Last night, 60 Minutes reported on Bloom Energy and their BloomBox technology. You can read a transcript of the story here. Bloom appears to have developed a reasonably priced fuel cell technology. My thought on this was that if they can sell me one for cheap (like less than the $3000 quoted in the …
Category Archive: Business
Feb
22
Feb
16
International Investment in the Oil Sands
There have been a few stories in the news lately concerning the Alberta Oil Sands and the various moves toward or away from this resource. A couple of interesting stories: Canada looks to China to exploit oil sands rejected by US BP risks investor outrage at ‘dirty’ oil deal Chinese, Korean and Japanese firms have …
Feb
09
Looking beyond the US Market
Jeffrey Simpson, writing in the Globe and Mail, sometimes surprises me. He hits the nail on the head that Canadian businesses need to look beyond the US market and find more customers overseas – even if that is hard. Mr. Simpson wrote a good book review a couple of years ago, on the same subject. …
Jan
31
Canada’s Climate Change Target
OK, given that the evidence is now out on climate change, I am very disappointed that the Government of Canada insists on going along with the charade of Copenhagen by committing us, in a non-binding way, to a reduction of 17% in CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by 2020… Let’s work out how much that …
Dec
23
Public Education fails AGAIN
In today’s National Post, there is an article about the elimination of a report card in Elementary schools in Ontario, replacing it with a “kinder, gentler progress assessment”. This is a stupid idea. You cannot fix what you don’t measure. And fluffy, feel-good assessments don’t measure. Mary-Lou Donnelly of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation is quoted …
Dec
21
Calculating Copenhagen
OK, so I’ve crunched the numbers on the non-agreement made at Copenhagen, using data from the IEA on emissions. In 2006, CO2 emissions from the world were about 28.4 billion tonnes, of which about 51.5% were from the “developed world”. This compares to about 21 billion tonnes in 1990, when 66% were from developed countries. …
Nov
18
On Harper’s nuclear deal with India
This could be a very good plan, depending on how it plays out. Here are the reasons: The world wants to build more nuclear plants, but there is a problem – the availability of fuel (uranium) and enrichment capabilities may not grow as fast as demand, which could drive up the cost of nuclear …
Nov
17
Less than Free
If you think free, open-source software is disruptive to the computer and software business, consider what Bill Gurley calls Google’s “less than free” offerings: Google’s free navigation feature announcement dealt a crushing blow to the GPS stocks. Garmin fell 16%. TomTom fell 21%. Imagine trying to maintain high royalty rates against this strategic move by Google. …
Oct
30
The Folly of Copenhagen
In today’s National Post, and elsewhere around the net, there is much commentary about the upcoming Copenhagen Conference where the UN and the Climate Change Priesthood will try to guilt the western world into signing on to a treaty that will cripple their economies and transfer wealth to the developing world. Peter Foster does a …
Oct
21
On Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality is a growing issue, and watching Glenn Beck (yes, he is a blowhard, but sometimes he asked questions that need to be asked) last night I discerned that the term Net Neutrality is being used to two separate and unrelated concepts: The original meaning (as I recognized) was the the Internet should be …