Carbon Offsetting Under Fire

As an outspoken carbon offsetter, this past Sunday and Monday I found my inbox filling with emails from friends about the NYT Week In Review cover story on Carbon Offsets. The Times article compared carbon offsets to indulgences offered by the church and suggested that the industry needs a Martin Luther to come along and spark a reformation. The overwhelming message from the article, offered up not only my skeptics but also my some environmentalists is that carbon offsetting is just a feel-good consumer action that people can take while driving around in their SUVs and flying from coast to coast. Tom from TerraPass (where I have purchased carbon offsets for air and car travel) responded on the TerraPass Blog with a thoughtful piece that compares offsets to recycling. The offset industry is in its infancy, but even when it is mature, the idea is not for offsets to solve the problem of climate change alone, they are part of a broader solution that of course involves conservation and other changes in behavior. Already my measuring my carbon footprint from air travel has resulted in me combining trips wherever possible, and has influenced, in part decisions about where CivicActions is holding its next retreat. So don’t be a hater! See carbon offsetting for what it is, part of a broader solution. It represents something that we all can do to have an impact (like recycling, or using reusable bags or water bottles or coffee cups). There will always be people who point out the shortcomings of any of these strategies in an attempt to either maintain the status quo...

A John Doe Law Suit I can get behind!

Generally I think that John Doe law suits are bad. The RIAA has used them to find out the identities of alleged illegal file sharers. I never thought I would read about one that I actually could support. But today I read about a lawsuit filed by Project Honey Pot against John Doe spammers. The class action suit seeks $1 Billion in...

Fundraising Trifecta!

It was a whirlwind 2 days for me on the fundraising circuit! On Tuesday morning I attended the annual Bike To Work Breakfast of the Cascade Bicycle Club in Seattle. CBC has over seven thousand members and the turnout for the breakfast was impressive with something like 400 people there including Seattle’s Mayor Greg Nichols and King County Executive Ron Sims. The bike club does some great work advocating for bike facilities in buildings and on the roads as well as educating kids about bike safety (and adults too!). Then, Tuesday evening I went to the King County Conservation Voters Benefit Auction where Hope and I won a few items in the silent auction. Unfortunately we had to leave early to catch a plane to DC for the National League of Conservation Voters dinner on Wednesday and could not really participate in the live auction. The National LCV dinner was really great. I sat with Theresa Keaveny, the Executive Director of the Montana Conservation Voters (one of our clients), Chris Ford of Tennessee Conservation Voters, Cormac Flynn and Hope Rippeon of the Federation of State Conservation Voter Leagues and a few others. A testament to the power of the LCV and the leagues in general was the turn out of elected officials. It was really great to see Speaker Nancy Pelosi who rushed over from the House Floor between votes to address the dinner. She made very strong commitments to working in a bipartisan manner to address the challenges of climate change and fossil fuel dependence. The LCV launched a new website recently to call attention to the issue...

Google 411 Harvesting Speech Data

I just stumbled upon (not with suble upon though) this Scary blog post about google data mining your voice: Assuming each call has four utterances – and costs 3 cents each on average – then it would cost Google about $8M for 1 billion utterances (or $80M to match TellMe’s 10 billion utterances). A bargain compared to buying Tellme for $800M. I agree with Tim O’Reilly’s conclusion that Google’s launch of a directory assistance product was accelerated (and is driven) by their desire to compete with Microsoft. The post, which might be a little over the top reference Tim O’Reilly, who speculates about the motivations of Google’s free 411 directory assistance This is reminiscent of a comment that Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, made to me last year about automated translation, and why it’s getting better. “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” In short, I’m speculating that the 1-800-GOOG-411 service is designed to harvest voice data to build Google’s own speech database, rather than licensing from Nuance or another player. This is kind of creepy from a privacy stand point, but as long as Google refrains from being evil, I guess we’re safe, right? Interestingly, O’Reilly says “many of the future battles between industry giants will be around who owns data.” Definitely scary when you talk about your own consumer data, what about scientific data? Like the traffic patterns of pelagic...