If you don't recognize those initials, I assume you don't pay much attention to venture capital investing. Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers is featured in the most recent issue of Fortune in a story by Adam Lashinsky because of its investments in "Greentech" and its move away from Internet companies. The story -- entitled "Kleiner bets the farm" -- is getting a lot of play on the tech blogs because of this paragraph:
Several Valley investors who monitor startups tell me they don't bother
sending Web-oriented entrepreneurs to pitch Kleiner anymore; they say
the firm just doesn't seem interested. As if to prove the point, not
one Kleiner partner attends the 600-person [AllThingsD].
But the main thrust of the story is that KPCB is putting all of its eggs in the Greentech basket. This comes from an unidentified KPCB investor: "I hope to God they're right.... But if they're wrong it'll be the end of
Kleiner Perkins."
So how risky is this move by KPCB? For a more balanced perspective on what KPCB is doing, you might want to watch KPCB partner Beth Seidenberg's presentation in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series at Stanford. Particularly this segment, where she explains KPCB's investment mix. About one-third of 2007 investments went to Greentech. The firm is also plowing a bunch of money into mobile technologies, which Lashinsky mentions, but the significance of this move is overwhelmed in the article by the emphasis on green. The bottom line is that KPCB isn't much interested in Web 2.0, and so far, the firm looks amazingly insightful on this point.
As for the riskiness of Greentech as a sector, does anyone really believe that this is a potential loser? Especially when KPCB has it's own in-house hype generator in Al Gore. People are ready for clean tech and KPCB is sitting pretty.
I often work odd hours and so have become
familiar with the custodians everywhere I’ve been (more familiar, sad
to say, than with many of my colleagues). But I haven’t (yet!)
been employed by enough schools that I would have any standing for
sweeping generalisations. Somewhere, right, there must be college
custodians who don’t just put the recycling in with all the rest of the
rubbish? Even when you are not watching them?
(I’ve never complained to the custodians, their superiors, or anyone
else about this. I’ve a strict rule against doing anything to anger
alienated labor when it has unrestricted access to my things.)
Several years ago, I sent an email to the faculty listserv at Wisconsin asking whether others separated their trash when the custodians just combined it. (We talked about such things on the listserv at Wisconsin. We don't have those conversation via email at BYU.)
The first response to my email was from a clinical professor, who accused me on the list of being a racist. Without replaying the whole event, suffice it to say that he was reading a lot into my email that no one else on the faculty seemed to see ... at least judging by the flood of sympathetic messages and office visits throughout the day.
Though my accuser never apologized directly, he subsequently engaged me in a friendly conversation that seemed intended to convey remorse. Unfortunately, I am not a big enough person to have forgotten the initial accusation. But I can laugh about it. Maybe that's worth something.
Anyway, what I am curious to know is whether office paper recycling is effective. One of my sympathetic colleagues claimed that the paper would be re-sorted at some later stage in the process, but that seemed unlikely to me. I found lots of articles on the internet extolling the benefits of office paper recycling, but what happens to all of that combined paper?
Christine and Gordon's recent hybrid car postings (Highlander for Christine; Prius for Gordon) got me thinking. You see, my family lives in a Prius-rich environment. Literally about a third of our friends have at least one Prius in the family, and one family has two--and they are Prius proselytizers as well. We, on other hand, drive a couple of relatively old, relatively guzzly cars. The efficient one is a 12-year-old Volvo, which gets about 15 mpg in city driving. The other is a 10-year-old Lexus SUV (the big one), which gets about 10 mpg (with a tailwind). When I get self-conscious about our old guzzlers, my defense mechanisms cause me to speculate about whether buying a new hybrid is as green as generally believed. Specifically, the manufacture of a new car--even a really fuel-efficient one--must leave a pretty big carbon footprint, right? All that steel and shipping! Is it possible we'd be better off just keeping our old cars forever and repairing them as needed, as they do in Cuba?
Turns out, building a new Prius requires 113 million BTUs of energy. So compared to an existing car, in carbon footprint terms, a new Prius has already consumed 1,000 gallons of gasoline before it rolls off the showroom floor! Instead of a new Prius, buy:
i. a 1998 Toyota Tercel, which gets about 35 mpg. You'd have to drive the Prius 100,000 miles before you broke even with the old Tercel.
or
ii. a 1994 Geo Metro XFi, which gets the same 46 mpg as the new Prius, but without the carbon overhead. In terms of carbon footprint, the Prius will never catch up.
Of course, odds are that you won't be getting that new-car smell. As one analyst concludes, "You might feel better driving a hybrid, but you won't necessarily be greener."
Second, about road rage. . . .
Did you hear that bumper stickers cause road rage? This study's been out for a few weeks now, and actually that's not what it said. Apparently, bumper stickers signal the driver's territoriality. Bumper stickers personalize the car, marking the driver's territory. These drivers are quicker to perceive a threat to their territory by the actions of other drivers, and they are correspondingly more lively at defending against these perceived incursions. And this is independent of any substantive message on the bumper sticker:
It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are
about peace and love -- "Visualize World Peace," "My Kid Is an Honor
Student" -- or angry and in your face -- "Don't Mess With Texas," "My
Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student."
You may remember that my oldest daughter is in BYU's Animation Program. Each year students in the program complete an animated film, and I was just looking over some of their past work. The film Lemmings caught my eye. Here is a clip:
You know, of course, that lemmings don't really commit suicide. According to the Wikipedia entry on Lemming, the suicide myth has been around for a very long time, and remains a powerful image in popular culture. The clip below is from a 1964 Disney film entitled White Wilderness that purports to show the very act of lemmings jumping from a cliff.
This has been called "Disney's Snuff Film," but Wikipedia makes the point somewhat more delicately: "An investigation in 1983 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Brian Vallee, showed that the Disney film makers faked the entire sequence using imported lemmings (bought from Inuit children), a snow covered turntable on which a few dozen lemmings were forced to run, and literally throwing lemmings into the sea to show the alleged suicides."
The other famous lemmings image that pops to mind is Apple's 1985 advertisement:
All of this ickiness associated with lemmings ... I'm not sure that I will ever be able to use that metaphor again.
A Texas legend has died at the age of 94 -- Lady Bird Johnson. Many tales of Lady Bird sound apocryphal, but have the ring of truth about them. I was told by someone at Pennzoil that Lady Bird had extracted a promise from Hugh Liedtke never to put up Pennzoil billboards. When Pennzoil acquired Jiffy Lube, he was gently reminded of this promise and many billboards had to come down. I have also heard that this movie was loosely based on her keeping a secret service detail, even when it was quite clear that it was not strictly necessary! (The statute providing for ongoing protection of former presidents and widows was amended in 1995 to limit the duration of secret service protection, but it did not apply retroactively.) For those of you who don't regularly drive Texas highways, the wildflowers in the picture are Indian paint brush and bluebonnets, in memory of wildflowers' most powerful protector.
Now an interesting new paper has come out describing another Wal-Mart effect, this time on global environmental governance. The paper, by Michael Vandenbergh at Vanderbilt, describes how Wal-Mart and other large firms may plausibly be improving global environmental governance by imposing environmental requirements on their suppliers. Responding to social, economic, and regulatory pressures, large importers are in effect exporting industrial country environmental standards to developing countries via private contract, a move that may help fill regulatory gaps that result from global trade. An interesting read.
Here's the abstract:
This Article argues that networks of
private contracts serve a public regulatory function in the global
environmental arena. These networks fill the regulatory gaps created
when global trade increases the exploitation of global commons
resources and shifts production to exporting countries with lax
environmental standards. As critics of trade liberalization have noted,
public responses often are inadequate to address the attendant
environmental harms. This Article uses empirical data to examine how
private contracting regulates firm behavior, focusing on supply-chain
contracting. The Article shows that more than half of the largest firms
in eight retail and industrial sectors impose environmental
requirements on their domestic and foreign suppliers. This contracting,
which the Article terms "the new Wal-Mart effect," reduces
externalities by translating a complex mix of social, economic, and
legal incentives for environmental protection into private contractual
requirements. After demonstrating that private environmental
contracting is an important part of global environmental governance,
the Article examines the efficacy and accountability of this regime.
The Article concludes that the private contracting regime often is
preferable to the alternatives: lax national and international
regulation of firms in many exporting countries, and markets that lack
private environmental contracting. Finding much promise in the private
contracting regime, the Article concludes by suggesting new strategies
for governments, nongovernmental organizations, and firms.
Last summer Al Gore praised Wal-Mart's environmental initiatives, stating:
The message from Wal-Mart today to the rest of the business community
is, there need not be any conflict between the environment and the
economy. We will find the way not only to reconcile (those), but to
find new profits and new opportunities as we do the right thing.
Today comes news of a plan to outfit 22 Wal-Mart stores in California and Hawaii with solar panels. (W$J) The panels will provide up to 30% of the energy for the stores. This is a pilot project designed to test the viability of solar energy in other Wal-Mart locations. And it is supported by tax incentives:
California and Hawaii have other appeals for solar panels beside
abundant sunshine. Solar power typically costs more than conventional
forms of energy based on fossil fuels, but those two states provide
generous rebates because they are trying to get 20% of their energy
from renewable resources by 2020.
Wal-Mart, Bentonville, Ark., declined to quantify its
anticipated savings from the pilot program other than to say they will
register "as soon as the first day of operation." What's more,
Wal-Mart, not its solar providers, will retain the renewable-energy
credits generated by the program. The credits recognize the value of
producing energy from renewable resources like solar power that don't
create greenhouse-gas emissions such as carbon dioxide. They could be
valuable if the Democratic-controlled Congress introduces emission caps
and such credits can be traded.
There are big subsidies for solar installations in
some states, and these programs can cut the effective cost of a project
by half. In the case of the 22 stores, Wal-Mart is buying the output of
the solar panels sitting on its rooftops. But the vendors -- BP PLC subsidiary BP Solar, SunEdison LLC and SunPower Corp. subsidiary PowerLight -- said they are receiving a federal tax
credit amounting to 30% of each installation's cost, plus
ratepayer-funded rebates paid by utilities and other incentives. After
all the subsidies, electricity produced by solar panels can end up
cheaper than that from conventional sources.
As Conglomerate readers know, I am not inclined to bash Wal-Mart, so don't take it as a criticism of the company when I say that this is not "corporate social responsibility." This is good business. Cost savings + positive public relations = no brainer.
That said, Al Gore's feel-good notion that "there need not be any conflict between the environment and the
economy" is dangerous because it leads many people to assume that clean air and clean water are costless. The obvious implication of Gore's reasoning is that corporate directors and officers are evil incarnate or wildly incompetent. How else could one understand environmental degradation in a world where the environment and the
economy are not in conflict? In the case of Wal-Mart's new solar panels, the costs of moving away from fossil fuels will be borne, in part, by taxpayers. There is no free lunch.
These are the sorts of thoughts that prompted me to write The Dystopian Potential of Corporate Law, in which I respond to Kent Greenfield's call for corporate governance reforms that encourage greater corporate social responsibility:
The crucial point of departure for this section is the following incontrovertible fact: Professor Greenfield's vision of utopia would require boards of directors to make decisions that sacrifice potential shareholder value in favor of value for non-shareholder constituencies. When boards of directors are able to enhance employee welfare, make the environment cleaner, or improve human rights throughout the world without impairing shareholder value, they often do it. This is not "corporate social responsibility," but good management. And the failure to pursue such strategies would be a problem of managerial incompetence, not a problem of improper incentives.
