Biomimicry and the use of Nature's wisdom is alive.

Check out this great article about the use of fungi as an alternative to Styrofoam [crosses fingers and hisses].
Excerpts:
What if mushroom roots could bind natural substrates into a sturdy, lightweight material? It could ultimately replace the Styrofoam packing materials that are ubiquitous in most ( Read more... )

A great article has been posted on Scientific American about the real costs of carbon and carbon abatement.  It's not as economically crippling as many would have you believe:

If we could achieve a cost of $50 per ton of CO2, what would that do to energy prices? Every $10 per ton of CO2 increases the cost of electricity by 1 cent per kilowatt hour, ( Read more... )

If you're looking for work, I can not only say that energy efficiency is a great industry to get into, but it looks like it is growing pretty well.  According to the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (not exactly a neutral source, but one that knows the status of the industry), the energy efficiency industry grew by about 23% last year.

If you're ( Read more... )

Scientific American has published two great articles about our dysfunctional relationship with Mother Earth:

• The Deepening Crisis: When Will We Face the Planet's Environmental Problems?, which looks at our divided-we-fall approach to global environmentalism
• If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well?, which examines the kicking of ( Read more... )

I am listening to Marketplace, and this episode links a compelling argument of regulation to service.  It goes a little something like this: under a price-regulated market, competition falls not on price, but on non-price drivers, such as service.  In the airline marketplace, fixed prices meant that the only thing airlines had to compete with one ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Three executives from BP, Halliburton, and Transocean each blamed the other for the deaths of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon in their testimony before congress, yet they all walked out of the room and off to their private jets to fly off to their private mansions - but if three people had robbed a gas station and 11 people had died because one of ( Read more... )

My friend sent me this article over at treehugger.  It got me thinking a few things.

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

Firstly, the soundtrack on this is pretty good.  It sounds like Four Tet to me.  Secondly, In the non-business realm, I've been discussing content/depth versus image/shallowness.  In the article, they overtly admit that this is conceptual, image-based, a front.  It ( Read more... )

Excess and faith in markets have created our worst enemy as a society.  A permanent culling of profitable, long-term agricultural land being used for short-term profit.  This could be the end of society and is a perfect example of why capitalism is, in fact, not the best allocator of resources.  Instead, we have pavement and homes for pavement and ( Read more... )

I watch Sunday morning programmes often.  Top on my list is This Week on ABC.  In today's episode, George Will, the resident conservative, opens with the supremely fallacious assumption that cap and trade translates to higher energy prices.  The only way this happens is if he has no faith in market economics.

Under market theory (granted this is ( Read more... )