changes

Shell CEO's oil-centric view on energy, climate change

Jeroen van der Veer, the CEO of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, sees easy oil coming to an end and a potential worldwide "scramble" to mitigate climate change.

Van der Veer outlined to potential scenarios for energy usage and extraction over the coming century in a speech published Friday on the company's Web site.

Regardless of whether countries "scramble" or take in a more orderly approach to adopting low-carbon fuels and renewable energies, getting oil and gasoline will not be as easy as it once was, he said.

"We are experiencing a step-change in … Read more

Bringing seapower to the fight against global warming

The cleantech sector has developed as a major player in the fight against climate change. One of my friends, Dan Whaley, has founded a company called Climos to attack global warming in a new way, sinking massive amounts of carbon into the ocean depths using ocean iron fertilization. The approach has seen significant scientific study, but as he acknowledges, still has a ways to go to prove its effectiveness. That is where Climos comes in. The exciting part is the sheer scale of the potential carbon sequestration (on the order of a billion tons) and the low cost (possibly on … Read more

Why is Finland Europe's technology leader? The prime minister explains

Although it's on the fringe of Europe geographically, Finland has for years been at the center of the continent's tech industry.

The country gave birth to cell phone leader Nokia and has emerged as a place where multinationals like to recruit and erect labs. The government and local entrepreneurs are now moving into clean technology.

It can be traced back to policies set up in the early 1980s, said Matti Vanhanen, the country's prime minister, during an interview with CNET News.com on Wednesday afternoon. The country saw the dawning of globalization and realized it would have … Read more

Design (thinker) hubris?

In an article for In These Times magazine, Alix Rule injects some fresh thinking into the realm of "design thinking," which has traditionally been mainly affiliated with parties like Bruce Nussbaum, associate editor of BusinessWeek, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as the d-school). Rule is skeptical about design thinkers' self-acclaimed world-changing mandate: "As we look beyond housing solutions to urban poverty, good design is enjoying a second coming as the cure for what ails us." She feels that designers overburden themselves with these universal goals, and she asks for realism … Read more

Cisco's second-in-command steps down

The man thought to be next in line for the CEO job at Cisco Systems has resigned, the company announced Thursday.

Charles Giancarlo, executive vice president and chief development officer, will be stepping down from his post as of December 31 after 14 years with Cisco. Giancarlo, 50, has taken a job as managing director and partner at Silver Lake, an investment firm focused on large-scale investments in technology. His first day at the new job will be January 2, 2008.

Cisco's CEO John Chambers said he had tried over the past six months to persuade Giancarlo to stay. … Read more

Climate legislation: Who gains? Who loses?

Most Americans now agree that something needs to be done to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully most Americans now appreciate that this is not a small, but even more so, not a simple problem. I am a big believer that the playing field for our low carbon future should start level, and the market should be structured to allow our major power and energy companies a chance to lead the way, instead of simply dishing out punishment for our combined historical choices. Carrots and sticks work well together, but sticks alone are not going to solve our global carbon … Read more

Global warming worry: Accelerating pace of change

Correction at 3:30 p.m. PST Thursday: Blame my Rust Belt ignorance. The Ohio river that burned is the Cuyahoga.

SAN FRANCISCO--I've been spending some time at the the American Geophysical Union conference here, and I've had a recurring thought: When it comes to apocalyptic predictions, geophysicists have the Book of Revelations beat, hands down.

Sometime in the last few years, the idea that global warming is a reality and that it's caused in large measure by people has finally started sinking in. But perhaps because of the remaining skepticism, and more likely because of the … Read more

Record heat sweeps Arctic Sea, ice in 2007

SAN FRANCISCO--Warmth may not be an attribute you associate with a place where the sun doesn't shine in the winter and the sea freezes over, but all things are relative. And compared to earlier years, the Arctic was downright sweltering this year.

According to new research presented here at the the American Geophysical Union conference, the Arctic Ocean reached record high temperatures, arctic ice diminished to a record low, and ice melted on Greenland for a record number of days.

"In 2007, we had off-the-charts warming" of the Arctic Sea in the summer, said Mike Steele, an … Read more

Warming climate triples northern fire frequency

SAN FRANCISCO--Researchers have linked global climate change to a tripling in the frequency of large fires in major forests of Alaska and Canada.

Black spruce forests cover about 2.7 million square kilometers in Canada and Alaska--about a third of the area of the lower 48 states of the U.S., and fire records date back to the 1950s. Beginning around 1987, the rate that large wildfires struck the forest jumped from about once every 10 years to once every 3 years, said Eric Kasischke of the University of Maryland at College Park, speaking at the American Geophysical Union conference … Read more