Measuring and communicating the carbon footprint of consumer goods is a resource-intensive effort that may be doomed to fail. But lean manufacturing process, already widely adopted and respected, hint at what might be done with the carbon footprint concept.
Despite the painfully slow progress on a global transition to clean energy, there are three relatively simple ideas that, if widely implemented, could offset a big chunk of fossil fuel emissions and buy us time while we shift to clean energy.
After more than two decades of talking about sustainable consumption -- and in spite of advances in resource efficiencies and renewable energy -- we are not all that much closer to consuming sustainably.
The principle of comparative advantage works well in an ideal world where trade incurs no human or environmental costs. But in the real world someone has to ultimately bear every cost, whether it is part of the accounting or not. By Kumar Venkat
It is all too common for discussions on sustainability to focus entirely on how to make our resource consumption more efficient, and very little on how people can work and earn a living without destroying the world. By Kumar Venkat
Technology plays a significant role in the development process for third-world countries. But what kinds of technological tools do developing societies need? By Kumar Venkat
Is it possible that we are over-optimizing one factor of production -- labor -- at the expense of other resources that are truly scarce? By Kumar Venkat
