EclecticLip

The EPIA’s recent estimate that solar PV installations grew 129% from 2007 to 2008 is excellent news.

While growth is likely to be stunted in 2009 (due in part to the collapse of the Spanish economy, last year’s biggest market) this is the kind of trend that should warm greens’ hearts, and not the planet.  One factor which works to solar’s advantage is the recent collapse in polysilicon prices back to “normal” levels — which will improve silicon-photovoltaics’ cost-competitiveness, even as some companies’ profit margins will be squeezed.

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While wind energy is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the rule of thumb is that it can’t be used for more than about 20% of the grid, due to its intermittent nature.  Basically, to accomodate large amounts of wind, you need to be able to turn other sources of power on or off instantaneously — to account for situations where the wind dies down or comes up suddenly.  That means hydro (which accounts for about 20% of worldwide power generation; quelle coincidence!).

While solar is also intermittent, a big advantage it carries over wind is that it only provides energy during peak usage hours (from morning to evening).  Which generally makes it easier to tie into the grid.  While wind energy production will continue to overshadow (heh) solar electricity for a few years — generation capacity is currently about 120 GW to 5 GW — solar’s ease of grid tie-in should help it surpass wind perhaps a decade from now.

For now, the next milestone for solar will be to outpace nuclear; in 2007 new nuclear generation capacity was about 2 GW.  Solar installations in 2008 were about 3 GW peak, which normalizes to about 1 GW (since solar doesn’t provide energy at night, and provides a lower-than-peak amount of power in the morning and evening).

Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago.  One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.

In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return.  The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.

Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men.  There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.

When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind.  But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles…  Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.

When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year.  Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:

• Harlequin Romance (the flagship line)
• Harlequin American Romance (for small-town readers)
• …and Harlequin NASCAR.  Yes, that’s not a typo.

Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae.  And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.

Fiendishly busy at work — in a good way — so some quick notes on the intensifying rivalry in hybrids.

Honda wanted to pip Toyota’s lead on hybrids, by releasing the new Insight at a far lower price point.  For Canada at least, though, currency fluctuations mean the final price hasn’t been set quite yet.  Basically, since Toyota has the perception of “first and most advanced” Honda’s tried to carve out the spot of “most affordable”.  And for one month at least, in Japan, the Insight did wrest the Prius’ hybrid sales crown.

I’ve heard rumour that Toyota has dropped Prius prices to arrest Honda’s momentum in Japan — and they’re also releasing the new Prius in a few months.  So they should easily regain the sales title.  And it’ll apparently compete head-on with Honda’s “most affordable” hybrid claim by releasing a “budget” hybrid in a couple years’ time as well.

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In related recent automotive news, Ford publicized the sale of their 100,000th hybrid SUV; Toyota shortly followed with an announcement that they’d surpassed 1,000,000 hybrid sales in that country.

Nice to see carmakers fighting each other for the environmental halo — especially since, if one of them starts greenwashing, the others surely won’t hesitate to point it out. 

I’ve been using the ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done at work for about a year now, and despite my undeniable novicedom, have found it invaluable: I feel like a Stone Age artisan newly introduced to bronze!

Like so many transformative tools, the basics are delightfully simple — but like eastern martial-arts disciplines with which it shares… well, virtually nothing, the arresting simplicity takes years to master. 

Actually, I jest — the end-goal of GTD, as it’s known to its acolytes, is to allow the practitioner to engage in their life and work attentively, undistracted by other action-items and to-do’s that might otherwise clutter the mind.  Which means it’s basically the Zen ideal of mushin, or “no-mind”, dressed up in 21st-century American secular idiom.  And mushin plays a central role in every eastern martial-arts discipline I’ve chanced to read up on.  So GTD does in fact share a common fundament with karate, judo, aikido, and their cousins.
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For me, the biggest GTD learnings have been:

• discovering the exhiliaration of the empty inbox!
• the idea of separating items on my to-do lists based on timeframe (my prior attempts to make to-do lists failed because my short- and long-term items were jumbled together)

Most gratifyingly, the “outsourcing” of my memory to Outlook has let me clear my mental cache of those things-to-remember that always floated around in the back of my mind, depleting my concentration.  So now, instead of multitasking, I can monotask.  That is, I can direct 100% of my focus to various tasks-at-hand, instead of only offering 90% (because the other 10% needed to be held back to avoid forgetting other action items).

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With my quantum leap in workplace productivity, it was a rashworthy irritation that I couldn’t apply similar methods at home with Gmail, given its more limited architecture.

So discovering GTDInbox a few days ago was a real psychological emollient.    A Firefox extension, it layers a GTD-friendly interface onto the Gmail interface.
Within a few hours, I’d decluttered my Gmail Inbox from about 170 to under 50 items — one screen.  And there’ll be a few whoops (as in plural-of-the-celebratory-whoop, not as in gentle-expletive-indicating-accident) of joy in the living room when I attain the mythical state of “Inbox Zero“. 

I decided it was time to check my iTunes playlist again (previous update here) to see how well Mr. Pareto predicted my music listening habits.

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Not too shabbily, as it turns out — he slipped a bit from before, but that’s largely because this time, I decided not to include tracks which I’ve never played.  (There are currently about 400 tracks which for whatever reason have never deserved my time.    )

Another slight difference is that I eventually moved some audiobooks out of my music directory (that would’ve removed about 200 tracks from consideration).

Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.

McKinsey & Company have now published it. 

Other authors in the series include:

• Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
• Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
• peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)

Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!!  (For now.)

Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.)  So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!

A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow. 

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(click to enlarge)

As a follow up to the Peter Senge lecture (previously noted here) I should note that there was an awkward moment during the Q&A when a participant demanded to know why Mr. Senge hadn’t discussed the need for ethical vegetarianism, alongside his discussion of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the other damage we are wreaking on the environment. To his credit, Mr. Senge deflected the question nicely, acknowledging the reduced footprint of a vegetarian diet, then segueway-ing into a discussion on the need for collaborative instead of confrontative approaches.

Because the other participant — as well meaning as they were — was a fratricidal ally, turning their fury on the very like-minded people they need to leverage, to get their own message heard. Such splintering seems pretty common in environmental circles; I can imagine an activist vegan calling out the aforementioned participant and arguing that ethical vegetarianism wasn’t enough, and that veganism was the way to go.  And so forth.  It’s like the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front, and the Popular Front of Judea don’t speak to each other.
On the far-left side of Canadian politics, the Marxist-Leninists and Communists certainly don’t seem to talk, as evidenced by data from the last election.  On the other end, it took a very long time to unite the Canadian right, with the Progressive Conservatives (”right lite”) and Alliance party (”far right” by historical Canadian standards) eventually merging into the Conservative Party, after a decade of counter-productive internecine strife.  (I’m counting from the 1993 election, a breakthrough for the Reform Party, to the 2003 merger.)
Fratricidal allies make it tougher for an umbrella movement (in this case the environmental movement) to gain critical mass, as they disrupt the umbrella movement’s messaging. Such withering criticism would be seized on by opponents to delegitimize the umbrella movement’s efforts, ultimately impairing the fratricidal ally’s own goals.
A more productive long-term strategy would probably be to gain buy-in from the umbrella organization.  But as long as there are absolutists out there, I suppose there’ll be plenty of people trying to catch flies with vinegar instead of honey.  Given the urgency associated with climate change, I can see how various groups might feel there’s not enough time to build influence in the greater movement, and thus switch from “friendly” to “fratricidal” tactics.

Ah, Hamlet, were you only alive to read this…  or, given that you were a fictional character, were you only ever alive.  Hmm…  actually, given how horrific your end, maybe ’twere better you stayed fictive.

A recent Harvard Business School study (”Red Light States“) further confirmed the trend that conservatives buy more pornography than progressives.  Conservatives can take comfort that maybe, just maybe, the difference is that progressives steal more porn through file-sharing.

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