The Realist Idealist

“The current race is to see who will control renewable energy technologies, and we are in the race,” Algerian Energy Minister Chakib Khelil told reporters. “We have the human and financial resources, and we have the will.”
Minister Khelil’s statement was made in the recent announcement that Algeria is undertaking a massive initiative to generate enough [...]

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The buying power of the casual consumer can be harnessed to impact the environmental actions of business. We can get companies to make choices that are sustainable and transformative. And we can do it with the carrot …not the stick.
Watch this video (highly recommend the longer version) to see exactly how it works.

CarrotMob is [...]

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My programmatic highlight of SXSW Interactive a few weeks ago, by far, was the keynote address given by Jane McGonigal - a noted game designer and games researcher, specializing in pervasive games and alternate reality games.
In all honesty, before the speech, I wasn’t in any way interested in games or what Jane had to say. [...]

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http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
As we all know Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So in true realist-idealist fashion Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first [...]

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Just finished this TIME article
The Clean Energy Scam
Without giving my own personal views yet, I’d really love to know others thoughts on it and get some discussion going.   I know some of you are ardent biofuel supporters.  Some of you have even raised vast sums of money to invest in biofuel infrastructure.
Some of [...]

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Yesterday, I got sent a press release about the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based organization I’d never heard of dedicated to preserving a record of the Internet and to increasing access to the Internet. This week, the little known organization began offering free internet service to public housing projects at speeds far greater than [...]

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I just learned about this unusual day - PARK(ing) Day - that takes place annually in San Fracisco as a project of the Rebar Group.
(thanks, Meg!)
Pretty awesome. A great example of thinking a bit (or far) outside the box and making something (actually) happen around it.
http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/parking/index.html

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Sitting here in Red Rock coffee shop in downtown Mountain View, CA - the fabled home to tech giants like Google and innumerable startups - you can almost feel the innovation pulsing through your veins. It permeates the air. You suck it in with every breath.  Like politics in DC.
I’m in a chair [...]

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