It’s Blog Action Day! The day when bloggers all over the world join their voices to speak on one particular topic. This year we’re talking about climate change. Personally, I think climate change is a rather nebulous term that fails to incite emotion and does nothing to call people to action. Rather than rant on about that, I’ve decided to focus my efforts on Blog Action Day in a positive direction! Lets explore the concept of carbon credits to determine if they may help stabilize our climate.

Green House Gases

We have all heard of green house gases. They are the fumes given off by both human and environmental processes that go up into our atmosphere and get caught up there, trapping the suns energy in our atmosphere; causing the overall temperature of the planet to rise, quite like a greenhouse. The following graph from Environment Canada describes the sources of these harmful gases:

Environment Canada (2004)

The largest culprit is clearly Industry, being responsible for over half of the gaseous emissions on the planet. Regular folks, like you and me, are responsible for our fair share as well within the categories of Transportation, Products, and Heating. I expect that we also have a part in that Industry piece, as Industry is busy making stuff for us to consume.

Everyone knows there is a major problem here. We have to cut back on these gases to reduce our negative influence on our planet, if we wish to continue to call it home sweet home. Turning this big ship around is not an easy task. It involves breaking well-ingrained habits of individuals and business, as well as counteracting the incentives that exist to continue to pollute our air. Lets face it: there is money to be made by emitting greenhouse gases, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it. Historically there has been no money behind protecting the air, and there was no money to be made in making the right choices for the planet. Enter:  carbon credits.

Carbon credits are a concept that came out of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the legally binding agreement to reduce the collective greenhouse emissions of the industrialized nations to 5.2% below 1990 levels, which 184 industrialized countries have ratified (the US is not one of them). Carbon Credits bring money into the saving the environment equation with a cap and trade system. Each country is allowed to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases that they can allot to the gas emitting businesses within their borders. Carbon credits can be bought and sold between both companies and countries. If a company has left over carbon credits, it can sell them to another company that wants to pollute more than its original allotment of carbon credits allow.

Carbon credits can also be created as carbon offsets.  Companies can create carbon offsets by doing environment friendly activities such as reforestation, and creating clean forms of energy such as wind and solar power. These offsets can then be sold to companies who want to pollute more than they have the credits for, or to individuals who can voluntarily purchase offsets to compensate for their personal carbon footprint.

A whole new industry is popping up around this concept of selling carbon offsets. Plant some trees, sell the carbon offsets. The David Suzuki Foundation states that purchasing carbon offsets can help in the battle against climate change, but warns the consumer that not all carbon offsets are create equal. While carbon credits is far from a a perfect system, it does introduce money into the equation, and puts the power of the free market behind doing what is right for the environment. As sad as it might be, it has come down to harnessing our dark inclinations, such as greed and selfishness, to enforce business to do their part for the environment.

What do you think about carbon credits? Will they have the intending effect of stabilizing climate change, or might the system be perverted by greed? Are you considering voluntarily purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for you and your family’s carbon footprint?

Back from a little hiatus on the round ups! I’m no good with enforced schedules, I have to go with the Flow! So, from now on, Round Ups will come exactly when they should, when I’ve been inspired to write one!

Twitter + Blog = Twog

Richard Florida Twogs!

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?, is quite an active tweeter. He frequently tweets about stats, facts, and graphs about place, population and societies ever-changing demographics. It’s a little difficult to keep up with all of his nifty tweets, so he is now twogging! Each Wednesday Richard Florida compiles his bests tweets of the week into one, each to swallow blog post.

Johnny B Truant talks about Motivation at IttyBiz

Johnny B. Truant

Johnny B Truant has been super shiny lately, making guest posts all over the web, and even making $10K in 3 months by helping people! Through a hap-hazard retelling of an old tale, Truant tells us where the motivation came from to make it happen. When you have a need or requirement rather than a desire, you have ample motivation!

Top 10 Moments Caught on Google Street View at urlesque

Drunk dude passed out on Google Street View

Google Street View was just released in Canada. All my friends, ok, I’ll admit, and me too, have been spending valuable work time combing through the maps of our usual stomping grounds and a select few have been able to proudly post blurred images of themselves doing usual stuff. urlesque complied some of the whackiest moments found on Google Street View, including public urination, flashes, and even a Web 2.0 marriage proposal!

Stop the TV Tax debate spins out of consumer control at Canadian Cholito

Up here in Canada there is a whole debacle going on over a supposed local TV tax. The Canadian Cholito took it upon himself to discover who the real players are in this charade, and shares with his readers what they need to know.

I missed last week, so these are actually kind of drying out. I’m contemplating moving the round ups to Mondays.

The Problem with Positive Thinking from Seth Godin

Tribes author, Seth Godin, offers an intriguing insight about the role of positive and negative thought in the human experience. If positive thinking increases self confidence, which in turn improves performance, who do intelligent people partake in negative thought? Godin proposes that negative thinking feels good, that it “soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment… protects us and lowers expectations“. The truth of it being that positive thinking is actually difficult, and requires effort, but it’s worth it.

Woman Refuses To Pay Off Bank Of America Credit Card at The Huffington Post

Ann Minch of Red Bluff, California is taking a stand. After the Bank of America repeatedly raised her interest rate up to a whopping 30%, Minch says she will no longer pay. She has carried a moderate balance on this credit card for years, and has always made at least the minimum payment on time. Following a layoff, she called the creditor to negotiate more reasonable terms, to which she got a big fat “No”. Minch has sinced closed her cheqing and savings accounts with the Bank of America, and, despite the future repercusions on her credit rating, refuses to pay the credit card bill any more, in the name of standing up for what is right! More power to you Ann Minch! My hopes are that more people join you to fight this massive goliath, as it’s a fight worth winning.

Cure all Running Injuries (and Pain) with One Simple Fix….Barefoot Running at Fitness Spotlight

I have seen many endorsements for those crazy Vibram Five Finger ’shoes’ all about the intertubes, and I didn’t get why people were endorsing them, until now.  Mike O’Donnell pulls together a wide range of evidence that running has never been the cause of all those runner’s knees, but it’s actually the running shoes! Being designed to protect our feet from the crewl ground, sneakers have long been making our feet weak, causing us to run incorrectly! I’m going to have to try Vibram Five Fingers out – any excuse to go to MEC really.

Google’s Data Liberation Front

I was completely dependent on Gmail. When they had an outage for a few hours a couple of weeks back I could do nothing except go a little banana sandwich from not being able to access my email: my data! Google has started the Data Liberation Front to empower it’s users with respect to their data that Google manages for them. If you want to know how to get you emails out of gmail, your documents out of Google docs, or your site statistics out of Analytics, this is the place to go to figure out how.

Have you watched Dan Pink’s TED talk: The Surprising Science of Motivation yet? It’s a really interesting talk that delves into the mismatch between what science knows about motivation, and what business does in trying to motivate people to do things.

Dan Pink

I encourage you to watch Pink’s talk, but something is giving me the motivation to give you a run down of what he is on about.

The Candle Problem

The Candle Problem by Karl Duncker

Pink starts his talk by explaining The Candle Problem, which was introduced by Karl Duncker back in the 1940s as an illustration of Functional Fixedness. The task is to take the candle, matches, and tacks held in a box, and affix the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip on the table. To solve the problem one must think “out of the box” to figure out that s/he must use the box that the tacks are in to solve the problem.

The Candle Problem Solution

Sam Glucksberg, Psychology Professor at Princeton University, used The Candle Problem to measure the power of incentives. He gave two groups of people the problem. The first group was told that they would be timed and the second group was told that if they solved the problem the fastest, they would be rewarded monetarily. The results showed that the group offered the financial incentive to solve the problem quickly took an average of 3.5 minutes longer than the first group.

What?

The incentive hindered creative thought! Pink continues on to explain that over and over again psychologists and economists have found that incentives do the opposite of what we want to do in many modern day situations. The old rewards and punishments system works well for the well-defined tasks of the previous century that primarily require mechanical skills and the ability to follow instructions. The problem is that these tasks are becoming a rarity in the modern work day. More and more we have to utilize our cognitive skills to think creatively in our daily work. Incentives and other extrinsic motivators have been scientifically proven to dull thinking and block creativity.

Modern businesses that require employee engagement must stop using old methods to motivate their employees, and move towards intrinsic motivators to improve performance. Pink breaks down the three elements of intrinsic motivation to be considered:

Autonomy – Urge to direct our own lives

Mastery -  Desire to be better and better at something that matters

Purpose – Yearning to do something in the service of something larger than ourselves

Given these three elements amazing things can be achieved. Pink offers several examples:

• Google 20% time yielding some of Google’s best products including Gmail, Orkut and Google News
• Encarta vs. Wikipedia
• Results only work environments

Each of these three elements are at work motivating me to write this post:

Autonomy – It is my idea to write this, on my own time, exactly as I choose to write it.

Mastery – I desire to become a better blogger, and see this as good practice for my writing abilities;.

Purpose – I wish to share some neat ideas so that they may spread for the benefit of all.

For the benefit of my future working life, I do hope that business listen to Dan Pink’s advice!

Check out Dan Pink 2006 book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future for more on this topic, and watch for his next book Drive due out this December. Both books are no on my To Read list after watching his TED talk.

A sampling of some of the things that caught my attention on the internet this week:

Browser for the Better

Microsoft has committed to donating 8 meals to the Feeding America program for every download of Internet Explorer 8 from the above page. This is  pretty darn awesome, because of obvious benefits from contributing to a hunger-relief charity, and because Microsoft is helping to eliminate the abomination that is IE6! We should all rejoice!

How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want at Dumb Little Man

It is not difficult to find advice on goal setting, but what do you do when you have no idea what you want? I expect this is a common problem for many. People who want to achieve, make their mark, change things for the better, but have no idea about the direction of those goals. Ali Hale tackles this rarely acknowledged side of goal setting.

The winner of the Unconventional Writing Contest at The Art of Nonconformity

Back in June Chris Guillebeau held a writing contest to spread the unconventional mentality. The winner of the writing contest was Allan Bacon who shares with us the 3 “oxymoronic approaches to break the unspoken ‘rules’ of the conformist career path” he learned on his 3 year path from miserable corporate slave to living in Paris with his family.

Bingo, Bango, Bongo: Social media and the truth about Roberto Luongo at CholoCan

My partner in love is trying his hand at blogging. He has some neat things to say about media and culture. His newest post delves into the fans/social media/traditional media feedback loop in hockey rumours, looking particularly at the recent deal between the Canucks and Roberto Luongo.

The Article Cash4Gold Doesn’t Want You To Read at The Consumerist

Have you ever been tempted by those Cash4Gold adverts on tv? Send us your junk gold, and we’ll send you cash money! Well The Consumerist, with the help of a former Cash4Gold employee, warns of tiny cheques (like $0.03!) sent too late to request your jewelery back in the 10 day limit. You are better off taking your unwanted gold to your local jeweler, and handling these transactions in person where you have more power to say no to a raw deal.

Happy Friday!!