Spare Planet Req... Apply Here

Such is our reckless burn rate of the earth's natural capital, it's predicted that we'll need a spare planet as back up by 2030. Well at least it's something to take your mind off SachsRossBrandGate.

A standard method for measuring carbon footprints will be welcomed... at least by those trying hard to set themselves meaningful green targets. It'll be less comfortable for the greenwashers who have, to date, been able to think of a number and find some pseudo-science to back it up.

New hydro-kinetic energy Vortex from WiReD.

Here's the full Living Planet Report from the top story.

The Tweetest Thing

Once you get the hang of the Twitterverse is surprising just what interesting and relevant stuff turns up.

Aside from Stephen Fry's adventures in Africa, which everyone seems to be following, there's all sorts of great stuff to follow. Check out global tweets here as they happen.

Also, pop over here for like minds... and vote! Unfortunately, green projects will be hit by the credit crunch, mainly because those holding the purse strings don't realise that, if implementedly correctly, green initiatives can save money... and even generate new revenue streams!

The Sweet Spot

I didn't even realise I'd sent a letter to the editor until someone mailed me and said they'd read my missive in this week's Computing. I'd actually commented on a blog which was spun off the Computing site. My comment got topped and tailed and turned into a Letter to the Editor in old world parlance. Anyway, all publicity is good publicity I suppose. It's worth perusing the actual blog post I commented on... as ever the IT world is obsessed with hardware and datacentres as the 'low hanging fruit' for green first movers with little thought as yet as to just how projects (green or otherwise) are delivered.

You can have non-green products delivered in a sustainable way OR green products delivered in traditional non-green ways. The sweet spot we're aiming for is where green products are also delivered using green and sustainable tools and delivery techniques.

This is where I was coming from at the Agile Business Conference and where I'll keep coming from as a I gather up Bright Green Solutions which hit this sweet spot.

Green Agile

I'm speaking at the Agile Business Conference today on Green Agile. As project delivery techniques Agile methods are a natural fit for the green and sustainable agenda as they already established, proven and green 'out of box' and place great emphasis on the reuse of software, hardware, tools, techniques and other artefacts.

Agile thinking also focuses strongly reducing waste by ensuring that teams share ideas and collaborate closely throughout the life of a project. The parallels with reduce, reuse and recycle messages which resonate throughout a media keen to demonstrate how we can all be greener in our daily lives are obvious.

Beyond today's Conference, the soon to launch IT Green Alliance will evolve Green Agile thinking and extend the focus of current green projects and programmes beyond hardware ('my server's more energy efficient than your server!') through software and on into business processes... ('it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it').

I'll keep you posted here... in the meantime get involved!

I always said McFly were brilliant.

If you like to get your news and views from a less mainstream source, perhaps with a more local edge, you could do worse than by taking a look at Only Planet.

Compiled by a passionate team of North-West based campaigners, writers, thought-leaders and, dare I say it, activists, Only Planet is being launched in an eco-friendly book-format at Manchester's Sandbar at 8pm on Wednesday 17th September. If you can't be there, look out for McFly (or the Manchester Climate Fortnightly to give it its Sunday name).

Viral Banking. What is it?

I was in a creative innovation lab session yesterday and came up with the term 'viral banking'. I think it's usually best to come up with the jargon and then re-engineer it into a concept which is likely to have resonance with customers and industries. So what could it mean then?

Well, bearing in mind that Faster Payments as a policy-driven initiative being overseen by one of the UK banking industries overseers (APACS) is about to speed up all of our banking transactions, maybe viral banking is a threat to mitigate against. As processing times for our funds transfers speed up from around four days to something less than 15 seconds, everyone is rightly nervous about the opportunities this presents to fraudsters looking to make a quick cash-grab and disappear. As you can imagine, introducing the scheme without opening the door to criminals in this way has been top of the list for the security conscious banks.

But what are customers getting from this... could they be the real beneficiaries of viral banking on the back of the Faster Payments initiative? Rate watchers, day traders and the financially astute have become used to tracking their investments on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour and even minutes-by-minute basis. Ultimately though what Faster Payments could deliver is the means to transfer allegiances around the financial services marketplace within seconds based on new deals, new offers or even scare stories!

Imagine the queues running round the block for days on end which we witnessed when Northern Rock ran into trouble being over and done with online in a matter of seconds. Have you ever been sitting there clicking refresh, refresh, refresh trying to buy sought-after tickets for, say the Led Zep reunion only to be disappointed and to read later that the event sold out in something like 11 seconds. Well viral banking could be like that. Marketeers used to spending weeks or months developing, focus-grouping and readying new banking and saving products will need to be on their toes to keep up with the ultra-responsive mechanisms available to all customers across all channels.

The impact on brands? My guess is we'll see more 'limited edition' products and rates as banks use the energy created by the increasing momentum of the industry's payments traffic to further stratify their customer base and try to understand the true meaning of loyalty when the value of a new offer can be assessed, rejected and countered in minutes!

Cars and Girls. Well, just cars actually.

Lots of ad's plugging new cars and their green credentials, which usually amount to one or two modest features and fail to take into the account the carbon cost of creating a brand new vehicle in the first place. It's better run your thirsty old banger into the ground, or buy a second-hand replacement than to buy a new vehicle, even if it's a Prius.

Elsewhere, Europe's car manufacturers struggle to meet EU targets for reducing CO2 emissions from all new cars. In a way it's fingers crossed that fuel prices keep rising, as it's the only thing getting us out of our cars.

In America, where the right bear car-keys is almost enshrined in the constitution, rental companies are finding that most of the SUVs are left sitting on forecourts, shunned by customers selecting economy hatch-backs which are now in short supply.

Meanwhile, the Church has seen the light.

Don't Chill Out...

We're pretty certain what weather we're going to experience over the next few days and what we're likely to see over the next century. It's less certain what's going to happen over the problematic medium-term.

This week's New Scientist suggests that we might have cracked this mid-term forecasting problem (seems ocean cycles our the best guide to changes here), but that the messages these mid term forecasts are throwing up some issues which might just scupper the current political momentum towards effective measures to drive down average temperatures and limit the volmes of CO2 in the atmosphere.

It seems that we might be in for several years of cooling and possibly a slow-down in overall global warming in around 5 years which is only going to make it harder to convince people to do the right thing. Apparently, the cooler 2008 we're experiencing to date is already driving up the 'global warming is a hoax' stories.

Trouble is, even several years of cooling won't change the longer term trend towards significant warming. It's just going to make us less likely to mitigate.

Love Saves The Day... or What Really Killed Top of the Pops!

Cramming to credit all my references for a project I'm working on, I came across this when re-reading George Monbiot's Heat:.

'Love Miles: The distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by love.'

In other reading (like I said, I'm cramming) WiReD's Chris Anderson has a book from a couple of years back, 'The Long Tail', which neatly explains the economics behind why our tastes and choices have, in the past, been constrained by only being able to access goods in the physical world and the limitations imposed on us by suppliers who have only been willing to stock what they are pretty certain they'll sell.

Now that we have a virtually infinite catalogue of books, CDs, movies etc at our fingertips, our tastes are broadening rapidly. The importance of what lies at the the top of the charts is beginning to diminish as the aggregate of all of the more obscure books, films, music tracks selected by people who, in the past, could never have even found them in Tesco or Wal-Mart begins to dominate the numbers. Fascinating stuff, but still all about our capacity and desire to consume more products.

How to balance the economics of commercial innovation with those of green innovation?

I Melt With You

Today's Guardian takes a lead on DEFRA's warning that we need to prepare for a catastrophic 4C temperature rise only the day after George Monbiot and Julie Burchill debated on Radio 4's Today programme just how ordinary people are being lectured on the green agenda.

It's hard to avoid the lecture approach when the situation is this dire. In a much softer way it feels like the mid 90s when early adopters of the Web drove through a more commercial internet than the academic/military comms network which had existed before. The man in the street wasn't interested then and certainly wouldn't be lectured on the changes likely to impact his life for the better... and yet now who hasn't got a mobile phone, thinks nothing of texting, updating their Sat Nav over the air and pausing live TV with their Sky Plus or TiVo.

This time, people are being hectored about more life changing events... more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

Elsewhere, I noticed irony-free reporting of the international fight over much easier access to previously unobtainable supplies of oil and gas underneath the ice-cap at the North Pole which is melting due to excessive use of... you guessed it. It's like a Dan Brown.