Perpetual Innovation

Category: sustainability

  • Why Won’t Yahoo! Let Employees Work From Home? – Businessweek

    Why Won’t Yahoo! Let Employees Work From Home? – Businessweek:

    Oh boy, Mayer is gonna cause a lot of shake up  here with her everyone-has-to-travel-to-work policy.

    Apparently (Today Show) she now as a nursery set up next door to her office for her new convenience. That helps new parents, maybe, but not the ones with kids in school or those people who live a longer way from the office.

    But Mayer is shaking it up.

    There has long been the debate about the down side of work-at-home (WAH). And a tech leader like Yahoo  might just be a place to face-to-face interaction that is lost from WAH.

    But, I fear that making everyone drive to work is a major setback to telecommuting efforts that are so very beneficial to the efforts of sustainability.

    Studies show that the true costs of telecommuting are far closer to $40,000 per year than to the $5,000 cost of gas. Most of that savings goes to the employer. Closer to $45,000 if you want to include the less-tangible costs of externalities such as infrastructure and greenhouse gases (GHGs).

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  • Advocacy: Sustainability a 3 part harmony series

    Advocacy: Sustainability:

    Check out this 3 part series on Sustainability.

    Part 1 talks about “What if they are right?”

    Part 2 addresses “How we liver our lives?”

    Part 3 takes on “A plan for the interim period?”

    Basically, what are we gonna do right here, right now.

    These are pretty long articles so sit back with a good late’ and let it rip.

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  • DOW’s Solutionism. !:-)

    Dow Solutionism:
    This is a very cool concept from DOW.

    Solutionism… Kinda a cure for consumerism, where it’s all about how much you can consume in your lifetime.

    Maybe this should be one of the cures for consumerism, one of the great Social Irresponsibilities?

    Interesting idea. Work backwards from each problem — and the associated solutions to them — into helping address the root cause of the original problem.

    Generally we tend to symptom solutions, not real solutions.

    Pretty cool ads for greening up the Olympics as well.:-)

    Solutionism. I like it.
    www.DOW.com/Solutionism/
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  • Earth Day Number 1 (of 4) Wellness… Gleaning feeds the needy | Highlands Today

    Gleaning feeds the needy | Highlands Today: “Gleaning feeds the needy”

    Earth Day… Basic four things to do. Right now.

    Number 1. Health and wellness. People can’t be healthy, and they certainly can’t be productive, if they don’t have the basics of health and living conditions. Just drinkable water and basic sanitation is a critical issue. This combined with the lack of basic nutrition results in major health and wellness issues for approximately 2 billion of the world’s population.
    ToDo: One of the things that can be done here is to go on missions to developing countries to help them learn and develop the sanitary and development skills. You will want to develop your own survival skills first in a programs such as the HEART program at Warner University.
    ToDo: Consider helping with composting, urban gardens and gleaning projects. Gleaning, as mentioned in the bible, is where volunteers are allowed to go through the fields after they have been harvested to pick the edible — but not necessarily pretty — fruit and vegetables. (See Gleaning For The World (www.GFTW.org), End Hunger (www.EndHunger.org), gleaning in Florida (this article). 

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  • A Year for the Record Books | Planet3.0

    A Year for the Record Books | Planet3.0:

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    This to us from MacDonald from GreenDistrict…
    It is one of several places to start rounding up the status of sustainability (gain &) loss for 2011 and start to plan for 2012.
    As we start to organize the (un)balanced scorecard for an unsustainable year of horrific sustainability numbers…
    ?What would be a good summary for the year, even if the summary has a lot of bad news in it?
    Non-Decisions might sum it up. Economically, you have the dysfunction of the US and EU. Efforts are on to eliminate the EPA from federal and state governments. Imagine a budget bill to keep the federal government running for the first two months of 2012 that contains efforts to stop energy efficient light bulbs.
    (Light bulbs will have to be 25% more efficient is basically the law. The obvious replacement could be — but doesn’t have to be — compact florescent lights that save about $20 to $35 over the life of each bulb, PLUS a huge savings in electric energy which is currently being produced 50% from ain’t-no-such-thing-as-clean coal. Europe did it a couple years ago. The arguments against the new law use obsolete and unfounded facts.)
    Globally, climate response talks have been pretty pathetic since Copenhagen (Dec 2010) and there’s been a lot of talks on several continents since then. Without the biggest polluters in the world on board — China, USA & India — the whole thing disintegrates. Now with Canada jumping off the bandwagon that means about 50% of the world’s pollution and emissions will go on with little or no impediments. Apparently, the idea now is to proceed with the old Kyoto protocol while a permanent agreement is being reached.
    But, what’s almost as scary as the global-warming/climate-change metrics that came in this year, is the development of yet another massive UN organization. But this one would, by its very nature, have to have a long reach into the countries who are members. Big bucks to help countries that will be most impacted by droughts, floods, etc. This would include island countries that are about to become much smaller as the sea levels rise. I wonder if Key West will qualify. (By century end, the Keys should be 25% to 50%+ under water.)
    At this point, Nuclear (ouch!) and NatGas looking a whole lot better than they probably should. NatGas is sooo much cleaner than (dirty or relatively dirty) coal, and it’s not destabilizing to the world economies (wars, trade balances and shifts of wealth to less-than stable countries).
    For some reason, you would think that the “sustainability” measure would provide self-evident solutions. If fuel is not renewable… then it can’t be used forever… then you should make plans now to replace it… and continue to do so… until that fuel is no longer needed and totally replaced by renewable sources.
    Bloomberg puts it well for the whole of a business (or any organization): “If you don’t have a sustainability plan, you don’t have a business plan.” See http://www.bloomberg.com/sustainability/ 
    Now, if only there were good private sector solutions to some of these problems of sustainability!… Hmmm…