World is Green

Don’t miss this. Blue Planet Run is a book with over 250 awe-inspiring photographs captured by some of the world’s top photojournalists. The idea is to help you know about water problems faced by people in different parts of the globe. Here are some pictures from the ‘Blue Planet Run’ book:

40 billion - The number of hours spent each year in Africa due to the need to collect water.

The advanced industrialized economies were lucky to have had their development fuelled by cheap fossil energy. Today’s developing economies have a much tougher challenge. It was a very short window of opportunity which opened just about 150 years ago and is likely to close in the next 40 years, by when the known reserves will be depleted at current levels of consumption. All told, 200 years is a very brief interlude considering thousands of years of human civilization and hopefully hundreds of thousands of years yet to come. At some time in the distant future, they will look back and remark that the age of fossil fuel was a short inflection point, a point at which humanity passed through the bottleneck of dependency on oil from the ground. Before that point, humanity’s primary source of energy was the sun, and so it will be after that point.

A new era for solar power is approaching. Long derided as uneconomic, it is gaining ground as technologies improve and the cost of traditional energy sources rises. Within three to seven years, unsubsidized solar power could cost no more to end customers in many markets, such as California and Italy, than electricity generated by fossil fuels or by renewable alternatives to solar. By 2020, global installed solar capacity could be 20 to 40 times its level today.

Today I had a phone call from a Pyrmont blogger who’d discovered PWF’s report on Australia’s first Community Owned Wind Park. His comments? “Its not everyday, that you read a story on a great community blog, and you go WOW…Why Did It Take So Long…Wake Up Australia…More of the Same Please.”

Let’s not kid ourselves: Google’s investment in transportation so far is paltry compared to what it’s spending on other industries. But while we’re not predicting that Google will make a G-car any time soon, its efforts to push plug-in vehicles as a way to build out a smarter power grid, and to bring some of the intelligence of information technology to transportation, will be worth watching.

Tenders are being called for companies to design, supply and install energy and rainwater storage solutions and also to supply and install innovative, energy efficient lighting options for Government schools.

“Under the Australian Government’s National Solar Schools Program, schools are being offered grants of up to $20,000 for solar technology and up to $30,000 for solar hot water systems, rainwater tanks and other energy efficiency measures,” Mr Bartlett said.

Solar insolation is the rate of solar radiation (kilowatt-hours per square meter) over an area.The world map shows the amount of solar energy in hours, received each day on an optimally tilted surface during the worst month of the year. This is used as an indicator of solar energy potential.

India's top firms face little stakeholder pressure to combat climate change with only about 40 per cent of the companies surveyed setting voluntary carbon emissions reduction goals, a report said. A survey by KPMG consultants of 70 CEOs found their response to climate issues was driven largely by the need to comply with expected regulations, while leaving the leadership role in tackling global warming to the government.

While many companies in the developed world have measured their baseline carbon footprint and set reduction targets over 5-10 years, in India only 41 per cent of firms had some qualified reduction goals to be achieved by 2010. About 38 per cent had no such goals.

Some schools, like San Francisco's Presidio School of Management (which contributes a for GreenBiz.com), the Dominican University in San Rafael, Calif. and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Wash. were founded with the idea of integrating the concept of sustainability with business education, but mainstream business schools are also making this shift.

Unless gas hits $10 a gallon, Americans will continue to buy SUVs in droves. - Inspired by the continued sales of SUVs.

REDUCING carbon emissions will not be cost free for Australians, Kevin Rudd has bluntly declared, as he turns the heat on the Liberals to pass the Government's scheme in the Senate next year.

Well it's hardly a surprise but the Government's green paper tells us an emissions trading scheme will be costly.It will be inflationary and could push the price of electricity up by as much as 16 per cent. But to ease the pain, the Government has promised compensation for pensioners, motorists and low income households; and assistance for high emitting businesses.The Greens aren't happy, and neither is the Opposition. But the broad outlines of the Governments design to reduce carbon pollution has been welcomed by the business community.

This report applies a full-cost economics approach to climate change adaptation, using the aluminium industry as a case study to illustrate the complexity of the policy challenge. The report examines the positive value of jobs within the upstream aluminium industry, and the negative value of carbon emissions from the sector. It estimates the value which flows from aluminium jobs to individual workers and to the wider community. The report provides a demographic survey of aluminium towns and finds that aluminium towns are less economically vibrant than the Australian economy as a whole, with lower median incomes (despite high aluminium wages), lower employment and lower workforce participation. This highlights the critical importance of aluminium to these towns, employing thousands of local workers at an average wage more than double the national median.

The term cleantech therefore tends to be a more amorphous industry group than, say, environmental services, and a less rigid investment asset class than, say, financial services.Sectors that appear to fit into the definition of cleantech without dispute include:Renewable energy – wind, solar thermal and photovoltaics, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal, biomass and biogas;Water technologies that increase efficiency;Energy efficiency, green buildings and biomaterials;Waste management and recycling;Energy storage and fuel cell technologies;Low emission vehicle technologies; andEnvironmental Services

Enterprise Rent-A-Car expects a move from PCs to HP thin clients will cut energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours, save about $500,000 annually, and reduce CO2 emissions by 6.5 million pounds per year, Computerworld reports. The network of more than 45,000 thin client terminals – operated through 743 terminal servers – connects Enterprise rental offices throughout the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Puerto Rico. Thin clients use only 13.6 watt-hours and 2.4 watt-hours of electricity in active and passive states, respectively, compared with the 77.1 watt-hours and 1.8 watt-hours consumed by PCs.

Rather than wait for Penny Wong, we thought we’d jump the gun with our own Paper on the options for addressing climate change. The key thing to bear in mind with all this stuff is what we are actually trying to achieve. Yes, yes, we’re trying to do something about the greenhouse effect, but what, specifically, and how? Answering that question properly leads into hotly-contested debates about economic and administrative efficiency, where tiny details can have vast and unforeseen real-world consequences.

Ever since strategy arose as a managerial discipline in the 1960s, business leaders have been honing their analysis of where and how to compete, grow, and best manage their organizations. Strategic and organizational models or frameworks help inform these decisions, offering shorthand for qualitative analysis of potential scenarios and insight on what options to adopt.