WSJ's "most intertwined politico-economic themes of the year"

In today's Morning Brief email, The Wall Street Journal's Joseph Schuman mostly asks questions about 2008, instead of trying to answer them. But after noting the theme of innovation (good for Apple, bad for mortgage financiers, missing for Bush in Iraq, except perhaps locally), then the pesky presidential question, and under the heading "More Key Questions" he makes a fairly definitive statement. It's our headline, which is only missing the subject: "Oil prices and the environmental effects of burning carbon fuels -- namely, global warming -- are likely to be..."

My question: when will the WSJ Editorial Board notice reality?

A sustainable gas station?

This might be the last place you'd look for green design, but why not? Gasoline or some kind of transportation fuel will be with us for a long time, and the places we have to stop to keep our personal transportation vehicles going are ubiquitous. BP alone has 25,000 worldwide. Hence, "Helios House" -- the first gas station built out of recycled and recyclable materials. Commissioned by BP, the oil company that is trying to appear greener than thou, the structure is built of concrete consisting of crushed, unrecyclable glass, with sinks and toilets of aluminum scrap, and covered with solar panels (BP brand, of course!). Visit it at the corner of Robertson and Olympic Boulevards in Los Angeles. About the station.

Replacing long-tube fluorescent lights

Well, this turned out to be easy, at least as far as you can get online (that is, without actually climbing up and replacing the bulbs). I simply Googled "replace long-tube fluorescent ceiling fixture compact fluorescent LED" -- since Google pays no attention to "stop" words -- and found Green Energy Management LLC, whose owner, Cort Cary, has apparently been in the energy saving light business for more than 30 years (according to the site). Long-tube fluorescents (okay, it took me a couple of wrong turns to learn the jargon "long-tube") apparently are also known as T-8, and LED versions save 75% of the energy used. Typical payback, per GEM, at least, is a year. What are you waiting for?

"Why Wal-Mart and P&G are disclosing greenhouse emissions--and you should too."

I admit, it's getting harder to find a publication that does not have some green to it. But still it warms the very cockles of my heart when I see business magazines covering and recommending climate-conscious action. Fast Company, for instance, has a column by David Roberts, who also writes for one of the original environmental publications, now on the web, grist.org. In the Dec 07/Jan 08 issue, Roberts notes that more and more companies are disclosing their sorry status --GHG-wise, voluntarily. In part, it's to establish green cred, which is an increasingly valuable part of a company's brand equity. But it's also "because it's always better to know than not to know." Such companies -- at least a few hundred so far-- will be ahead of the game come the nearly certain carbon market, and increased regulations.

But Roberts' most powerful argument is that "carbon emission...[is] gaseous evidence of inefficiency. It costs money to create carbon dioxide, so cutting emissions slashes costs."

I'm sure somebody's working on it

Remember your kingdoms of living things? Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria (and viruses)? Somehow I missed this, but in 1977 that view of more or less equal dominions was destroyed by Carl Woes, U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who used not morphology and eating habits but molecular biology to redraw the tree: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya -- everything with a nucleus. "In terms of gene content, humans and potatoes are more closely related than [these] two bacter are to each other -- one measure of bacterial diversity." ("The Undiscovered Planet" by Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007).

Don't worry, I have a point. But first:

And remember "culturing" bacteria on agar? Well, that's pretty meaningless too. It turns out that only a fraction, an infinitesimal fraction, of bacterial species will create those pretty colonies in that simple way. And get this: scientists knew this (vaguely) -- the "plate count paradox." No one told me about this! And I majored in biology...Anyway, it means that through a microscope one can see thousands of different species from a teaspoon of soil, but only a handful grow in the petri dish.

In 1990, Norman Pace took a gram of sediment from Yellowstone National Park, extracted the DNA, cloned it and inserted it into one type of bacterium he knew how to grow. He "discovered more diversity than we ever knew existed before," says Roberto Kolter, co-director of Harvard's five-year old Microbial Sciences Initiative.

"The world of animals is divided into 13 phyla (vertebrates, insects, etc.). In the microbial world, their equivalents are called, for the time being, 'deep-rooting branches.' In 1987, 13 of these big divisions were known in the bacterial domain...by 1997...36...By 2003, 53, by 2004 80 such divisions from which we couldn't cultivate even a single representative." Each of these deep-branching divisions is thought to represent millions, if not hundreds of millions of species. "That means there are lots of genes out there, and we have no clue what they are doing," Kolter says.

Okay, so what's the connection to fighting global warming? These hundreds of millions if not billions of genes have helped shape our planet's surface and climate. Perhaps we can enlist them to help us control the shaping we're doing. Crazy? Here's a clue that it might not be: renowned climate scientist and proselytizer for seriously practical solutions, Daniel Schrag, is on the steering committee of this new cross-disciplinary Microbial initiative, first of its kind.

What time is it? Time to act

Of course it's been time to act for decades, but if you haven't yet, why not start today? That's what I'm doing.

This blog will chart my own learning curve about the things my or any business can do to reduce energy use, reuse, prevent waste -- measure progress, and get others to hop on the anti-global warming bandwagon, both within your company and in your community.

I have questions and huge areas where my knowledge is limited (construction techniques, zoning and permitting regulations, electrical wiring, and well, much much more), but with the Web at our fingertips (yes, we'll look at greening computing, too), I'm hoping we can both learn and make progress.

My first question, in stream-of-consciousness order only: what can we do about the banks of long-tube "sprawling" (opposite of compact?) fluorescent lights that blanket so many office buildings? But first, I think, is to assess your actual energy consumption, CO2 emissions, waste and so on. Open Eco, a joint project of Sun Microsystems and Natural Logic, is a good place to start. (See link at right.) I'll be back soon!