I was talking to a friend who felt mildly depressed about learning to manage your mood. She had read my friend’s story I posted recently about changing his emotions. (As an aside, I have to rank his experiment among the most effective practices you can do to learn to manage your emotions.) I talked to her about how most of my clients can change their environments and behavior easily. To[…] Keep reading →

If we could use leadership in any place most, I can think of few places more important than in understanding what is happening with our environment, energy, and how it will affect us, meaning the economy. Some conclude that since before Revelations through Malthus and beyond people have been predicting the end of the world, yet the world hasn’t ended, we have solved all problems before and we’ll solve whatever[…] Keep reading →

Walden is one of the great American books on nature and American society. Friends and longtime readers know I like it and much of its message. It criticizes the pick-a-little-talk-a-little-cheep-cheep-cheep-talk-a-lot-pick-a-little-more gossip-about-your-neighbor culture in favor of simplicity and appreciating nature. Facebook is in the news a lot. The opening sentences to Walden made me think about Facebook and the values spending time on it promotes. When I wrote the following pages,[…] Keep reading →

After my recent posts on the environment, the Do The Math blog, and the Sustainable Energy book I liked, a friend and Columbia engineer, Marshall Cox, is succeeding in a business plan competition to help reduce waste with a company called Radiator Labs. They have a simple idea that could cheaply reduce a lot of waste and make people’s buildings more comfortable. A why-didn’t-someone-think-of-that-a-long-time-ago idea you can’t imagine someone not[…] Keep reading →

If you live in New York City or many other places, you’ve doubtlessly gotten used to restaurants and bars having no smoke in them. Perhaps, like me, you’ve come to find the idea, or experience, of smoke around you when you eat or drink or in any public space you can’t avoid barbaric. Does “barbaric” overstate things? I used to consider myself tolerant of smoke in bars and clubs. Actually,[…] Keep reading →

Following up yesterday’s post on balance sheets and charts for using and producing energy and reporting our numbers to see if we can make them balance, let’s look at carbon flows. People who don’t know about carbon emissions, flows, and balance confuse simple ideas with each other. For example, some talk about how volcanoes and cows digestive systems produce tons of carbon and wonder why we should bother changing our[…] Keep reading →

People don’t realize it, but business people have some of the best the skills to understand our effect on the environment. We should learn those skills from them. I didn’t have much (any?) business experience when I co-founded my first company. I couldn’t read a balance sheet or know accounting. My science background taught me to understand general and broad patterns, which don’t suffice for running a company. Either the[…] Keep reading →