I support GoProfileGreen

Barva Volcano National Park, Costa Rica

When an idea has huge potential to create a significantly positive impact at a global scale, my optimism replenishes. So invigorating! 

GoProfileGreen is a student startup initiative at Babson College entrepreneurship program in Boston, MA. It aims at mitigating the CO2 emissions created by our social media profiles -roughly about 300 grams of CO2 per year, according to Facebook- by charging a symbolic amount to regenerate natural capital, in other words, to invest in forests and other ecosystems. 


This would allow us to certify our profiles as carbon-neutral and at the same time give a big push to improving the natural environment. 


With 1.3 billion users only on Facebook, the success of this project could be the greatest contribution this generation has given to the following one so far. 




We could be seeing only the tip of the iceberg of a new ecosystem of carbon-neutral projects for natural capital regeneration that have an online base and an offline impact. How good is that.  


He is into the third of four rounds for the opportunity to receive feedback from renowned and expert VCs. This is like taking the fast track for a startup and I would like to see his project go through to the last round. 




If you could spare ten more seconds, please support this initiative here.


Thank you.

A Few Thoughts on "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math"

Rolling Stone has published Bill McKibben's article which I believe to be the most action-based diagnosis on climate change that I  have read. 

Forget everything you have heard or read about climate change and stick to this one piece! A few additional concerns:

1. We have diagnosed the conflict incorrectly. It is not about carbon emissions. It is about a severe addiction to comfort that maintains us unconscious of the holistic, long-term consequences of our behavior;

2. Ninety percent of the problem is caused by the 2 billion richest people, which are those who live in a household where per capita income is greater than US$300/month. The remaining 5 billion, who earn less than that, are barely contributing to the growing spiral of ecological degradation, and they certainly are too busy surviving under highly impoverished conditions to worry about global issues;

3. We either change our behavior and culture decidedly, or it will change us dramatically and -apparently to many- unexpectedly. But we've been sufficiently warned in advance;

4. I don't think oil companies are solely responsible as to target them and blame them for the crisis. We are the ones burning and causing to burn fossil fuels to support our comfort levels, to the point where we rather remain indifferent and even deny the issue than to face it;

5. The big picture is far more complex: we are reducing the Earth's biocapacity (its ability to naturally replenish resources like oxygen, potable water, fisheries, fertile soil) and we are consuming 50% more every year than can be naturally renewed. If we proceeded like this with our finances (it is not so differently, in fact), we would have gone bankrupt and bust a couple of decades ago. The difference is that we cannot print more planet;

6. By cutting down forests at a rate of the entire area of Nepal every year, we are not allowing the biosphere of the planet to clean its own atmosphere. We are approaching the tipping point-of-no-return from more than one direction simultaneously;

7. We are contaminating aquifers, river basins and oceans with the residue or leftovers from our shampoo and toothpaste and hair gel and plastic bags. We are causing contamination of our own sources of food, and at the same time we are exhausting available resources. 

I already know I won't see a healthier planet than the one I saw when I arrived. But I got tired of being pessimistic, so I chose to make the change for myself including not commuting by car the last five years, going vegetarian the last four years, and planting some 40 trees per year in average the last five years. I decided to embrace a sublime faith that a more prosperous life on the planet can be achieved. My sense of ethical responsibility towards six generations after mine does not allow me to proceed otherwise. 

I don't foresee the great transformations that the planet requires coming from politics -including diplomacy, for the matter- nor from markets. The only harmonious course of action I can imagine is an emergence of ethics as a binding force across cultures, generations, genders and socioeconomic conditions. We are just not properly connected, but this shift could happen far quicker than we think.

At the end of Rio+20 a journalist said that the only way out of the global climate conflict was a catastrophic climate-related disaster that would shock us all and bind us together. I think the climate-related disaster is here and now. I strongly believe it is the turn for our generation -not our parents, and not the other country at the other end of the ocean- to take the lead and facilitate the change that is required. If not us, then who?

A Planet made of Diamond

In recent weeks, the scientific community has congratulated itself for the discovery of a planet that is composed of a carbonic substance similar to what we know here on Earth as diamond. Not so fast, jewelers! It is 4000 light years away.

The method to confirm this discovery is the good old scientific method: observation, simulation, hypothesis, testing, confirmation, peer reviews by anonymous, qualified scientists. In the words of Dr. Matthew Bailies, it is likely to be the greatest scientific discovery of his career.

He very quickly shuns pride for the achievement and wonders why, if the scientific community and the specialized and general public are cheering for such discovery, is it not possible to be consistent with scientific discovery following the scientific method that proves, without reasonable doubt, that human behavior with the Earth's natural resources is causing a net negative impact on the world's ecosystem?

The question is pertinent. A group of scientists identify a body in outer space that would take 4000 years to arrive at if we traveled at the speed of light, but the samples collected for decades from all possible locations on our planet are disregarded as sufficient proof of anthropogenic interference -that is, caused by humans- in our ecosystem.

It may not be a matter of method. If we wonder what would happen if exhaust fumes from combustion engines would stay at surface level instead of flying kilometers up into the atmosphere, we would have gotten sick from them half a century ago and we would have probably solved the problem by now.

It may be a matter of belief. Some people choose to believe there is no anthropogenic climate change because they don't see it. Some others choose to ignore its existence or become indifferent to it because it would imply changing the comfortable life that at least 1 billion people on the planet (14% of us) have achieved through technology, energy, safety, market economies, food availability, health, entertainment, etc.

Unfortunately, it may also be a question of incentives: some people may be receiving monetary gains from the lifestyle and processes that are involved with human contamination of nature. I am almost sure that if my father was an important shareholder of a Big Oil Company I would find it more difficult to criticize pollution from carbon emissions and green house gases.

Which leads us to the field of ethics, that moral ground that we used to have and may have escaped this generation of new leaders that we are forming. More on this later.