This guy has a pretty cool little electric car, eh? My goodness. And when he drove off, there wasn`t a sound. Absolute. Total. Silence. I want one.

 

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Japan airline in world first 'camelina' biofuel test flight: "Today is an extremely important day for Japan Airlines, for aviation, and for the environment. The demonstration flight brings us ever closer to finding a greener alternative to traditional petroleum-based fuel. When biofuels are produced in sufficient amounts to make them commercially viable, we hope to be one of the first airlines in the world to start powering our aircraft using them." -- JAL president Haruka Nishimatsu

World`s first. First. You know, I`m so used to hearing the Japanese described as laggards by the uninformed that it`s nice to read otherwise. JAL, along with Boeing and Pratt and Whitney, flew a 747 on kerosene jet oil mixed with plants and alga. I wonder what that tasted like. Can seaweed, miso, and nato be next? More on Nishimatsu here and here. He seems to be an executive with a clue.


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While Detroit Slept: "The first Renault and Nissan electric cars are scheduled to hit Denmark and Israel in 2011, when the whole system should be up and running. On Tuesday, Japan?s Ministry of Environment invited Better Place to join the first government-led electric car project along with Honda, Mitsubishi and Subaru. Better Place was the only foreign company invited to participate, working with Japan?s leading auto companies, to build a battery swap station for electric cars in Yokohama, the Detroit of Japan."

Great to see the Japanese auto industry continuing to innovate by engaging with Better Place in Silicon Valley for this electric car project.

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China Asks Japan to Hold Climate Forum, Seeks Clean Technology: "China said it wants Japan to set up a forum in Tokyo with developers of clean technologies this year to help the world's fastest-growing major economy find ways to reduce carbon emissions." -- Bloomberg

This is good news. A cleaner China means a cleaner Japan because we get the pollution here too. And it's also good for Japan to start asserting itself in the efficient management of energy a lot more.

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With gas prices rising, Americans are finally checking out the trains and buses -- Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit -- to get to work. "Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation,? said Joseph J. Giulietti, executive director of [The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority]. ?But in the last year, and last several months in particular, we have seen exactly that."

Cool. And that's with prices just a tad under $4 a gallon. Imagine what will happen when it goes to $6 a gallon? I'm sure behavior will change even more. The US is designed around the car, though, so it will take some time to get really good mass transit systems in place. Until then, Americans will pay or be inconvenienced. I had to laugh, though, because the lead photograph in the article doesn't quite fit the text in the first paragraph. It says something about "standing-room-only" or something. Ok, the people in the image are standing, but really, there is a massive amount of room on that train. Try this in Tokyo. And I'm told that's nothing compared to some places in India and China.

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Why Bother?: "The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us ... and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we?re living our lives suggests we?re not really serious about changing ? something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking ? passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists ? that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It?s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it." -- Michael Pollan, New York Times

That's my favorite paragraph in this very long but very good article in the NY Times. It articulates clearly the need take action as an individual, to set an example for others, and to not always look to some so-called leader to do something. Act. Take individual responsibility to lead yourself. Do something. That's the fastest way to make your point.


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Here's a piece I did for the September 1995 issue of Animals Magazine exploring the gigantic challenges of running a critical care veterinary hospital in the third world -- a world where families literally depend on the health and safety of their work animals. The hospital profiled in the article -- The American Fondouk -- is sponsored by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), a non-profit Animal-protection organization in Boston, and Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston, one of the largest and most sophisticated animal hospitals in the world. The MSPCA was also the publisher of Animals Magazine, where I worked at the time as an editor.

What was nice about this piece was that it was the only feature article in Animals Magazine at the time that was used specifically for fund-raising purposes. It was an experiment. We conceived it, wrote it, reprinted it, re-packaged it, and created direct-mail marketing campaigns for it specifically to raise money for the Fondouk itself. We never did that with any of the other news or feature articles in the magazine. It worked out well, though, and brought in a few grand in the first few weeks. Not bad. That money goes a long way in Fez, Morocco. Although the article was used to raise money, I didn't change how I wrote the piece at all. It was just packaged a little differently and positioned more aggressively, just as any good marketing piece would be.

There was always a push-pull aspect to working at Animals Magazine, since it was published by a non-profit, and everything we did was designed to raise money for the MSPCA and Angell Memorial Animal hospital. But Animals Magazine was also a money making venture -- we were trying to make it that way, anyway -- with advertisement and subscription campaigns. So, we wanted to remain as close to so-called journalistic ethics as possible. Advocacy journalism is probably a better way to put it. And I have no problem with that term, either, because I don't believe the mainstream media is independent or objective in any way whatsoever. We were simply telling stories with a point of view, just like everyone else who ever picked up a pen.


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The Estrogen Imitators was a highly charged piece to research, write, and defend in the fall of 1994. The topic involved how chemicals in the environment mimic the female hormone estrogen and cause serious reproductive issues in wild animals -- sometimes to the point of actually changing the sex of an animal, if you can believe it. Utterly amazing and terrifying for the biologists studying this phenomenon. It's bad for the animals, sure, but what about the implications for humans? After all, we live in the same environment, don't we? That's what I explored in this article. I interviewed a bunch of biologists and was, quite frankly, shocked at what I found. I was equally unnerved by the reaction of the chemical industry, though. They were not at all happy with the article, which I expected, I suppose. They criticized me after the piece was written, but they had little interest in contributing to the article during its development. Imagine that. Then they wrote a letter to the editor taking shots at me. So, naturally, I responded in kind and around we went. I'll have to dig out the back and forth and post "conversation" too.


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This was the first piece on zoopharmacognosy I wrote way back in 1992. I did it as an intern at Animals Magazine while going to Northeastern at night in Boston. It was part of my final project for school, too. It only took three drafts, but it led to a promotion at the magazine, which put me on the staff, it peaked the interests of an editor at Technology Review, and it was also cited as a source in a letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal (which I'll post here eventually). I never thought I'd see my name in such a prestigious medical publication as the British Medical Journal, but there it is. Pretty cool. I just tripped over the reference while doing some research for another article, actually. A happy surprise for sure.

Looking back at this article after all these years, I think it holds up pretty well. I'd only change a few things, but then again I rarely have the desire to re-write stuff. I remember arguing with the editors for another page of space, but this particular issue in the magazine was too full and I was too junior to get that extra page. So I had to cut. Damn. It's always painful to cut your own stuff. That's why we have editors, I suppose. I do miss writing articles like this, though. I had great fun interviewing the biologists who study these animals who use medicinal plans.



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This is the toughest thousand word article I've ever written -- The Monkey's Medicine Chest. For science writers this article would be just a straightforward little news piece, but for me at the time it was a very big deal. MIT's Technology Review is a huge fish to catch for a beginning writer (as I was back in 1993). But what made it even better was that they called me and asked me to write the article after reading a similar piece I had written for Animals Magazine (which I'll also post here as well). That was my first lesson in the power of publishing and generating a conversation about an issue.

The topic of how endangered wild animals seek out and use rare medicinal plants to heal themselves (zoopharmacognosy) fascinated me (and still does), since it was an emerging field in science at the time and could have dramatic implications for human health and our global environment. Imagine wild animals teaching domesticated humans how to cure some of our nastiest diseases. My conclusion? Follow the animals. We'd be much better off if we'd just stop killing the animals, their medicinal plants, and the habitats in which both live. Perhaps some day. This article was reprinted in several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and a couple of other similar-sized US daily publications.



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Could India`s new car represent a disruptive innovation? Tata Nano - world's cheapest new car is unveiled in India. Cheap. Good mileage. Introduced into an utterly gigantic market hungry to industrialize. Can foreign car companies match this? But I wonder if the world has enough oil for every person in India (and China, for that matter) to own a car. The west is probably not a very good example of resource allocation in this instance. The west is also probably not in a very good position to preach about this, too.


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I found this bug quietly climbing a tree earlier today. I have no idea what he is but he seemed like an interesting character.

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Doha and Dalian: "'Demand for oil has grown 22 percent in the U.S. since 1990. China's oil demand has grown nearly 200 percent in this same period,' Margo Oge, director of the Environmental Protection Agency's office of transportation and air quality, told the Tianjin China Green Car conference that I attended. 'By 2030, the global thirst for oil is forecast to increase by another 40 percent if we maintain business as usual.' Such an appetite would devour every incremental green initiative we make." -- Thomas Friedman

Friedman concludes that a "transformational technological breakthrough" is needed in the energy space to counter the massive growth in demand for oil in both established and emerging markets. Most would agree with that. And an environmentally friendly one would be nice, too. But for the immediate future, it seems the world is intent on sucking out all the oil first. Friedman doesn't mention nuclear, but perhaps that ought to be an option as well.

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Firms' Own Data Centers are Their "Green" Showrooms: "Sun reduced its server count to 1,240 from 2,177 and its storage hardware count to 225 from 738, all while achieving a fourfold increase in computing power. The upgrade reduced Sun's electrical use to 500 kilowatts, from 2.2 million megawatts, and earned Sun a US$1 million rebate from the local electrical utility, Silicon Valley Power." -- CIO Magazine

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$100 Oil Price May Be Months Away, Say CIBC, Goldman: "The failure of near-record fuel prices to restrain global oil demand growth is what concerns [Jeff] Rubin, chief strategist at the brokerage unit of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Toronto. 'Prices have doubled, and demand is alive and well and accelerating,' Rubin said in a July 18 interview. 'The argument that rising prices would choke demand and bring increased output is falling to the wayside.'" -- Bloomberg

People seem to have plenty of money to burn on oil, I guess ...

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