Not sure if you caught Obama’s speech today as he signed the new stimulus bill, but he talked at length about the emphasis his administration is placing on modernizing the country’s electrical grid, which he pointed out is simply too antiquated to handle needs of an economy based on renewable energy.  ”[It's like] using 19th century and 20th century technologies to battle 21st century problems, like climate change and energy security,” he said. Well, a colleague [...]

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In the past, natural resource conservation came down to the capacity of an authoritative, centralized body in a geographic territory to monitor and control the exploitation of a given resource, whether forests, minerals or fisheries. Said regulators would issue permits for exploitation, often acting from a distance and on the basis of very sparse and intermittent data about the sustainability of those resource stocks (see study on Canada’s failure to regulate cod stocks on the [...]

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I’ve been working on our follow-up to Wikinomics and came across this nice quote in the transcript from my recent interview with Larry Smarr: “Having a wiki world, and having an ability to instantaneously set up mass collaboration, you can solve problems on a time scale that’s going to matter. So if we start having a bird flu pandemic, or if global warming continues to accelerate, we may not have the luxury of what I [...]

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking to Ken Eklund, a freelance writer and game designer, and the creator of a fascinating Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called World Without Oil. As the world grapples with climate change and other global issues, we both agreed that interactive gaming experiences could play a vital role in engaging the world’s citizens in the process of finding solutions. If you haven’t heard of or experienced an [...]

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It seems the timing of my earlier post was somewhat fortuitous as NESTA (the UK-based National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts) has launched a £1 million contest to find the brightest ideas to fight climate change. The Big Green Challenge, as they call it, is intended to stimulate the search for “Eureka moments” for reducing carbon emissions. The top ten finalists will receive £20,000 to help put their idea into practice. The lion’s share [...]

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Don and I have been ruminating over the potential to develop the equivalent of the human genome project for climate change and would like your input on the issue. An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented. Thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and [...]

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I doubt anyone who has watched Fox news recently will find the content of this YouTube video particularly surprising. Nevertheless, it reminds me of a conversation I was having a yesterday with a few New Paradigm colleagues about the Bush administration’s concerted attack on science. This attack is now well documented (see The Scientist, subs only unfortunately) and includes not just climate science, but everything from sex education to stem cell research. If you’re going [...]

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New Paradigm colleague Paul Artiuch just tipped me off about this amazing new app on Google Earth. Google has teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create awareness of the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. Darfur, which has been labeled by the U.S. as the first genocide of the century, has seen over 200 000 deaths and 2.5 million displaced since the start of the conflict in 2003. The initiative, [...]

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Virgin’s Richard Branson has joined forces with Al Gore to launch an innovation challenge to find new approaches for reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The goal is to find an efficient way of removing one billion tones of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually – for ten years. Innovators have 5 years to make a submission. The winner will receive $5 million up front with another $20 million after the ten year period. [...]

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Climate change policy has been in the news a lot recently with the United Kingdom set to release its report on the economic costs of climate change today. I’ve had a chance to read the highlights and find myself increasingly convinced that we have reached a tipping point in a decades-long campaign for a more environmentally-sustainable economy. I’ve long felt that we need to reinvent the economy around a set of policies, practices, technologies, and [...]

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