Earth Hour - Sydney Leads the Way

With Sydney, Australia driving the effort, Earth Hour is happening today around the globe. Conceived to draw attention to global energy consumption and to make an ever-so-small contribution to conservation, Earth Hour organizers are asking major cities in every country to dim or shut off the lights for an hour this evening.
Sydney led the way with strong support from the Lord Mayor, and even Google is is turning down the lights between 8 p.m and 9 p.m. to participate. And well they should, as data factories now use as much energy as all air traffic. That's right, each Google search query according to this article in Der Spiegel takes as much energy as running a low wattage light bulb for 15 minutes to an hour. Check out the Wikipedia page on Earth Hour to see if your city or town is on the partner's list. And if you can drag yourself away from March Madness or your regular evening activity for an hour, please consider participating in this grassroots, global effort. Polls have shown that the effort itself is succeeding in raising the visibility of this important issue.
Earth Hour

Google Announces Energy Initiative

Google today announced a new energy initiative designed to produce clean energy for less than the cost of coal power generation. A project of Google's foundation, Google.org, and Google Corporate, initial goals call for producing a full Gigawatt of power - enough to provide for the energy needs of a city the size of San Francisco. Read about it at Tim O'Reilly's site, O'Reilly's Radar. If you are wondering why an Internet giant is playing in the Energy space, just imagine how much power it must take to run a GooglePlex. O'Reilly likes the idea, and so do I.

Also today, reports surfaced about the Gdrive online storage and backup service that Google is due to announce in short order (the company declined comment today). It looks like this service formalizes and featurizes the functionality the company already offers users of several other products including Google Docs, Google Video and Picasaweb online photo archive. Again, a welcome move from the author's point of view. Readers of Pop Impulse know that I gave it up to Google long ago, and am totally delighted with the results. There's a reason the company's shares are around $700. Google gets it. And, of course, they're not Microsoft.

Green Econometrics

If you are curious about the numbers involved in the emerging "green economy," surf by my friend Michael Davies' really wonderful site, Green Econometrics. Someone's got to mine the data; do the numbers, and analyse the results for the rest of us. At least if you are as averse to counting beans, or worse yet predicting bean totals, as I am. Econometrics is the science of applying statistical methodologies and quantitative analysis to study, analyse and understand economics.

I first met Mike in the eighties when he hired me to join Marketing Strategies International, a small skunk-works marketing research team that consulted with Ron Roner to help Apple target market niches prior to the introduction of the first Macintosh. Even back then, Mike's favorite book was the Statistical Abstract of the United States. That's right. And fancy regressions were his forte. Since that time, he's gone on to a bunch of Wall Street jobs, crunching numbers and developing data for financial mavens. He got his Bachelor's from Columbia, and his MBA from UCLA. Sort of a bi-coastal guy. And then, he got his CFA to top it all off. You want numbers, Mike is your guy.

So what's the big deal? Just this: we're entering into uncharted waters right now in our journey through endless economic cycles - as we shift from resource exploitation and excess to conservation and alternative resources. Nobody is sure just exactly what's going to happen, and when. So who do you call? The denizons of data; number crunchers extraordinaire; trend prospectors; and, heavy weight analysts. Who else?