Business As Usual

Last Wednesday I attended a monthly seminar sponsored by Georgia Tech, one in their Clean Energy Speaker Series. Something remarkable happened.

This month's topic was Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management in Complex Times, featuring guest speakers from McKinsey and Co. and from the UPS. As usual they were informative as was the subsequent Q&A.

I enjoy attending these sessions to learn and to converse with others in my field. But as I said something truly remarkable happened this time.

We learned about the possibly dramatic effects that newly-opened natural gas reserves in underground shale deposits will have on the domestic production of electricity. That is interesting and useful to know, but not particularly remarkable.

Neither was our learning about UPS' reporting of Scope-3 CO2 emissions for their customers or the relative carbon intensiveness of various shipping modes such as air, truck, rail and ocean freight. Interesting but not remarkable.

And so it went.

Then in the midst of his presentation Ken Ostrowski, the McKinsey consultant, stated that "Unconstrained growth is not an option (due to the damage it does to the environment)." OK, that is obvious to many people but not to those who refuse to pay attention to such matters or are committed to less-rigorous standards for reality. Amongst this audience of clean-techies, it's a safe statement for him to make.

Now comes the remarkable part. Ostrowski shows a Powerpoint graph showing the projected growth of worldwide carbon dioxide releases into the atmosphere for the next twenty years should we do nothing to change our current habits and policies. The line climbs steadily throughout, a climb towards runaway global warming fueled by large increases in human population and a growing per-capita appetite for energy.

In other words it is suicide, if we believe what 98% of the world's climate scientists tell us.

Ostrowski's graph shows a second line showing how much we must curtail worldwide emissions so as to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million in 2030. 450 was the target that delegates to last year's failed international climate summit in Copenhagen attempted to negotiate.

Ostrowski's graph shows that to reach 450 ppm we need to reduce annual CO2 emissions by 14 gigatons by the year 2020, compared to the level we would be at if we continued on our present course. As a point of reference, he helpfully mentioned that 14 gigatons approximates the combined amount of CO2 emitted by the United States, China and India.

So we basically have 10 years to figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions as if we took three of the world's largest economies offline.

While you take a moment to savor this fact, also savor the fact that 450 ppm is a contrived target based less on scientific reasoning than on what most organizers of the Summit felt was politically achievable. At 450ppm, the Earth's surface warms an average of 2 degrees Celsius.

The specific effects of these 2 degrees currently elicits considerable speculation amongst climate experts, but suffice to say that our terrestrial home becomes much more, ahem, severe than it is today.

The most remarkable thing that happened at last week's Clean Energy Seminar is that no one freaked out, ran for the exits, found Jesus, or even shed a tear. Ostrowski finished his Powerpoint talking about how this all translates into action and opportunity.

I'll continue on this blog next week to examine whether Ostrowski's claims hold any validity, and to delve further into the reasons why audience members like myself remained so calm.

As usual, thanks for reading and please stay in touch!

Apple's iPad: Good but not Great

One month ago I bought an Apple iPad with 3G wireless and 16GB of memory. I am pleased with it but also hope that Apple addresses some of its shortcomings in future software updates.

The iPad offers a mixture of portability, simplicity and versatility that makes it my new trusty companion for informing me, organizing me, preserving what my frail memory cannot, and entertaining me. In this way laptop computers have served me well for many, many years.

New tablet computers like the iPad offer an alternative to the laptop that affords more availability, convenience and plain fun. These devices have no keyboards, no moving parts and truly place its operating system in the background, where it belongs. In this regard, I can turn my iPad on and off faster than any laptop or even any cell phone I have used.

The iPad device presents a sleek, solid feel. The multi-touch display responded well to my fingers and provides very high quality graphics with vibrant color rendering. I like using the on-screen keyboard and can type almost as fast as I can on my laptop.

The only shortcoming of the iPad device is in its lacking a camera. One can be sure that Apple's competitors will not miss this opportunity to one-up the iPad by including a camera.

Surfing the Web on the iPad is as easy as pushing the "on" button, which as I mentioned before instantly puts the iPad into service. It establishes Wi-Fi and 3G wireless connections with ease.

The iPad comes preloaded with a stripped-down version of Safari, Apple's web browser. The browser lacks so much capability as to make it barely acceptable. Topping its list of shortcomings is the lack of support for Adobe's Flash plug-in.

This makes a visiting many animated web sites a frustrating experience of "sorry." Safari also does not allow the user to search for text within a page. While one can open multiple pages at once, navigating amongst them is clumsy without the availability of tabs. Safari's controls for navigating forwards and backwards through recently visited pages is also very limited.

I have not yet tried any of the other web browsers available through the App Store. I give the iPad's version of Safari a "D."

The other productivity apps that come preloaded with the iPad are unexceptional. None of them support rich text formatting which makes composing email messages particularly dull.

The iWork apps, Apple's office productivity suite, are where the iPad demonstrates its mo-jo. The word processor (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers) and presentation (Keynote) apps offer plenty of power and function at the bargain price of $9.99 apiece.

The iWork apps can store and share files through Apple's iWork.com and MobileMe cloud services. I wish they'd add Google Docs to that list.

To be sure, the iPad has a ways to go before one could consider it an outright replacement of laptop and desktop computers. You still cannot print from it. It has little capacity for managing files or running multiple programs at once.

Apple promises to address these shortcomings in an update to the iPad's operating system (iOS 4.2) due out any day now. It will remain to be seen how well they do with it.

Excepting the lack of a camera, all of the shortcomings I have cited can be remedied by Apple with new software. Apple clearly has demonstrated once again its desire to exceed its customers' expectations, but their desires may get upended by their troubling tendency to fight with the Adobes and the Googles of the world.

I am more comfortable buying my technology from companies that play nice with others in the belief that customer choices guide future market innovations better than when a technology giant like Apple plays hardball with its perceived competitors.

For those interested in buying a tablet computer, I think you should wait to see what new products hit the market in time for the upcoming holiday shopping season. Toshiba and Microsoft/HP have already introduced their respective "iPad killers" and stumbled, but they won't be the last to try.

With the iPad in its current state, Apple has certainly left the door open. I am most interested to see what Google might have in store for us.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!