Carbon neutral is a stupid idea

Paul Gilding is an environmental business expert from Australia. his view is that we have a 'very big problem" which can only be tackled by changing human behaviour. He suggests we need to eliminate CO2 emissions and material growth consumption.

 

Perhaps Paul is a pessimist -one who is never wrong- "...see i told you so" or "oops It is not as bad as I thought".

 

I prefer a different model. We cant go on emitting CO2 and carbon neutral is a stupid idea. We need to become carbon negative. To do this we need new fuels and energy sources and newer break through technologies to make this happen.

 

Humans are very bright. We need incentives, creative and innovative thinking, economic incentives, life style incentives (as opposed to environmental),research and industrial manufacturing conditions to do this..

 

Realistically material growth is not going to slow but it may be different.  We have gone through some interesting cycles of product size. for example large radios and record players to CD players to larger Boom boxes and now back to miniaturisation with Ipods and MP3 players. Cars similarly started off small, became big then small, then big again and now small and even ultra small (the new PUMA). There are many examples where energy is saving and CO2 emissions can be reduced or eliminated.

 

Economic instruments such as carbon trading just make it more expensive for "dirty" industries to operate. With an increase in the price of carbon credits business will find it cheaper to reduce emissions. A similar example works in cities where by some industries are charged on the level of their BOD discharge into sewerage systems when this became too expensive they invested in onsite treatment or controlled the amount of BOD being used.

 

Yes humans are bright and good decision makers when we need to be. What we need is the right incentives to do so. Mind you by changing our values and adjusting our behaviours can help as well. we just need the right framework of incentives to make it work.

Robert Heller

From Robert Heller: Culture shock and the cults 

In 1990 I had published a futuristic book called Culture Shock: The Office Revolution. 

The book was commissioned by Rank Xerox, and I have to confess that, before I started work, I had no clear knowledge of where the modern office might be heading as it absorbed all the frenetic developments in all the Silicon Valleys and all the organisations that were entering the Silicon Age. And in one flash of personal experience I had a revelation of revolution.

In a Rank office in High Holborn I was shown a Chinese-born whiz-kid who was at that moment metaphorically crossing the Atlantic, going coast-to-coast to LA, and entering a colleague’s PC file to add input of his own.

My conclusion was obvious. The networked PC was going to conquer the world. Collaborative working in particular had a whole new meaning and potential - and the subsequent advances have been huge on all fronts. 

Too many didn’t look in 1990: just as many didn’t understand the significance of the World Wide Web when it was marvellously launched three years after my book; and many still aren’t looking in 2008. Deep trouble indeed.

Wall Street’s dot.com mania and nightmare was directly linked to ignorance of the real revolution. The very same people who sneered at Amazon because it made no money for so long rushed to invest in the day-dreams of con-men who lavished their venture capital on themselves up-front; paid insane amounts for ‘hits’ and ‘eyeballs’; and thus built up an unreal clientele. 

Not surprisingly, most of them failed. No more surprisingly, those companies which operated in the real world with real markets (like Amazon) went on with their real breakthroughs and won real rewards for their real and life-changing innovations.

As in the sub-prime massacre, competition had achieved total lunacy. The years from l990 were full of large disappointments (and vast ephemeral rewards) for worshippers of the two false gods, The Cult of Shareholder Value and The Cult of the Chief Executive. Both were naked invitations to maximise both the share price and the amounts which the hero boss could extract from the stock markets.

Despite the fiascos and financial scandals, managerial IT is actually much fitter for purpose than it was in 1990 or 2000 - as you would only expect. Those two Rank Xerox employees I found working together at a distance of 7,000 miles were forerunners of armies of collaborators, using shared electronic information to reshape their organisations and businesses.

The Office is anywhere and everywhere - we’re all home-workers now. Also, the workers’ knowledge of what’s actually happening inside the organisation and outside is much greater and obtained much faster. The new Cult is (or should be) that of Collaboration, which is where I found my enlightenment in 1990.

Quote

"No nonsense, no mucking around. Just get in there and do it. Once everything else is in place, just keep your eyes on the prize."
Sir Edmund Hillary 

Highway-capable electric ca

US automaker Tesla Motors unveiled Thursday its state-of-the-art five-seat sedan, billed as the world's first mass-produced, r. 

http://www.physorg.com/news157312107.html

Similarity and contrast

From Edward de Bono: 

There are similarity, difference and contrast. All three enter into the creative process. Our mental ability to use all of them improves our creativity because all three are needed, at different times, to move from one idea to another. 

Similarity usually works through concepts. Two things are similar if the operating concept is the same in both cases. Two things are similar if they are both expressions of the same concept. Traffic lights are similar to a traffic policeman because of the way they function and the value they provide. 

We could arrive at a different idea by moving to a ‘difference’ aspect. Traffic lights follow their own schedule. A traffic policeman follows his own estimations. A different idea would be to have traffic lights that counted the vehicles waiting to cross the junction and reacted directly to this count. 

So on one level the ideas are similar, while on another they are different. When we have an idea that works, we often look for an idea that is similar with regard to its value but perhaps different with regard to its nature. 

The great advantage of ‘similarity’ is that, if we know one idea does work, then it is likely that a similar idea will also work. That is not always the case, because there may indeed be similarity on one level but difference on another. 

At its strongest, a contrast can be an opposite. A random word exercise on supermarket shopping was given the word ‘hedgehog’. This suggested spikes.

From this came the idea that somehow spikes could be scattered around the shelves, so that when a customer picked up an item, that customer would be pricked by a spike.

From this, by way of a contrast jump, comes the idea that certain items would have a lottery reward attached to them. When the item was taken to the checkout, some reward would be given. The jump from pain to reward is a simple contrast jump. 

Contrasts force us to think and to look at things in a new way. We make the contrast deliberately and then look around to see what happens. 

Sometimes it is very important to note the difference between two ideas that seem similar. This noted difference may indicate differing values in the ideas. These different values may then be delivered by an entirely new idea. 

Seeking difference is a great motivator. 

The essence of creative thinking is the ability to move from one idea to another. The habits of similarity, contrast and difference are some of the ways of getting this movement.

5 big ideas

“5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done” - recording of The AppGap webinar now available

by Hylton Jolliffe

The major takeaways the discussion sought to explore:

How to automate what you hate

How going virtual can help

How being “social” at work is good for business

How to reframe what you do

And how to get your head in the cloud, i.e., move more work to the web

Talkfest about recession busting

There is a talkfest going on.

 All around us the new discussion is about recession busting. Listen to the radio, read the papers, watch TV everyone is turning away from the R word. 

The only good thing about this is we are at last getting some good news with the media now seeking to report this stuff. I wonder if it will continue when the R has been officially declared over. I doubt it.

 Pity journo’s and their bosses do not seek out good news all the time. But then does good news sell news? They say no, but why are they doing it now? It is helping to sell news now so lets encourage them to keep it up when times are good. 

Good news will create more good news and maybe the media will again become a focus to stimulate progress and ideas to help make our country greater.

 Watch this space!!