes to its front-end controls. Where the “Favorites” button used to be is now something called “Like” (shown above), which does more than just submit a video you like to your YouTube favorites list. As the settings screen now shows (as depicted below), your likes may be communicated with Facebook (if you have an account there).
That may not happen by default, however, or by accident. First, the user must establish a Google Account (the necessary item for him to join Google Buzz), and then explicitly tie that account to Facebook (Twitter is another option, as shown above). If the user has already established a Google Buzz account, then those associations may already be made, and the videos a user likes may be fused with the Open Graph and tweeted to everyone around the world.
Also joining the service’s new Open Graph today is Microsoft, which today launched a basic form of its Office Web Apps for use in creating Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that can serve as centers of attention, and that reside not in Microsoft’s cloud but in users’ Facebook news feeds.
“The fact that we’ve been able to adapt the Office 2010 Web Apps technology to work directly within our Facebook app truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system’s rich ‘contextual collaboration’ capabilities,” reads an actual Facebook-compliant document in Word format, published this afternoon by the leader of Microsoft’s FUSE Labs development team, Lili Cheng. “And we’d never have been able to achieve our critical ‘simplicity’ goals had it not been for our ability to use a new test feature from Facebook that allows us to build an instantly personalized and seamless document authorization & sharing experience directly from our site.”
FUSE Labs’ Facebook apps are functional versions of the real Office Web Apps, running in the context of Facebook’s platform…but on Microsoft’s site. Conceivably, they can be created either online using the Web Apps themselves, or uploaded into the Web Apps using Office 2010 applications (which consumers will be able to begin using in earnest on May 12).
As Zuckerberg explained today in a blog post, his goal is to incite all Web users with impetus to share content, including Office docs and Pandora music (another charter Facebook partner), using Facebook as the conduit.
“This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the Web,” he wrote. “It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized Web that gets better with every action taken.”
In his unveiling of a five-year plan for Fiat and its myriad brands, group CEO Sergio Marchionne today revealed details of Ferrari’s future model lineup. It was somewhat of a surprise, as hearing concrete information about future Ferraris is as rare as getting all the details on, say, a new Apple product; it’s usually a loose tongue or detective work that spills the beans, not the CEO himself. But thanks to Marchionne, we now have concrete information on what will gallop out of the Scuderia over the next few years.
For 2011, we can expect a replacement for the 612 Scaglietti plus the 458 Italia Spider. We love the 458 Italia coupe, and the Spider is sure to be just as fabulous. A year later, in 2012, Ferrari will launch a new 599GTB and an all-new, Enzo supercar. A face-lifted California will arrive in 2013, as will a 458 Italia Scuderia. As to the latter, look to the 430 Scuderia for what to expect: a lighter, meaner take on the Ferrari’s volume mid-engine sports car.
Sibling brand Maserati will release a redesigned Quattroporte in the near future, according to Marchionne. It will also launch an all-new entry-level model priced just above $50,000. Let’s just hope the entry Maser doesn’t dip too deeply into the Chrysler parts bin to make its price target—remember the Chrysler TC by Maserati?
Related posts:
As we celebrate Mustang vs. Camaro Week and in anticipation of our upcoming comparison tests of the latest V-8 and V-6 versions, we dove into our archives and plucked out pictures of Mustangs and Camaros past. Then we zoomed in and cropped the photos to make identification a bit of a challenge. Here’s where the fun begins: Take a look at this picture and tell us what you see.
Guessing the model is the easy part—say either Mustang or Camaro and you’ve got a 50-percent chance of getting it right. Year and trim level are where it gets tough, so let’s see what you’ve got. If you get it exactly right—year, model, and trim—you might win a C/D T-shirt, but only if you read these rules first. Post your answers in the comments below. And remember: We can’t contact you to tell you you’ve won unless your commenting persona was registered with a legitimate e-mail address. So make sure yours was.
Related posts:
As you may recall, last August the Navy put out a call to biofuel companies for 40,000 gallons of fuel to start testing in their F/A-18 Super Hornet jet. Sustainable Oils ultimately won the contract to develop biofuel for the military branch and now the Navy is prepared to take the Hornet on a supersonic flight using a blend of 50 percent jet fuel and 50 percent camelina-based oil.
Tomorrow, at the Air Station at Patuxent River, Maryland, the so-called “Green Hornet” will fly over the Chesapeake Bay, hopefully proving that biofuels can perform well in a full range of flight operations, including traveling faster than the speed of sound. The Super Hornet was picked as a test craft for biofuels because it’s the Navy’s largest aviation fuel-consumer.
Camelina biofuel has shown itself to be a great choice for jet fuel blends because it can work as a drop-in replacement for jet fuel. All aircraft systems — fuel gauge, etc. — operate the same as if it were straight petroleum. Also, a recent study found that the use of camelina jet fuel could reduce carbon emissions by 84 percent compared to regular jet fuel.
The Hornet won’t be the only naval craft to get a makeover though. The Navy has committed to getting half of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, which will include cleaning up ships, aircraft and all of their power systems. The U.S. military is the world’s greatest consumer of petroleum, so their commitment to reducing that consumption is an important one.
–True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgard was snapped by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for a spread featured in “The Scandinavian Issue” of VMAN Summer 2010…. 
-Facebook now has more than 400 million users — and shows no signs of slowing down…..
–Life & Style Weekly claims Kate Gosselin hasn’t had a good roll in the hay since Jan. 2009. I’m still not sure why we needed to know this information, but it sure explains a lot!
-Drake’s create his own Economic Stimulus Package for a group of his closet childhood friends.…
-Kim Kardashian escaped an abusive marriage!
-Seth Rogen tops Forbes’ 2010 list of Hollywood’s Hardest-Working Actors….
-Rihanna’s trip to a Swiss hospital has been explained: The star was treated for an injured rib….
-It’s getting Real Dirty Down South. In the biggest batch of messness to hit The Real Housewives of Atlanta since Sheree coined the phrase “Who’s Gon’ Check Me, Boo!,” NeNe Leakes and Kim Zolciak are accused of going upside the head of resident gay Dwight Eubanks. He should have been smacked up for the jacked up nose job ages ago…..
-Here are “15 Movies Posters Re-Imagined with the Stars Originally Cast….”
-CNN’s countsdown the 10 Top-Paying Jobs for Women……
-Very sad: American adoptive parents prefer girls over boys, and non-black children over African-Americans, according to a new study carried out by a group of economists……
–Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden will reportedly fill in for Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez — who goes on maternity leave next month….
