Friday, December 21, 2007

Clean Technology (Green Technology) and Natural Capitalism Books,




I am very interested in industrial ecology and clean technology. It is very hard to get good reading material on this subject. I tried to get A Safe and Sustainable World by Nancy Jack Todd: The Promise of Ecological Design. John Todd is the inventor of Living Machines and Artificial Wetlands. His site Ocean Arks International is very interesting http://www.oceanarks.org/

Currently, The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder is on reserve at the library for me. I also have Freedom From Oil: How The Next President Can End The United States Oil Addiction by David Sandalow on reserve.

Two books which talk about natural capitalism, or green business practices which I can recommend are Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Amory R. Lovins and Paul Hawken, and Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. The article which the book Natural Capitalism came from is here,
http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~ewb-ucsb/documents/articles/natcap.pdf



There is not a whole lot written on this material. I am taking home Green Gold Japan, Germany, and the United States Race For Environmental Technologies by Curtis Moore and Alan Miller. I read this but it was not that good. The information was very dated. It was written in 1994 and much of what was being talked about has changed considerably. I would suggest reading something more recent.

Getting back on topic. Recently, I had mentioned a failure by Finavera to commercialize their wave energy buoy. They wrote the technology down to zero value. Something unusual has happened. After they wrote the value of their wave energy buoy technology down to zero, they are opening a wave energy project with PG&E http://www.energy-businessreview.com/article_news.asp?guid=135144DB-4CD2-4116-9987-1425D809CAF7

It is an utterly odd experience going from thinking a company is worthless and will never do any wave energy projects to the first commercializer in the United States of wave energy.

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