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Green City

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:00:00 +0000

San Francisco has made great progress towards becoming a “Green City”. Voluntary programs like “Green Business” that encourage businesses to take proactive actions that are good for their bottomline and the environment, is just another example of the city’s innovative approaches towards greening. Mayor Gavin Newsom talks with Dana Goodyear on what it means to be green in politics and in the world.

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About Gavin Newsom:
Gavin Newsom was born October 10, 1967 to the Honorable Judge William Newsom and Tessa Newsom. He grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Santa Clara University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 2005, Newsom earned an honorable mention as one of Time Magazine’s Best Big City Mayors and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

As San Francisco’s youngest mayor in 100 years, Gavin Newsom has brought fresh ideas and renewed energy to the City and County. He has earned a reputation as an innovator on issues ranging from homelessness to the environment, healthcare to education.

Simple designs that could save millions of lives

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal.

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About Amy Smith:
Mechanical engineer Amy Smith’s approach to problem-solving in developing nations is refreshingly common-sense: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith, working with her students at MIT, has come up with several useful tools, including an incubator that stays warm without electricity, a simple grain mill, and a tool that converts farm waste into cleaner-burning charcoal.

The inventions have earned Smith three prestigious prizes: the B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, the MIT-Lemelson Prize, and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Her course, “Design for Developing Countries,” is a pioneer in bringing humanitarian design into the curriculum of major institutions. Going forward, the former Peace Corps volunteer strives to do much more, bringing her inventiveness and boundless energy to bear on some of the world’s most persistent problems.

Life at 30,000 feet

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:00:00 +0000

When Richard Branson was at school, his headmaster predicted he would wind up either a millionaire or in jail. Since then, he’s done both. He talks about the ups and the downs of his career, from his multibillionaire success to his multiple near-death experiences, from Virgin’s line of spacecraft to the failure of the Virgin condom. He also reveals some of his (very surprising) motivations.

About Richard Branson:
He’s ballooned across the Atlantic, floated down the Thames with the Sex Pistols, and been knighted by the Queen. His megabrand, Virgin, is home to more than 250 companies, from gyms, gambling houses and bridal boutiques to fleets of planes, trains and limousines. The man even owns his own island.

And now Richard Branson is moving onward and upward into space (tourism): Virgin Galactic’s Philippe Starck-designed, Burt Rutan-engineered spacecraft are slated to start carrying passengers into the thermosphere in 2009, at $200,000 a ticket.

Branson also has a philanthropic streak. He’s pledged the next 10 years of profits from his transportation empire (an amount expected to reach $3 billion) to the development of renewable alternatives to carbon fuels. And then there’s his Virgin Earth Challenge, which offers a $25 million prize to the first person to come up with an economically viable solution to the greenhouse gas problem.

Winning the Oil Endgame

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions.

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About Amory Lovins:
Amory Lovins was worried (and writing) about energy long before global warming was making the front — or even back — page of newspapers. Since studying at Harvard and Oxford in the 1960s, he’s written dozens of books, and initiated ambitious projects — cofounding the influential, environment-focused Rocky Mountain Institute; prototyping the ultra-efficient Hypercar — to focus the world’s attention on alternative approaches to energy and transportation.

His critical thinking has driven people around the globe — from world leaders to the average Joe — to think differently about energy and its role in some of our biggest problems: climate change, oil dependency, national security, economic health, and depletion of natural resources.

Lovins offers solutions as well. His book and site Winning the Oil Endgame shows how all US oil use can be eliminated by 2040. Lovins has always focused on solutions that conserve natural resources while also promoting economic growth; Texas Instruments and Wal-Mart are just two of the mega-corporations he has advised on improving energy efficiency.

Why can’t we “grow” new energy?

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Juan Enriquez offers a glimpse of some ground-breaking research to explore the potential of bioenergy. Our current energy sources — coal, oil, gas — are ultimately derived from ancient plants — they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently as we grow wheat? (Less than a month after this talk, his company announced a process to do just that.).

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About Juan Enriquez:
A broad thinker who studies the intersection of science, business and society, Juan Enriquez has a talent for bridging disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. The founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, Enriquez has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter’s marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world’s oceans.

Formerly CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation and chief of staff for Mexico’s secretary of state, Enriquez played a role in reforming Mexico’s domestic policy and helped negotiate a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. He is chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a research and investment firm helping to fund new genomics firms. The Untied States of America, his latest book, looks at the forces threatening America’s future as a unified country.