Worries about the Earth reaching its full carrying capacity for humans are nothing new, and they all come back to how much food we can grow. Our last case of the Malthusian heebie-jeebies, in the 1950s, was put to rest by the Green Revolution, wherein large international aid orgs boosted agricultural yields in the developing world two and three times using heftier breeds of seeds, more fertilizer and pesticides, industrial-scale processing and up-to-date machinery.
Well, since then the population has doubled, keeping up with increases in farm production. And the old Green Revolution strategy is facing three new constraints: Water, soil, and oil. (Synthetic fertilizer is currently made from fossil fuels; mechanized harvesting, planting, irrigation, and transport of crops all require energy, normally in the form of gasoline).
Genetic modification can lessen the need for pesticides and fertilizers, making it more palatable to some--not all--environmentalists. But controversy aside, GM is not the perfect techno-solution. A new study published this month showed that planting modified high-yield crops may cause diminishing returns. In side-to-side comparisons, high-yield varieties of broccoli, corn and wheat contained 5 to 40% fewer nutrients like minerals, vitamins, and proteins compared to varieties with more modest yields.
By 2050, when world population is expected to rise another 37% and peak at 9.2 billion, we'll need a solution that balances all these constraints. It may have less to do with something concocted in a lab or welded in a factory than with more sustainable human behaviors: Conserving soil and water through biodynamic or permaculture techniques like terracing, crop rotation , and composting.
A German company has found a "magic formula" to make a tough, resilient, moldable and recyclable plastic-like substance called Arboform from lignin, a component of wood. Intriguingly, lignin is currently a byproduct of paper production and is usually burned for fuel. Diverting it to manufacturing uses instead would save fossil fuels and reduce CO2 emissions at the same time.
A story in the Christian Science Monitor shows how plastic substitutes are achieved differently in different countries.
Bioplastics are being made from sugarcane fiber, corn starch, tapioca, potatoes, cellulose, and even soy protein and lactic acid. In the U.S., scientists have focused on making bioplastics from foodstarch, partly because of large agriculture subsidies. But the controversy over biofuels and spiking food prices may make a wood byproduct a more attractive choice.
Pasadena's Art Center College of Design is in the middle of a three-day summit on sustainable mobility and the future of the automotive industry, bringing designers together with political leaders like Rep. Edward Markey and LA's mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and green luminaries like Amory Lovins.
The award for the most awkward presentation yesterday went to Bryan Nesbitt of GM, that asked the government for an additional $16.6 billion, in a plan summarized by Andrew Leonard of Salon as "Give us a lot more money, right now, so we can shrink even more rapidly."
The gee-whiz innovations Nesbitt talked about seemed drawn from an alternate universe where kids still make clay models of shark-finned Chevys: Aerodynamic improvements for efficiency (the company has exactly one windtunnel, located in--you guessed it--Detroit!) and electronic controls that work like an iPhone.
After a panel discussion, Nesbitt, along with representatives of Toyota and hybrid startup Bright Automotive, were asked a very rude question.
"Are you guys rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?"
Bill Reinert of Toyota Motors bristled at the charge. "I don’t think that any of the three of us up here see business as usual. We might see things going in different directions than you do, but we don’t see business as usual. The fact that we talk about how difficult it is to bring this stuff to market and to educate the consumer doesn’t mean we think it shouldn’t be done."
A few months ago, I wrote about the travails of user-submitted review site Yelp. Now there are new accusations that the site is running a protection racket to try to sell advertising. Small business owners in the Bay Area have reported that soon after they got a couple of negative reviews on the site, a Yelp sales rep would call and offer to eliminate the one-star ratings--in exchange for a $299 a month sponsorship. Several owners didn't want to talk on the record because they were afraid of Yelp's power to make or break their business. "In at least one documented instance, a business owner who refused to advertise subsequently received a negative review from a Yelp employee."
I heard similar allegations when I was reporting the story. Village Voice restaurant critic Robert Sietsema checked out the site and he thought the reviews smelled a little funny:
"Singa's Famous Pizza Inc. appeared right at the top of the list, before many, much finer restaurants, and the enthusiastic string of reviews really was unbelievable. It's just a pizza parlor after all, and one that doesn't even make the radar at sites like chowhound.com."
Yelp won't disclose its algorithms for ranking and displaying reviews. The site has a legal right to do whatever it wants with the reviews and ratings on its site, whether user-submitted or written by employees. But if the company wants to reach profitability it better figure out a way to get more transparent and trusted--fast.
Update: Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman responds in this blog post.
He says the article was based on some anonymous sources and another with credibility issues. He denies the charge of moving or removing bad reviews from advertisers, but he doesn't address the charge of whether their ad salespeople use bad reviews as sales leads.
If you are a business owner and a Yelp salesperson calls you up and says "You have some one-star reviews there, how about buying a sponsored four-star review for the top of your page," is that extortion? No. Could it be seen as an unfair pressure tactic? Maybe, especially considering the promotional power that Yelp has and the dicey climate for small businesses these days. Once again, the onus is on Yelp to provide the appearance of transparency and fair play.
The Obama stimulus signed yesterday contains $11 billion for technological upgrades to the electric grid. Huge companies like IBM, Cisco, GE, and now Google all have initiatives and investments in the so-called "smart grid." But yesterday, a company you may not have heard of was the only startup invited to speak at a high-profile event with Google and GE: Tendril.
I spoke to Tendril's CEO, Adrian Tuck, and got his provocative views on the future of this fast-growing industry.
We provide a software platform called TREE (Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem) that links utility back office systems into the whole host of devices that can exist: Thermostats, in-home displays, smart plugs. What's unique is that our setup allows us not to necessarily need a special smart meter. We think the smart meter‘s a fantastic thing, but in the best case it may be 5 to 10 years before everyone has one. About half the homes in North America have a meter we can work with today.
So who are your customers?
The utiltity is our customer, but the residential consumer is our user. We have a very consumer-focused view of this. Historically smart grid was really looked at from the utilities' side--giving the utility control over things like turning air conditioners down [to conserve energy at peak usage]. That model needs to be flipped on its head—getting consumers information about their consumption is the cornerstone to getting people to understand/control/modify their behavior.
Why were you the only startup invited to speak with Google and GE yesterday?
We all think about the problem the same way. We have a shared vision of open standards, and getting information to customers as quickly as possible. The biggest risk in this market is timing--there are players in it that are slow to adopt. Google getting public and announcing their intent to play here will hopefully accelerate the market. We hope to be a good partner to Google in this process—although we have no formal partnership plans at the moment.
There is so much excitement about smart grids right now, with their applications to energy efficiency, demand-based pricing, and increased use of renewables. What do you see as the biggest risks going forward?
This is a highly regulated market with lots of monopoly utilities in it, who are well-meaning custodians of the status quo. What’s really needed are agents for change. My worry is that the guardians of the status quo will prevail or at least slow things down. That’s a challenge, and we all need to find ways to help utilities move more quickly.
The second risk is that there are systems integrators out there who seem to have unlearned the lessons of Enterprise Resource Planning-- offering to build the utilities bespoke solutions. Twenty-five years ago that’s what systems integrators did. Then out came standard open platforms like Oracle. There are lots of people thinking about this in the old-fashioned closed way that are making me nervous. What’s happening now in the electricity industry has often been compared to the telecom industry.
The parallels with the Internet are strong. Before the breakup of the telephone market we had organizations like Bell Labs which controlled the evolutions of the market. They said things like, you can’t get more than 14.4 kbps down a piece of copper wire. It wasn’t until the telecom market broke up and money flowed into startup labs and universities that it started to change. I think exactly the same is true in the energy market. But utilities are your customers right now. Aren’t you a bit of a Trojan horse, then, posing a serious threat to their control over the electricity market?
I think it’s inevitable that consumers will demand choice. We have choice in almost every other facet of our lives. But bringing it to the grid is a non-trivial task, and the current setup has a huge role to play. We are trying to work with utilities to help them through the change process. Whether they occupy the same place at the other end of the transition is not in my control.
Here's a new approach to teaching financial literacy: a video game in which you play the business manager of a free-spending celebrity, trying to satisfy her wish list while keeping her out of the red.
The game is no World of Warcraft. It's a simple, mildly-amusing Flash job of the Chimgam ilk that eats up countless working hours nationwide. And it appeals primarily to an audience of women age 18-35 (studies show that women play even more of these "casual games" than men do). The creator of the game, the nonprofit Doorways to Dreams Fund, has a video showing real testers, and they seemed to have a good time with it: "I thought it was wack and you were never going to keep me interested in it," says one tester. "And then I started thinking about the game when I was at home and I was like, I want to play it again!"
Testers showed a 15-30% increase in confidence in their financial skills, and a 55-70% improvement in knowledge of concepts like credit limits, credit vs. debit, APR, and finance charges.
Peter Tufano, the financial management professor at Harvard who helped develop the game, is a kinder, gentler money guy. His work focuses on the best policies, regulations, products and education to help especially lower income and less-educated people cultivate healthy financial habits. (I wrote about his work on savings promoting products last fall.) Financial responsibility is a tough sell, and Tufano's chosen tactic is engagement rather than coercion.
"We can design the best curriculum in the world, but if nobody is willing to spend time on it, it won't work," says Tufano. "Our goal in all of these things is to find something people will voluntarily do."
This is the first of a sequence of video games Doorways to Dreams is developing to teach various financial skills. They're hoping employers and colleges will like the game enough to distribute it. And the concept is catching on elsewhere, too. MTV has a similar initiative called InDebtEd--they just closed a contest that asked students to develop their own game to teach financial literacy.
Sirius XM Satellite Radio is filing for bankruptcy. Back in the early 2000s, it seemed like the future of radio: Sirius and XM, each with hundreds of channels, ready to take you from shock jocks to swing bands to comedy to grunge to electronica with a flick of the wrist. I remember recording an on-air interview with one of their dozens of talk shows at their Manhattan HQ, a veritable sweatshop of studios down a long hallway: One had a grand piano, one had a Playboy bunny, one was probably full of dancing bears.
But in the end, the smorgasbord of choices, even including a thick incrustation of celebrities like Stern, just didn't entice enough of America's ears. There are lots of theories why: The expense and inconvenience of combining a $150 piece of hardware--or several, if you want to listen at home and in your car--with a monthly service contract. The robotic, generic onslaught of dozens of channels, which completely wastes the intimate, conversational quality of radio. The rise of the iPod and podcasting.
To me, the strongest reason satellite radio never caught on is that radio is not like television. People like to have hundreds of TV channels because it's a passive activity for which expectations are generally set really low. Flipping through the stations is, of course, a form of TV watching in itself, and the longer it goes on, the more your feeling of mild, soporific amusement can continue.
But for most people who care about music, having hundreds of different stations is just annoying, because you only really enjoy a few of them. You don't need to surf channels--the three-minute pop song is good enough for even the worst ADD. And really, you'd usually rather choose specific songs and artists. Once again, the iPod is the killer app here. Or, if you truly don't care what you listen to and only want it to be vaguely familiar and hummable, you can try Jack-FM, the most popular radio format of the last decade. Jack mixes hits from the 60s through now. It's like putting all the other radio stations on shuffle.
It seems that the media nuclear winter is not only endangering wonderful quality media that we all want to have survive, it's also killing stuff that nobody cares passionately about. See also: Muzak, which also filed for bankruptcy today.
Should the taxpayers and utilities be investing hundreds of billions in new heavy-metal infrastructure to transmit renewable energy to big cities from massive centralized installations in the windy Midwest and the sunny Southwest?
Or does a real green energy future look a lot more locavore, with a patchwork of publicly financed rooftop solar, small-scale wind, microhydropower, wave buoys, biogas and battery power, woven together with sophisticated software management, allowing each region to be self-sufficient?
The answer probably falls somewhere in between. But this is just as much a political debate as a straight-up technical policy question. Basically, existing utilities, which have regional monopolies and make money from transmission as well as generation, want to borrow more money to build thick lines and big green power plants, and then have the public pay it off for years in their electricity bills. State governments like Arizona and Kansas are into this idea too because they want to sell their power to other states.
Yesterday, the folks who control the Midwest gridreleased a proposal that put the cost of sending Midwestern wind power to Northeast cities at $50 to $80 billion. But Northeasterners aren't so sure this is a great idea. They might buy wind from Canada instead. And the Midwest still produces a lot of coal power too, which the Northeast doesn't want (once you get electrons pumping through the grid, it's hard to separate them out by origin.) Basically, they want local control over future decisions about their regional power mix, which is hard to do once you start investing in huge facilities.
Consumers should have a say in this debate too. Not everyone wants to go off the grid and produce all their own juice. But as we move toward a low-carbon future that relies on multiple, variable energy sources, we should be wary of sinking big capital into single-source projects that look an awful lot like the old "fires and wires" model.
Think: did you leave a light on this morning? What if you could pull up your homepage and find out, right now?
As I wrote about last fall, companies from IBM and GE to startups are getting excited about green IT: Managing natural resources using computing intelligence. In the electricity industry, this means "smart grids" that distribute power more efficiently, avoiding peak loads, and home-based smart meters and software to help people measure and control demand in real-time. The Obama stimulus package would provide 40 million US Homes with the meters, but consumers still need a system to see and analyze the information. That's where Google comes in.
Google PowerMeter, now in internal testing, hooks up with smart meters to provide simple, clear realtime graphs of electricity use. You can post the gadget on your iGoogle homepage and share with friends to encourage competition. Studies show that simply seeing your home energy use can lead to savings of 5 to 15 %.
Besides promoting environmental goodness, Google obviously sees an opportunity to enter new markets here. They're investing with smart grid companies, and advocating with state and federal government for open standards and protocols to keep the market free for software solutions like PowerMeter, that are not controlled by utilities. They've partnered with GE and are holding a Smart Grid event together in DC on the 17 (GE ran a cute, if puzzling, Smart Grid ad as their first-ever Superbowl commercial).
By putting more information and thus power in the hands of consumers, the potential is to disrupt utilities' monopoly over the energy industry, the same way the Internet disrupted telecom and media ten years ago. Which makes this a real power move for Google.
MyRichUncle was an intriguing startup student loan company with an innovative, white-knight approach when I wrote about them in the 2006 Fast Company 50.
When I talked to them, the two 20-something founders seemed cocky, but sincere. They believed they could bypass the punitive terms and high-pressure sales tactics used by other student lenders in favor of better analytics to predict students' chances of repayment, and that they could build customer loyalty through transparency. They gained a higher profile in 2007 when they took out a full page ad in The New York Times to publicize the shady collusion between college financial aid officers and other student loan companies. Lenders like Sallie Mae often offered colleges kickbacks and sweeteners in exchange for inclusion on "preferred lender" lists. The ad campaign helped fuel a large-scale investigation into these practices by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, which led in turn to some federal policy crackdowns, including subsidy cuts to lenders.
But the student loan market today looks very different than in 2007, when it saw 27% annual growth. Throughout those years of growth, federal and private student loans were heavily repackaged and securitized just like home loans and credit card debt. So in the face of the credit crisis, 168 lenders have pulled out of the program. So-called "subprime students" especially at community and for-profit schools, are having trouble getting federal or private student loans, and all students are seeing fewer discounts on loans. More student loan defaults may be looming as the economy sheds jobs. And the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve have quietly authorized up to a $260 billion bailout for the student loan industry, separate from the $700 billion bailout we've all heard so much about.
MyRichUncle won't see any of that money. They had trouble raising capital as the market got tighter, stopped making new loans, and today, declared bankruptcy. As if they didn't have enough trouble, it came out in December that one of their former employees allegedly embezzled $2.3 million from their accounts. Troy Hill, of Jersey City, blew much of the cash on several Mercedes, bling from Jacob the Jeweler, and two coffeehouse franchises.
The student loan market is definitely not getting any more clean or transparent in this atmosphere of scarcity and panic. In this environment, it's a tough time to be the nice guys.
A German 
Pasadena's 
Here's a new approach to teaching financial literacy: a video game in which you play the business manager of a free-spending celebrity, trying to satisfy her wish list while keeping her out of the red.
