Happy long weekend

Did you enjoy a long, leisurely morning in bed, catching up on some reading? I sure did, and it was wonderful. The week was long and busy, so this was my reward. I think I was also fighting off a nasty bug, so far so good, but it had a way to drain my energy. A few more good night's sleep and I'll feel as fresh as a daffodil.

I heard a cute joke while at Yuk Yuk on Wednesday night. I somehow had entered a draw for six free tickets and won, so I brought together a few friends and we sat in a booth while listening to local comedians test some material. It wasn't all good, actually, a lot of it was terrible, but some had their moments. Here's the joke: if they didn't want people to download free music off the Internet, then why did they give it such a cool name? Piracy! Who wouldn't want to be a pirate? "I'll have me some of these great U2 songs, yarr." Unfortunately, most of the jokes were in poor taste, obviously lots were about sex, drugs (this is Vancouver). And somehow, you can't be a stand-up comedian unless you say "fuck" every second word. It impoverishes the dialog in my opinion.

I attended a fantastic presentation last night, but I'm not going to write about it here. Instead, I'm going to point you to my latest endeavor: Sustainability in Vancouver. I haven't advertised it yet, but I intend on sending an e-mail soon to individuals I know are interested in sustainability.

Hold on tight?

I've been nervous about checking my investment portfolio of recent, news of markets all over the world feeling the impact of the US economy slowdown not helping me feel very confident about its performance. I'm mostly invested in Canadian stock, which is obviously going for a wild ride.

When I reviewed my performance stats for the past year, they were pretty poor, barely any gain. However, I recently received the statement for my group RRSP investments (through work) and the funds in which I placed my money did a lot worse than I did, which is surprising because my personal portfolio should be more volatile. I'm mainly invested in stock.

One happy piece of news today was from a company I recently invested in called Lignol Energy, a small startup here in BC that has developed technology to prepare fuel-grade ethanol from cellulosic biomass. When I read about their technology, it made sense to me. Instead of growing corn as a mono-culture to produce ethanol (something that has been criticized by environmentalists as not really being a sustainable approach to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels), Lignol uses what pretty much amounts to scraps from the forestry industry. Pretty cool, no? Well, the US Department of Energy also seems to think so, as they just awarded $30 million to Lignol for the construction of an ethanol plant. I doubt this stock will send me to retirement at 45, but I really enjoy seeing a local company with a cool green tech solution getting some recognition from the market.

As for the rest of my stock? Well, I'm holding on tight. Now is definitely NOT the time to sell. I do have some cash coming in though, any good buying opportunities?

If you must start somewhere...

As I was reading about corporate social responsibility and sustainability, I came across references to a book by John Elkington in pretty much every article. The book is called Cannibals with Forks. When I was done reading journal articles, I decided to grab a copy of the book at the Vancouver Library (which finally opened after two months of strike).

John Elkington is the Founder and Chief Entrepreneur of SustainAbility, a renown consultancy firm and think tank in the UK. The book was published in 1997 and, although ten years have passed since, it is still very relevant today. In the book, Elkington introduces the concepts of triple bottom line (people, planet AND profit), sustainable development, and challenges faced by companies as the world's population grows and consumes beyond what our planet can sustain. If you are curious about the topic of corporate sustainability, this is a good book to start with.

I started building a collection of links to web sites that discuss sustainability and CSR. Most are sites I came across while researching my MBA project. I used a very neat little link-sharing site called del.icio.us. If you are like me and add quantities of sites to your favourites, only to not remember why you linked them in the first place, you'll like del.icio.us. Once you add their button bar and find a web page of interest, you can highlight text on the page, click the Tag button, add a few keywords to help categorize the content, and voilà! You can also see how many other del.icio.us users have tagged a web site and then visit their list of favourites to find other link of interest.

Very well done.

Fitting the pieces of the puzzle

My last three days were spent in a workshop on sustainability reporting, stakeholder engagements and assurance. After reading about these topics all semester for my project, my head was filled with disconnected concepts and my own interpretation of what all the theory meant. After the workshop, the pieces of the puzzle are finally fitting together and I was able to learn about real-life applications of these concepts. Nothing short of impressive.

Now, I get to digest all this new information and review a few sections in my project report. My lack of experience made me connect dots too quickly and state grand conclusions that are not as black and white as I initially thought. My project report will be available online after it's been verified and approved, and will be searchable like so many other academic papers. The workshop has increased my confidence in what I am about to publish: it might actually be sound and useful information :-)

I'm enjoying the cold snap in Vancouver. We've seen ground frost every morning and the temperature never increases over two-digits. I prefer this to rain, although if you ask me to pick between -20 and rain, I'll probably vote for the wet weather. The cooler temperatures mean that we've received quite a bit of snow on the mountains. Whistler is already open. I'll see if I can manage a ski trip once the semester is over, it would be nice to play in the snow.

We've blown our budget

Living according to a carefully planned budget means that you spend within your means and that, hopefully, you are even left with a little extra at the end of the year that can be saved for a rainy day. Because rainy days happen. A lot of people do not live within their means and because they run out of money before the end of the year, they borrow. The next year, not only do they have to pay their yearly expenses, but they also have to repay their debt. So they borrow more. If this cycle doesn't stop, you stand to lose a lot.

Sustainable Business published an article on Ecological Debt Day. October 6 marked the day that humanity consumed all resources that our planet could produce this year. We already started borrowing on next year's resources. Ten years ago, we started borrowing in November.

This is really bad budgeting. What happens when we have to declare bankruptcy?

Way to penalize the green initiatives

I didn't find any online links to this story, but on French CBC radio tonight, I heard about something that was too silly not to blog about.

Vancouver has a car co-op that allows 3,000 members to share the use of approximately 170 vehicles. The cars are parked in designated areas in the city, members can call the co-op or reserve a vehicle online for a given date and time. The co-op is a great initiative to get vehicles off the roads and to provide affordable access to wheels for those who might not be able to afford owning a vehicle (or don't want to bother). For short trips in the city, the co-op is a lot cheaper than renting from car rental companies. I'm not a member of the co-op, but Lara was, Typhanie was and Gerri still is.

Well, apparently, the BC government thinks the co-op should have charged its members a vehicle rental tax and since it hasn't for the past three years, is now asking the not-for-profit company for $300,000.

For a government that launched a big "green cities" program back in 2006 to "get British-Columbians out of their vehicles", this is not very smart. Car sharing is as good an initiative as buying hybrids (which doesn't reduce traffic or the energy and materials consumed to make the car) or promoting public transit. In the news report, a representative from the co-op emphasized how they were a non-profit and could not afford to pay this large sum (all the money they make is reinvested in the cars they own, either to buy new ones or maintain the existing fleet).

Someone wasn't thinking...

Mainly clothes and food

I visited EPIC this afternoon, the sustainable living expo held in Vancouver. A friend from school and I picked up free tickets for the expo, and when it's pouring outside, I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday. It was OK, mostly focus on organic food and organic/recycled clothing, which is nothing really new. There were the usual suspects, Capers, Toyota and their hybrid line, a couple of local publications, a few local organizations promoting sustainable living... I was hoping for many more green builders and green tech, something like a green condo development. One really cool product was these roof shingles made out of old tires, guaranteed for 50 years! That's twice the guarantee on a regular roof.

The expo was quite small, we spent about an hour in there and then headed out to Steamworks for a beer and something to eat. The place was packed, even at 3 p.m.! Some holiday was also prompting everyone to dress in green, go figure ;)

Now it's 7, I'll make myself dinner and start attacking one of my final assignments. Somehow, I don't feel like this end-of-semester is as crazy as the last one. No complaints, I guess I'm just waiting for the truckload of work to hit me and it hasn't. March 27 is the date we submit our last assignment, exams are already done... Not bad, not bad at all.