Finally, a silver lining--the downturn means a faster route to the turnoff. A 29% decrease in snarlups in 2008 was largely attributed to the slowdown in the economy, according to a new list of the top 20 most congested metropolitan areas.
Hopefully we can see a recovery without more cars. Lots of cash to ameliorate traffic is designated in the stimulus package: $8.4 billion is designated for public transportation, $9.3 billion for intercity and high-speed passenger rail,and another $825 million for bike trails. One technological fix to spur growth, raise public revenue, and have faster traffic too: Congestion pricing.
"Of the big four IT companies -- Apple, Dell, HP, IBM -- Apple has
disclosed the least information and is the only one that has not made a
major commitment to carbon footprint reduction." That's the conclusion of the director of As You Sow, an organization which uses shareholder activism as a tool to promote sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The information that Apple does release is in an idiosyncratic format that makes it very difficult to compare with other companies' products. The Carbon Disclosure Project releases a widely distributed and accepted survey to find out how companies are measuring and managing their carbon footprint. Apple deigned to answer only a few questions on the survey, scoring 7 on its disclosure vs. 91 for Dell and 88 for HP.
Apple is one of the most admired brands, both generally and among young people. The dean of climate change himself, Al Gore is one of Apple's most prominent board members and fans. So what gives? Why doesn't Gore exert more influence over the company to act and to disclose what it's doing?
Good news! Softer, flufflier, whiter, stronger, fully recycled tissue and toilet paper may already be possible! The sensitive American consumer no longer has to compromise. And the all-natural technology requires less energy and less harmful chemicals in the manufacturing process, too. After I posted on Greenpeace's Tissue Buying Guide yesterday, wondering why manufacturers can't create more squeezable recycled paper products, I got an interesting note from Mark Emalfarb. He's the founder and CEO of a biotech company called Dyadic International. Dyadic started out in the 1980s supplying the blue jeans business with pumice for a literal stone wash. They soon upgraded to using patented enzymes that break down the cellulose in cotton, providing that broken-in feeling for top manufacturers like Lee's, Levi's, Wrangler, and Guess!.
Well, the same enzymes can work in the same way to soften the cellulose in recycled paper pulp, too. "You use like a glassful in a big vat," Emalfarb says. The enzymes break down the paper pulp slurry so it flows more easily through the machines, taking one-third to two-thirds less energy to refine. And they make it softer and whiter and even stronger at the same time. The process is cheaper and uses less bleach. "It's not just better for the environment. Everybody's needs are met," he says.
So why isn't Charmin, et al. beating down Emalfarb's door? It's a classic case of an incumbent industry's resistance to change, he says. "The big problem is that the pulp and paper industry is an antiquated industry that’s done everything the same way for 200 years...We've worked offshore, in Mexico, China, and Indonesia and they're actually more flexible in adapting technology. A lot of those mills are new and they're innovative cause they have no choice."
Dyadic will continue attempting to market its technology to forward-looking paper companies even as they explore other opportunities. Last fall, it licensed itd production system for enzymes to Codexis, a Shell Oil partner, for the production of cellulosic ethanol.
Almost 2500 people were planning to risk arrest last week outside the Capitol Power Plant, the heavily symbolic coal-burning plant that provides juice to Congress. Only...soon it won't be burning coal anymore. Awkward!
Greenpeace recently released a tissue-buying guide for consumers to highlight the use of post-consumer recycled content and environmentally friendly bleach. Green Forest came in first, with Whole Foods' store brand, 365, a close second.
The New York Times chose to frame this as a standard environmental cliche: Americans, with their unreasonable preference for soft, fluffy tissues and toilet paper, are destroying the Canadian boreal forest, and it's up to environmentalists to guilt us all into buying the uncomfortable off-brand stuff we don't really like. In this narrative, the big manufacturers' hands are tied.
"Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.”
But I talked to Greenpeace forest campaigner Lindsey Allen and she had a different story. They are targeting manufacturers, not just consumers. For example, they disrupted a Cottonelle viral marketing campaign: "They had set up a blue couch in Times Square and were asking passersby to tell a story; you were supposed to 'let it out,' get emotional, reach for a Kleenex. They were filming for a commercial. We had volunteers get in front of the camera, all miked, who said, we have something we want to let out:
it’s really sad that you’re using North Ameican Boreal virgin fiber in your products." You can check out the YouTube video here.
It’s common to frame environmental dilemmas moralistically, as small, personal choices where we all should try to do the right thing, even if it makes us a little uncomfortable. But maybe the tissue issue is really a matter of pressuring businesses to innovate and do a better job marketing products that are better for the planet. Is it really impossible to make a soft, fluffy paper with recycled content, and to make it an appealing brand? Marcal, the oldest manufacturers of recycled paper in the country, is giving it a shot this Earth Day, with the first line of nationally advertised recycled toilet paper.
Credit card companies are canceling your account. Student loans, home mortgages, and auto loans are all getting harder to obtain, and the big bank where I have an account is insolvent; how about yours?
Starting today, a range of next-generation financial services companies, all of whom employ technology in innovative ways, have teamed up to market some much-needed help to consumers with the Uncrunch America campaign. Like a team of of financial Superfriends, Lending Club offers personal loans through a peer-to-peer model, Virgin Money (yes, a pro-social for-profit offshoot of the Branson empire) has peer-to-peer mortgage financing, OnDeck Capital offers small business loans with a proprietary holistic scoring model, CreditKarma has credit score tools, and Geezeo offers personal finance and budgeting tools.Since the beginning of the year, UnCrunch members have lent almost $75 million to one another.
The site has an overwhelmingly grassroots, patriotic feeling and look, as though it were a stray page from MoveOn.org or recovery.gov. "The American people will solve the credit crisis by helping each other," it proclaims.
Does this fine-sounding premise hold up? Peer-to-peer lending is one of the oldest ideas in finance. In its online incarnation, it doesn't have anything like the volume yet to fill the trillion-dollar gap in the consumer credit market. But it does offer an intriguing alternative to the standard profit-happy credit model, and it's been spreading as a close cousin of the microfinance or social lending movement. As a niche both for borrowers shut out of the credit market and for investors looking for a better return than the stock market can offer, it's likely to grow.
This infographic visualizes the gallons of fuel it takes to travel 350 miles by various means. Surprisingly, in terms of energy efficiency as well as time, a full motor coach is by far the best option, second only to bicycling. It even beats walking! The comparative advantage of the humble bus improves even more when high-speed bus lanes are put into place, and hybrid buses have been adopted in dozens of municipal and inter-city transit systems. Good thing the stimulus package included an extra $440 annually per person in mass-transit commuter tax benefits.
General Motors should display this graphic in place of its logo. It's not widely known, but in partnership with Allison Transmission, the Detroit company is currently the leading manufacturer in the U.S. of hybrid buses, with models currently operating in more than 70 cities in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
You would think it was 1997 again, a year without smart phones or the social Web. Despite all the endless chatter about Twitter this and Flickr that and YouTube, iTunes, and Kindle 2.0, the good old boob tube is capturing record high levels of eyeballs: 151 hours a month of traditional television viewing. According to Nielsen's new "Three Screen" report, video viewing on the smaller Web and mobile screens is comparatively a puny 3 and 4 hours a month, respectively.
So for most Americans, TV viewing is equal to a part time job, at just over 5 hours a day. Of course, with unemployment the way it is, TV watching may be a full time job for many more people.
What is the cultural meaning of all this? Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, has smartly called television a "cognitive heat sink" and
social lubricant that helped America as a whole mitigate the effects of unprecedented postwar prosperity, and use up all that extra brainpower and free time created by a highly educated workforce and
post-industrial economy.
His thesis was that more of our free time is going to the Internet now, to the Wikipedias and YouTubes of the world, shaping a more participatory, creative and valuable mass culture. The reality is that replacement apparently hasn't happened yet. American households have more than one TV per person. The TV habit contributes to childhood obesity, is a risk factor for depression, and isn't so great for our carbon footprint either: plasma screens eat up more juice than the old cathode ray tube and home electronics may account for a fifth of a household's energy use by 2020.
So here we are caught in a vicious cultural circle. It may feel good for half an hour at a time, but America's not going to kick this depression until we get off the couch and start doing something.
The blogosphere is buzzing about a changing of the guards at Google's philanthropic arm. Larry Brilliant is stepping down from Google.org to become chief philanthropic evangelist at Google.com; Megan Smith, the company's VP of new business development, will add Google.org to her portfolio.
The shift has been portrayed as a technocratic and highly hubristic one: Google has discovered that its most valuable contributions to saving the planet come not from the cash it gives nonprofits but from the brains of its own engineers, like PowerMeter, which I wrote about last week, and FluTrends, which tracks epidemics. Brilliant writes on the official Google.org blog:
"By aligning Google.org more closely with Google as a whole, Megan will
ensure that we're better able to build innovative, scalable technology
and information solutions. As a first step, Google has decided to put
even more engineers and technical talent to work on these issues and
problems, resources which I have found to be extraordinary."
I wonder if this closer alignment between business aims and philanthropic ones couldn't also be seen as an anti-recessionary measure. Profits fell for the first time last quarter and the Goog has gone through quiet cutbacks in perks and personnel.
Brilliant emphasizes that Google retains its commitment to invest 1% of equity and profits to make the world a better place, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily giving billions away. On the contrary, of the $100 million Google.org has given to support global health, clean energy and access to information, almost half has gone into for-profit investments.
By putting the wildly popular Brilliant out on the road more as a brand evangelist, adding to Smith's job description, and tapping more Googlers' 20% time for do-gooder projects, Google gets to shine its image and build its business at the same time for less cash. Good thinking!
UPDATE: I goofed. Google has granted and invested a total of $100 million, not earned $100 million as the post previously stated. This projects page details Google's investments and grants to date.
Now that Dubai has collapsed, Canada's looking like the next best place to weather the economic storm. "When the tidal wave comes, the question is can you still feel the ground under your feet? And we can." That's the view of Sandra Pupatello, Ontario's minister of International Trade and Investment, who I met with today in New York.
Surprisingly, Canada's economy is outperforming the rest of the developed world. Its banks were too strictly regulated to take in the worst excesses of the subprime madness and as a result, it's beating even Swiss banks: In fact, at the beginning of the crisis last fall, the country's banks were rated the best capitalized in the world. While the U.S. has been tiptoeing up to the necessity of bank nationalization, Stephen Harper's Conservative government has no problem with charges of "socialism." They've put into place one of the most generous bank stimulus plans around to try to stem the credit crunch.
The willingness to embrace a strong role for public investment in innovation, particularly when it achieves social and environmental goals, was Pupatello's major talking point in New York this morning. Ontario accounts for 40% of Canada's GDP, and the government's $1.15 billion Next Generation of Jobs fund provides matching investments of 15 to 20% for Ontario-based companies to expand operations and create jobs in clean cars, fuels, technologies, and products. For example, they kicked in $8 million for 6N, a next-generation manufacturer that transforms lower grades of silicon for use in solar cells; and they've partnered with Better Place, the electric-car-and-charger company. Another example of public, private and university collaboration is the MaRS discovery district, a nonprofit innovation center that brings together biotech researchers, VCs, and social entrepreneurs in the same part of downtown Toronto with several research hospitals.
If you're interested in hatching a Canadian escape plan, good news--the country actually has immigration targets of over 250,000 people a year.
Almost 2500 people were planning to risk 
