As the new week begins, we bring to you this compilation of Tweets and stories harvested during our internet fishing expedition over the past week. Have a great week ahead!
— The Editors
1. Winner of the week’s top comedy award:
2. Nasa, via the NYT, brings perspective to Pakistan’s flooding woes:
3. Biomass more efficient than ethanol
Biomass converted to electricity could achieve 80 per cent more “miles per acre” than the same material converted to ethanol, a group of United States researchers announced last year.
As an example, the study by researchers from several US universities found that a small SUV powered by bioelectricity could travel nearly 14,000 highway miles on the net energy produced from an acre of switchgrass, while a comparable internal combustion vehicle could only travel about 9000 miles on the highway.
Average mileage for city and highway driving would be 15,000 miles for a bioelectric SUV and 8000 miles for an internal combustion vehicle.
In addition, the researchers calculated that carbon offsets are on average more than 100 per cent larger for the bioelectricity than for the ethanol pathway.
However, the researchers warned that transportation and offsets are only part of the equation: issues like water consumption, air pollution, and economic costs also need to be considered when reviewing future energy policy.
View the report at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5930/1055
4. The 2010 edition of WWF’s Living Planet Report presents new analyses on the health of our only planet. It shows populations of tropical species are plummeting while humanity’s demands on natural resources are sky-rocketing. At this dates we are using 50% more natural resources than the earth can sustain.
5. Analysis finds that companies supplying clean energy products to India–including solar lanterns and energy efficient cooking stoves–to the rural market, have seen annual gross revenue grow by an average of 36 per cent per year since 2004. (Via IAP News Update)
6. Finally, but not least, a thought about the type of entrepreneurs we need to make a difference in sustainable and efficient biomass combustion solutions for the BoP.
Borrowed from an FT column by Stefan Stern:
What does the future have in store for us? Short of some fantastic scientific innovation that uncovers vast new sources of clean and sustainable energy, it seems likely that the world faces many severe and related problems.
As Rich Lyons, the dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, points out, the straight line extrapolations on a number of important graphs lead you to a pretty scary place.
Over the next few decades the earth’s population looks set to climb to about 9bn. Temperatures and sea levels are rising. But we may not have enough habitable land, water, energy or food to cope with these changed circumstances. Future healthcare costs in a world of greatly increased longevity are daunting. See it human. The outlook is bad.
That is why Haas is completely revamping its MBA syllabus. Business as usual is not even close to being good enough any more. Haas wants its graduates to be people who will do something about those scary straight line extrapolations, slowing if not necessarily reversing the trends. Dean Lyons calls this sort of activity “path-bending leadership”, because it will bend that 45-degree line back nearer to the horizontal.
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