I’ve been in a discussion of the upcoming lightbulb law with @NobleIdeas, and he’s provided a blog response to my earlier post. His post is useful, since it covers most of the standard points used to support the law, as well as providing support for one of my key points. Here’s my thoughts in response. The Main Point The federal government has many proven, existing programs to drive efficiency, including Energy Star, portfolio standards and product labeling schemes, not to mention the myriad of state and local programs, many of which have already invested in lightbulb efficiency.

I’ve been having a useful exchange back and forth with @NobleIdeas about the lightbulb law that is set to take effect in January 2012. (Here’s my first post and @NobleIdeas’ reply. I have another note on this in the works.) One of the recurring themes of this discussion is the mercury content of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). The standard argument is that widespread use of CFLs, despite their mercury content, will lower the ambient mercury level.

For the past few days I’ve been going back and forth with @NobleIdeas on the national lightbulb law (formally known as the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007), but I thought I’d break out of the 140-character limit and write down my rationale. Those who know me know that I’m a big fan of efficiency, especially when it results in economic gain as well as environmental. During my term as CSO at Sun we did big lighting retrofit projects, and saved tons of money.

Terje Sorgjerd writes: (Thanks to WUWT) The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

We all know that Twitter is amazing, that everyone is using it, and that it’s on the road to making everyone who’s involved with it rich. But if that’s the case, why are they messing around with their developer agreements at the risk of annoying their most loyal partners? Maybe the answer is that Twitter isn’t the financial slam dunk that we all thought. The problem, I believe, goes back to a fundamental decision that they made early on, and that probably also contributed to their rapid rise.

“JPMorgan” is a registered trademark of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Sorry for starting with a legal disclaimer, but you’ll see why in a minute. You may recall that 18 months ago Greg Papadopoulos and I published a book called Citizen Engineer, where we tried to help engineers understand key topics related to the role in society, including sustainability and intellectual property. Since then we’ve traveled around giving talks (on our own dime) to help spread the word to students and engineering professionals.

It’s been almost a year since the Oracle deal closed, and I’ve been fortunate to work on a lot of interesting projects since then, including the Energy Innovation Tracker, which I’ll write more about soon. By last fall I was feeling like it was time to settle down somewhere again. I talked to a number of companies; some of the companies were really small, and some were really large. But late in the year I got an offer to work full-time for Applied Minds and their spinoff, TouchTable, and enthusiastically accepted.

David Roberts has an excellent piece at Grist titled “Carbon tax in the U.K.: What does it mean for U.S. debate?".. Personally I wasn’t surprised. I’ve always believed that there was a mismatch between the idea of a pure cap and trade system and a democratic system of government. Once cap and trade (or any other carbon pricing scheme) fills up the proverbial cookie jar, there’s no way that elected officials will be able to keep their hands out of it.

In my experience Chris Mines at Forrester is the top analyst covering the green enterprise, but I think he’s slightly off the mark on his latest article “Five Reasons Why Carbon Management Software is the Next Big Thing”. Before I talk about where he’s wrong, let me say that he’s right on the money that ECEM is an important function in the enterprise going forward, and as I’ll cover below, I think its just the tip of a larger iceberg.

Over my years as Sustainability Officer at Sun I’ve publicly given lots of credit to the EPA, primarily for their world-leading Energy Star program and for the excellent Climate Leaders program. Boy, do I feel foolish now. First, in my eyes they tarnished their crown jewel, Energy Star, with the politically motivated and poorly conceived Energy Star server specification (a longer, separate story that I won’t cover here). But I still felt justified in singing their praises as long as they still ran the excellent Climate Leaders program.