Photo credit Lauren Manning
And here are this week’s Green Numbers:
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GE: Good citizen, but where’s the payoff?
Inside GE, Ecomagination is deemed a success, so much so that it has spawned a sister initiative (if you can spawn a sister) called Healthymagination, focused on profitably creating better health for more people. GE says that it expects Ecomagination product revenues to grow at twice the rate of GE’s overall revenue between now and 2015.
The logic behind both initiatives is simple, Bob noted. Big global problems demand big solutions from big companies. GE prides itself on “tackling the world’s most complex and pressing problems,” as chief executive Jeff Immelt writes in the report.
The trouble is, the payoff for GE’s shareholders have been disappointing. I didn’t realize just how disappointing until I put together this chart comparing GE’s stock-price performance to the S&P500 and to a couple of its conglomerate competitors, Siemens and United Technologies.
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GE invests in SynapSense to cut data center energy
General Electric on Monday said it will invest in and partner with SynapSense, a start-up that makes a system for reducing data center energy with the help of wireless sensors.
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HP first to use TPC power usage benchmark
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has added a power efficiency metric, TPC-Energy, to its ongoing roundups of speedy transactional processing systems. Hewlett-Packard is the first participant to use the new TPC-Energy specification, submitting benchmark results of four of its systems.
“Energy is an increasing factor in the total cost of ownership” for many organisations, said Karl Huppler, chairman of the TPC. The new benchmark will allow an organisation to judge how energy efficient systems are, as judged by watts per performance.
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US Wastes $200 Billion on Environmentally Damaging Subsidies
A new report by the Green Scissors Campaign details some $200 billion worth of yearly US government subsidies that the coalition says are “wasteful to taxpayers, harmful to the environment and bad for consumers.” Green Scissors 2010 [PDF] covers four broad areas in which these subsidies occur– energy, agriculture and biofuels, infrastructure, and public lands.
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Engineers race to design 10MW offshore wind turbines
British, American and Norwegian engineers are in a race to design and build the holy grail of wind turbines – giant, 10MW offshore machines twice the size and power of anything seen before – that could transform the global energy market because of their economies of scale.
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New report shows how greening our Royal Bank of Scotland could create 50,000 jobs
A new WDM/PLATFORM report released today finds that transforming the Royal Bank of Scotland into the Green Investment Bank would kick start the green energy revolution. ?The research, by former Pricewaterhouse Coopers consultant, James Leaton, finds that it would bring 50,000 new green jobs a year, boost the UK economy, reduce the UK’s carbon emissions and improve international competitiveness – whilst not increasing the budget deficit.
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Plankton declines 40% as Warming Oceans Causes Steady Population Decline
The warming temperatures of the ocean are problematic for many species, but especially worrisome is the impact hotter water has on cornerstone species upon which many other marine animals rely. Usually we hear about changes in ocean temperature impacting coral reefs, but now scientists are finding that across the globe, phytoplankton — the food for zooplankton which is food for many other ocean species — is in decline, and that will have massive impacts for not just the marine food chain but ocean systems on the whole.
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