GUESS WHO TOPS NEWSWEEK's GREENEST COMPANY LIST?

[Anonymous]

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/article.php/3840251/HP-Intel-Greenpeace-and-Saving-the-Planet.htm
GUESS WHO TOPS NEWSWEEK’s GREENEST COMPANY LIST?
The
concept of green flows through much of what we do right now because we
can see the ice caps melting, the pollution growing, and our energy
prices starting to overtake our incomes.There are three kinds of green
efforts: the first is focused on assuring a clean environment and has
recycling at its core; the second is focused on conservation (generally
energy related); and the third, and newest, is intelligent management
which should help us get the greatest financial and environmental
return from our green efforts.Last week at an Intel Alumni event, Andy
Grove and a large number of ex and current Intel executives spoke on
the need to respond to a Chinese effort to corner the market on both
oil and solar technology by around 2020. This effort, if successful,
would turn most of the rest of the world, especially the US, into a
dependent of China. Something that, ironically, it doesn’t appear that
China really wants.

This week HP was ranked by Newsweek #1 for their green efforts .
a few weeks after Greenpeace vandalized their offices. The organization
increasingly looks to be more interested in getting publicity than in
focusing on actually improving the world. This Greenpeace stuff seems
incredibly irresponsible to me because it could have caused HP to
reduce the strongest green effort in the US and turned it into a
program like Apple’s which is simply designed to keep Greenpeace happy
while not truly making the same kind of important difference. (The
Apple ranking in Newsweek was 133.)

Becoming Energy Slaves
Boy
if you want to have someone scare the living daylights out of you,
listen to Andy Grove’s stump speech on energy.As you would expect given
he is one of the most well known engineers in the world, his talk was
full of well researched numbers and the ones that most stuck out was
how China is in the process of purchasing most of the world’s oil
production output, effectively turning that country not only into a
mega-consumer of oil larger than the US, but one that controls vastly
more of the world’s oil reserves than the US by the end of next decade.

This becomes a big problem for the US as soon as 2013.
Additional
charts by both Grove and other executives pointed to the fact that
China is not only starting to outspend us on solar research but, unlike
other Chinese investments like this, they aren’t trying to be the low
cost low technology provider in this market. They’re moving to be the
low cost technology leader in the solar market.

If successful,
the result would be that they would not only have the oil we need to
operate the country in a few years but they will have replaced our own
solar industry with theirs. Meaning, they would be the only real source
for a strong alternative for electricity production (they largely use
coal for electricity and we use oil). Effectively, if we wanted to
drive or turn our lights on, it would be at the discretion of the
Chinese political leaders and not our own.The irony in this is that,
after listening to a specialist on Chinese Government, this result is
likely as much to do with that Government’s inability to execute as it
does the US’s. They don’t appear to want to be in this position. But
the reasoning behind their action appears to be their inability to
convert their own country to solar power quickly enough – coupled with
the need to make sure their population doesn’t become too dissatisfied
and revolt – topped with a government structure that allows them to
respond to threats more quickly than the US.

You see, unlike the
US, if the people in a state like China want to throw the bums out they
tend to revolt and those in power often don’t survive the path to
retirement. This motivates them much more aggressively to make sure
folks aren’t unhappy and being without enough energy is likely a
politician hunting season waiting to happen.In the end, I think the big
message is that given Oil is funding the other side of the wars we are
involved in, its cost is a major portion of why we both have an
economic problem and can’t afford adequate healthcare. Additionally, it
is sourced as the major ecological problem to solve, and it will likely
eventually either result in a war or the US becoming a Chinese
dependent (worse than we now are). Fixing this should have the highest
priority.Either that or learning “yes boss” in Chinese (and I’ll bet
you can guess my choice).

[Author]

September 29, 2009 at 10:54 AM