What’s on your wishlist? What do you want for your nearest and dearest? What’s your favorite book, movie, album, game, cocktail, or best-loved anything?
Tumblr wants you! We’ve seen lots of great recommendations this holiday season, but we’d like to add one small innovation: Instead of a few contributors, we’ll have millions. And who knows the greatest stuff in art and design, fashion and food, gadgets and tech, or TV and literature better than the Tumblr community? Join us in creating the world’s largest gift guide.
This Wednesday, all day long, post your favorite things and tag them #tumblrgiftguide. We’ll reblog some standouts onto a special blog. Follow us here, or just track the tag to see every fantastic idea to give and get this December. Happy Holidays!This is today! Everybody make your gift requests or recommendations and tag them #tumblrgiftguide!
Especially looking for great green/charitable gift ideas so please post today! Danke.
So pretty but so scary.
In which WNYC reveals its secret tote agenda
via moth-stories, re: WSJ, “Should cities ban plastic bags?”
wnyc:
Daniella Dimitrova Russo, co-founder and executive director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, presents the case for bans. Todd Myers, environmental director at the Washington Policy Center, makes the opposition argument.
YES! Fewer plastic bags = more totes.
http://youtu.be/PuJZu0wlTEU
Dear Mr. Lehrer, Please ask the candidates about climate change
Business study: Corporate acceptance of climate change at a ‘tipping point’ | The Raw Story
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a British environmental advocacy group that focuses on business sustainability, said Wednesday that 343 companies listed on the S&P 500 participated in its carbon survey this year, adding that their results show a “tipping point” has been reached when it comes to corporate acceptance of climate change.
The group’s annual S&P 500 Climate Change Report (PDF) found that 92 percent of the participating companies conducted “board or executive-level oversight” on climate change strategies, and that 83 percent incorporated climate strategies into risk management portfolios. Both of those numbers are up over 2011′s report.
In all, 81 percent of the companies identified physical risks due to climate change, and 74 percent “identified climate change opportunities” that simultaneously boost efficiency and profits. In one of the biggest shifts the CDP noticed, 52 percent of the survey’s respondents actually reported making emissions reductions, up by 23 percent over last year’s survey.
This is great news. CDP is a really serious and rigorous org and tracks the largest set of corporate data on emissions out there. Sad that while nearly 70% of the biggest US businesses recognize climate change as a risk (and opportunity!), our elected leaders are still scared to say the words out loud, much less tackle the problem head-on.
“We’ll have a much better shot at developing solutions to our climate and energy problems that are good for our economy if leaders from across the political spectrum get re-engaged in the debate. It is time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost-effective climate solutions. Solving this challenge will require all of us.
Fred Krupp, of the Environmental Defense Fund, desperately trying to break America’s climate change impasse with reasonable words in the WSJ. We’ve tried reason before, and while the data-driven skeptics are finally reassessing, are the politically-driven ones likely to do so in a meaningful way? I hope so, but I’m, er, skeptical.
Visualizing 1 billion cars.
Hoooo-boy.
Pardon my French, but F*CK! Already at 1 vehicle for every 7 ppl on earth, and rising fast.
So I’m assuming my post tipped the scales on this one.
A tough choice for the hip but conscious consumer: choose Apple or be green?
It’s a damn shame that Apple has withdrawn its products from green certification by EPEAT - a standard the company helped to found and under which 39 of its products were certified.
Apple’s record on sustainability has always been a bit iffy, despite its efforts to counter criticism from Greenpeace and some pretty comprehensive documentation of environmental practices on its corporate website. With this formal withdrawal from EPEAT, some conscious consumers - like the city of San Francisco, and possibly even the Federal Government - will choose (or be forced by their own standards) to stop purchasing Apple products entirely.
But my experience suggests that the overlap between green consumers and Apple enthusiasts is large - and that for those who have a choice, their devotion to Apple tends to win out over any commitment to sustainable consumption. This is especially easy to rationalize as the company’s defenders claim that while Apple might not fit the industry’s green standards, its own independent standards/practices are just as legit.
This sort of rogue self-regulation might work for Apple, but it’s not a useful precedent to set for business in general. Just another reason why, as tempting as it is to use Apple as a model for innovation, design, strategy, etc., its successes are rarely applicable to companies that are not, well, Apple. As my friend (and Apple fan) Roy has put it “don’t be Apple - even if you could be.”
Will I stop buying Apple products as a result? Unlikely, in part because I’ve recently become even more deeply dependent on them via my work at Tumblr. I’d like to believe that, as Mike Daisey argued in his compelling if flawed call to action re: Apple’s questionable labor practices in China, questioning/encouragement from loyal Apple customers can have as positive an effect on company practices as criticism from the outside. But in this case I’m most interested in the business world’s obsession with emulating Apple in every way, an endeavor I believe is largely futile; in the case of sustainability, I believe it could be detrimental.
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