cnn.com: By Michael V. Copeland

Building the world’s first electric supercar was never going to be easy - even without the hubris, infighting, and mismanagement that nearly sent Tesla spinning off the road.

For Martin Eberhard, there were many obstacles on the path to building the ultimate electric sports car. There was the scientific challenge of creating a lithium ion battery pack stable enough to power a 2,650-pound vehicle. There was the belief that Americans would stick with their gas-guzzlers, no matter what the price of oil. And there was, of course, the considerable resistance in the venture capital community to funding heavy industry.

But for Eberhard, the ultimate indignity came in early June of this year. Just days before he was finally supposed to take possession of his Tesla Roadster, a gray beauty with orange racing stripes that he had devoted the past five years of his life to building, a technician who had been driving it on the 101 freeway relayed some bad news.

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cnn.com : By Adam Lashinsky

The legendary venture firm is going green - and leaving Internet deals to the competition.

In the past decade Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has doled out $10 billion to its major investors, all of which are university endowments, philanthropic foundations, or public pension funds. Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms never divulge their actual performance. Yet this tidbit comes directly from John Doerr, Kleiner’s preeminent partner, who is so intent on ensuring that I’m correctly processing the significance of that figure that he helps me with the math. “That’s $1 billion a year on average,” he says. “Those are great gains. That’s not a couple university chairs, and it’s not a building or two. That’s whole quadrants of a campus.” [ read more ]

sciam.com: By John Broome

Weighing our own prosperity against the chances that climate change will diminish the well-being of our grandchildren calls on economists to make hard ethical judgments

What should we do about climate change? The question is an ethical one. Science, including the science of economics, can help discover the causes and effects of climate change. It can also help work out what we can do about climate change. But what we should do is an ethical question.

Not all “should” questions are ethical. “How should you hold a golf club?” is not, for instance. The climate question is ethical, however, because any thoughtful answer must weigh conflicting interests among different people. If the world is to do something about climate change, some people—chiefly the better-off among the current generation—will have to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to save future generations from the possibility of a bleak existence in a hotter world. When interests conflict, “should” questions are always ethical. [ read more ]

telegraph.co.uk: By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

A catastrophic water shortage could prove an even bigger threat to mankind this century than soaring food prices and the relentless exhaustion of energy reserves, according to a panel of global experts at the Goldman Sachs “Top Five Risks” conference.

Nicholas (Lord) Stern, author of the Government’s Stern Review on the economics of climate change, warned that underground aquifers could run dry at the same time as melting glaciers play havoc with fresh supplies of usable water. [ read more ]

Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor.

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telegraph.co.uk: Graham Boynton

We no longer have a choice. Climate change demands that we adjust our habit and get serious about greener holidays. Graham Boynton invites you to nominate the best of the eco-travel companies.

We have reached a point in our development where we can no longer travel without conscience. Even those of us who are the most self-interested of creatures, indifferent to the state of the planet, will have to shape up and start travelling responsibly. [ read more ]

forbes.com: By William Pentland

In 2001, a water shortage in America’s Pacific Northwest wiped out nearly a third of the U.S. aluminum industry. Low precipitation levels in the Cascade Mountains during the preceding winter robbed local reservoirs of the water needed to turn the massive turbines inside the region’s main hydroelectric power plant, the Bonneville Power Administration. Electricity prices skyrocketed. Over the course of a few months, roughly a dozen aluminum plants closed. Nearly a decade later, only one has reopened.

Like oil, water is an essential part of doing business in almost every industry, and unexpected shortages can trigger potentially catastrophic consequences. The trouble for investors: Companies disclose very little if any information about their exposure to water-related risks.

“This is not an area that companies like to discuss quite frankly,” says Marc Levinson, an economist at J.P. Morgan and the principal author of the recent report Watching Water: A Guide to Corporate Risk in a Thirsty World. “They don’t want to call attention to a vulnerability and that applies very much to the water scarcity issue. Investors in general know very little about what is going on in companies’ supply chains.” [ read more ]

vtcommons.org: by Rob Williams

I want to start out with a little game, called “How Do You Know When Your Empire Is Collapsing?” – invented in a little different form by a
political scientist on Long Island.

Let me give you a few examples of how it works.

Let’s say for starters, you know your empire is collapsing when the empire that is your fiercest rival buys up a total of 26 percent of three of your major Wall Street firms for $9 billion, and declares that it has another $200 billion that it is looking to invest. Next, you might figure your empire is collapsing when its total debt obligations amount to $50.5 trillion. That is so big that it’s about the same as the total household income of everyone in the country, including the billionaires. In other words, we owe almost more than we make. [ read more ]

realclearpolitics.com: By Fareed Zakaria

On June 22, 1897, about 400 million people around the world — one-fourth of humanity — got the day off. It was the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the British throne. The Diamond Jubilee stretched over five days on land and sea, but its high point was the parade and thanksgiving service on June 22. The 11 premiers of Britain’s self-governing colonies were in attendance, along with princes, dukes, ambassadors, and envoys from the rest of the world. A military procession of 50,000 soldiers included hussars from Canada, cavalrymen from New South Wales, carabineers from Naples, camel troops from Bikaner, and Gurkhas from Nepal. It was, as one historian wrote, “a Roman moment.”

In London, eight-year-old Arnold Toynbee was perched on his uncle’s shoulders, eagerly watching the parade. Toynbee, who grew up to become the most famous historian of his age, recalled that, watching the grandeur of the day, it felt as if the sun were “standing still in the midst of Heaven.” “I remember the atmosphere,” he wrote. “It was: ‘Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.’”[ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Kevin Bullis

Oil, of course, dominates world economics and politics. But it’s conceivable that some day, alternative fuels and other clean technologies, combined with the rising costs of extracting oil, could diminish petroleum’s influence. But by that time, another scarce commodity–water–could come to dominate geopolitics, and venture capitalists are starting to take note.

The thinking goes like this. Biofuels are enormous consumers of water, says Jim Matheson, a general partner at Flagship Ventures, a venture capital firm in Cambridge, MA. And water is not always abundant where it’s most needed. “So, increasingly you’re going to see water as a scarce resource. I think it’s going to drive not just economics but also a lot of geopolitical dynamics. So, we’re trying to find technologies that can allow us to plug into this enormous value chain.” He’s interested, for example, in membranes and other water-treatment technologies that will allow biofuel-makers and others to reuse water. But he says there’s a big challenge to making these new technologies successful. There has to be a way to scale them up to bring down costs. “The problem is that water is like the Internet. People love it and they use it all the time, but they don’t want to pay for it,” he says. “So the question is, how do you come up with a business model that actually works?” [ read more ]