Category: Big Business

BusinessWeek reports on suspect portions of the carbon offset market:

Done carefully, offsets can have a positive effect and raise ecological awareness. But a close look at several transactions — including those involving the Oscar presenters, Vail Resorts, and the Seattle power company — reveals that some deals amount to little more than feel-good hype. When traced to their source, these dubious offsets often encourage climate protection that would have happened regardless of the buying and selling of paper certificates. One danger of largely symbolic deals is that they may divert attention and resources from more expensive and effective measures.

I’ve done my part to reduce global methane emissions by ceasing to eat at White Castle. Why won’t TerraPass return my calls?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my drunken Irish readers! It’s not yet 9am local time, so I’ll assume you only have a good buzz on at present!

It’s a hectic weekend here at stately VM Manor. I’ve got plenty of writing to do for my magazine — two articles (regional bio-investment and disposable bioprocessing systems) and an overhaul of our 20-page annual glossary of pharma & biopharma terms — so expect little by way of posting.

Still, I couldn’t let the “running of the green” go by without a wacky article. In this case, it’s a piece from Der Spiegel about how much trouble the German automakers are having building hybrid cars:

[Toyota representatives] told [Porsche CEO] Wiedeking that they could help him, but only by providing the full package — in other words, the platform for the entire vehicle. The Japanese insisted that merely buying the individual components, as Wiedeking had envisioned, made no sense. The Asians politely advised the Porsche boss not to underestimate the complexity of hybrid engines. Wiedeking’s talks with Toyota quickly came to an end.

Today Porsche’s engineers know that the Toyota executives were by no means trying to make fools of them two years ago. The engineers discovered first hand just how sincere the Japanese had actually been when they set out to develop, in a joint effort with Volkswagen, a hybrid engine at Volkswagen’s research center in the town of Isenbüttel near VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters. But the project failed to progress as smoothly as the Germans had expected.

Enjoy. And go drink yourself stupid.

Michael Bierut at DesignObserver feels that Dreamgirls misses the soul of the music that it’s trying to capture, and he has some neat remarks about the “production line” of Holland, Dozier and Holland at Motown records. It puts me in mind of Jack Kirby’s most prolific and productive era, in the 1960s, in which he was drawing tons of pages but also inventing (or co-inventing) mind-bending character after character.