Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity. It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.

This quote from Buzz Woolley, president of VoiceofSanDiego, can be found at the very end of a recent New York Times article about next-gen online newspapers. Yet it perfectly summarizes the recent transformation of the newspaper industry, toward a local and publicly-funded reporting. VoiceofSanDiego is an online, non-profit and local newspaper. It is funded by individuals, foundations and businesses and has a readership of about 18,000. Like Spot Us, it’s experimenting a new kind of business model, which has since been taken up by many others.

I’ve always thought that journalism should be a non-profit activity. It is indeed a public service, even if it must stay independent from the government. Making profits off the news just doesn’t seem quite right…

I looked up the sunscreen lotion that I used last summer and found out that it contains few chemicals and is overall very safe to use. However the company that manufactures it is poorly rated when it comes to ethics, compliance to environmental regulations and its energy policy, among other things.

GoodGuide suggested a bunch of other products that have better ratings and offered me the possibility to buy them through Amazon or add them to my shopping list.

You can also use the GoodGuide App for iPhone to get instant information while shopping.

• The government should offer incentive for the construction of renewable energy plants.
• A new grid should be built to transport renewable energy from its production sites to cities.
• The government should give incentive to automobile companies to switch their production to hybrid cars.
• All buildings should be equipped with energy-efficient windows and lighting in order to stop pollution and reduce energy bills.
• The government should put a price on carbon emissions and lead the way to replace the Kyoto treaty by a better one.

Gore says that these initiatives will also help improve the state of the economy.
I found the section on the automobile industry particularly interesting:

We should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

This made me think of a profile of Mitchell Joachim, written by traffic expert Tom Vanderbilt, that I read in Wired’s October edition. Joachim is an architect who focuses on reducing the ecological footprint of cities.

Among the biggest sources of waste, he argues, is the automobile—not only in energy but in the space it occupies (cars, he notes, spend more than 90 per cent of the day parked.) For nearly a century, Joachim says, “cities have been designed around cars. Why not design a car around a city?” So he did just that. One of his concept vehicles, the City Car, was named to Time magazine’s Invention of the Year list in 2007.

His various cars would  be less machine than Facebook on wheels. Instead or rpm gauges, there’d be social networking software telling drivers where their friends are and how to get there. Nade from neoprene and other soft materials, cars would no longer suffer traffic-fouling fender benders, merely what he calls “gentle congestion”—picture a flock of urban sheep grazing against one other. Like Zipcar vehicles, the cars would be shared. They would “read” potholes and send warnings to nearby drivers and city repair crews. Urban parking would be eased by intelligent real-time supply and demand management, with people bidding remotely for available spots. Of course, there’d also be more spaces to begin with, since his cars could be folded and stacked like shopping carts. The average New York City block could handle 880 of the vehicles, he says.

Al Gore, meet Mitchell Joachim.

Source: The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008
Wired, Oct. 2008

Source: “Le gouvernement afghan étudie la construction d’une ville nouvelle écologique près de Kaboul,” Le Monde, Oct. 16.

Source: “Le prince Charles veut exporter son modèle d’urbanisme ‘à l’ancienne,’” Le Monde, Oct. 25

Source: Le Monde.

Source: BBC News.

In order to limit the influence of financial contributors who might be driven by personal interests, donations are limited to 20% of the cost of the story.

Spot Us was founded by Dave Cohn, a 26-year-old journalist, with the help of a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. It might very well be the future of reporting!

spot.us

The NYT: “A different way to pay for the news you want,” August 23, 2008

I’m sure the IPCC members are wise people but they are scientists studying climate patterns, not policy-makers. This recommandation is simplistic and doesn’t take into account whether people already make an effort to eat food that is produced locally or not or try to reduce their emissions in other ways. Climate change is a global problem that can’t be solved by isolated measures such as this one. I don’t think this is educating people about what they can do in a proper manner.