Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a young man. Now that he’s 54, merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he’s Fortune’s CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue).

In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets — music, movies, and mobile telephones — and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm’s Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.

In all instances, and many more like them, these entrepreneurs turned captains of industry defined a single market that had previously not been dominated by anyone. The industries that Jobs has turned topsy-turvy already existed when he focused on them.

[...]

The financial results have been nothing short of astounding — for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple’s groundbreaking “digital lifestyle” strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google.

via The decade of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple – Nov. 5, 2009.

The collapsing US dollar is playing havoc with ETS projections. Governments that had been hoping to make extra revenue by selling carbon permits will now lose money, which means less cash available for subsidies to the developing countries.

That was exposed by this week’s Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook from the Australian Treasury.

In the past six months the Rudd government’s CPRS has gone from being a net contributor to revenue to a big cost – mainly because of the rising Australian dollar.

The CPRS was a $208 million benefit to the budget; now it’s a $1.2 billion cost over the forward estimates (to 2012-13). Over 10 years the net cost is now $2.5 billion.

In 2013-14, according to Treasury’s new forecasts, revenue from the sale of permits will total $12.1 billion and the cost of assistance measures will be $13.7 billion – a $1.6 billion budget hole.

The MYEFO says: “While world carbon prices have remained stable, the appreciation of the Australian dollar has resulted in the A$ carbon price estimate for 2012-13 falling from A$29 per tonne in the 2009-10 Budget to A$26 per tonne. A lower A$ carbon price assumption directly lowers the amount of revenue that is expected to be collected from the sale of CPRS permits.”

via Carbon trading in the dollar doldrums – Alan Kohler – News – Business Spectator.

November marks the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth. In more than 30 sharply written essays for Harvard Business Review and other publications, he delved into executives’ basic challenges and opportunities. Assembled here are some of his classic contributions, as well as new perspectives on Drucker’s influence.

via The Drucker Centennial – Harvard Business Review.

More here – Drucker Institute

The FreeXchange blog at the Economist goes with its ridiculous logic again. The previous time was on the Tata Nano and now its with efficient railroads.

Commenting on Buffett’s buy of the second largest rail company in the US,

ONE of today’s bigger stories is the news that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway will buy up the 77% it doesn’t yet own of rail company Burlington Northern Santa Fe, in a deal that values the company at about $44 billion. Mr Buffett called the purchase an “all-in wager on the economic future of the United States”. He also played up the greenness of the business, saying:

BNSF last year … moved a ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of diesel. It releases far fewer pollutants into the atmosphere. It saves enormously on energy consumption and … it diminishes highway congestion. Rails last year moved 40 percent, more than 40 percent, over the country. They moved more than all those trucks, just the four big railroads. It’s a very effective way of moving goods. I basically believe this country will prosper and you’ll have more people moving more goods 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, and the rails should benefit.

But while the trains themselves are among the cleanest freight transportation around, their cargo is decidedly not. Almost half of BNSF’s tonnage last year was coal, and MarketWatch estimates that some 10% of the power generated in America comes from coal hauled by BNSF.

For FreeXchange, acknowledging that railroads are an efficient medium of transportation the problem is with the goods it carries. Any business needs to make economic decisions and in this scenario I do not see how BNSF can say deny itself the coal business.  We need to remember that the coal industry is not going to go away anytime soon.

I think the logic does not make sense.

As Amory Lovins has been suggesting,

Both Areva and EDF have found themselves reprimanded in recent months by nuclear safety authorities during the construction process of the EPR. Areva also remains in a fierce battle with its utility client in Finland, where the reactor is at least three years late and several billion euros over budget.

via FT.com / Europe – France tries to calm reactor concerns.

More Details,

Alongside increasing costs, construction times have proven to be problematic. The last four reactors that were built in France, two units in Chooz and two in Civaux, were only connected on average 10.5 years after construction work began, and subsequent safety problems caused further delays. Their official industrial service only started in 2000 and 2002 respectively, some 15.5 and 12.5 years after construction started.

– French nuclear reactor costs are just as out of control as they are in the U.S. The EPR has been promoted as a technology that makes nuclear energy cheaper and more competitive. When the decision was made to build an EPR in Finland in 2002, the government promised that it would cost Euro 2.5 billion and take only four years to build. The final contract, three years later, put the price at Euro 3 billion and construction time was set at 4.5 years. Since construction began in summer 2005, a variety of technical problems have led to a three and a half-year delay, extending the construction period to at least 7 years. The currently estimated additional cost is Euro 2.3 billion, raising the current price tag to Euro 5.3 billion, almost 75 percent over the initial estimate.

Simon Hackett rode the Tesla pure electric roadster across Darwin to Australia, more than 3000 kms. Here are his results.

How would you like your car to achieve the equivalent of 1.6 Litres per 100 km (US 150 MPG)?

Would you like to do that while paying between AUS$69 and AUS$126 for your energy costs (including a surcharge to buy 100% GreenPower), to take you 3147 kilometres from the top of Australia to the bottom?

(or to put it another way: between 2.2 and 4 cents per km over that entire distance using GreenPower)?

We’ve just demonstrated that its possible – if the car is a pure electric vehicle.

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• Tesla Roadster Breaks EV World Record: 313 Miles on Single Charge (501 KM) (treehugger.com)

Due to the logarithmic nature of fuel efficiency there is more to be gained to green trucks than work on small cars.

For 50 years, long haul tractor-trailer designs have remained fundamentally unchanged. Basically a giant box hurtling down the highway at 55 miles per hour, most trucks average only six miles to the gallon.

[...]

But the time is ripe for change. According to recent analysis by Rocky Mountain Institute the technology already exists to double the energy efficiency of long-haul trucks in the nation’s fleet. Their size, speed and poor aerodynamics mean they are laden with “low-hanging fruit” in terms of cost-effective efficiency and retrofitting opportunities.

via The Time is Ripe to Green Trucking | GreenBiz.com.

I learned about this first from an article by Seth Godin.

This very interesting article in Science, “The MPG Illusion” by Richard P. Larrick and Jack B. Soll at the Fuqua School of Business in Duke University (Vol 320, June 20, 2008, p. 1593), points out the mathematically obvious truth that gas used per mile is inversely proportional to miles per gallon, which means that you have a steeper slope at lower MPG ratings, and diminishing returns at higher MPG ratings.

And,

There are some important policy implications of this. Relatively small MPG improvements in the most gas-hungry vehicles pay off greater than larger improvements in already efficient cars (hence, it does make sense to offer tax breaks for modest improvements in SUVs versus tax breaks for hybrids, which typically replacing already gas-efficient sedans). Also, personal driving habits, especially for gas-hungry cars, can often times add or subtract a few MPG to a car’s efficiency on average. For example, a car that may get 25 MPG “average highway” will degrade to under 15 MPG if you gun it out of stoplights in city traffic. That’s a huge increase in gas consumed per distance driven, especially for the less efficient cars, whereas for more efficient cars it doesn’t hurt as much to goose the engine a bit.

Apparently the thinking that gas savings is linear with MPG is not uncommon. A survey of college students revealed that a majority of them shares this misconception.

While working in the Greening job I learned a lot in terms of systems and inspiration from Leith’s work at Harvard. She has done some amazing stuff at a bureaucracy like Harvard.

She was the first paid environmental officer on the Kensington campus when still a student and after graduation was hired to “green” the university, which she did for five years.She pushed for sustainable solid waste disposal, worked with the state transit authority to cut commuting times to the campus, and ran a greenhouse gas challenge, an environmental living program so people could learn how to live sustainably, and a “green office” program.

By the time she took up a Churchill Fellowship in 1999 there were eight staff, funded by grants from not-for-profit groups, and government and university funding.When she set off to study international trends, she discovered “we were the ones leading, and instead of me learning from everyone else’s programs I used to get invited to present the UNSW case study.

It was exciting to be asked but on the other hand I was devastated to realise that no one had the answers in the higher education sector.”She spoke at Harvard and was recruited to create and run a program aimed at the enormous task of greening the campus.Her initiatives at Harvard are estimated to be saving $US7millon annually and have set the pace in the US higher education sector. Sharp has plenty of practical advice on inculcating the cultural change that must support technical measures such as equipment upgrades, lighting and insulation improvements, and making it self-funding.

via Harvard visitor Leith Sharp sharpens focus on sustainability | The Australian.

Simon said he would put the Tesla through its paces in the six-stage journey, covering distances from 300km to 700km per day. “We’re simulating the recharging infrastructure by putting a generator on the back of a truck and sending that out ahead of the car to be at the recharge point we want,” he said.

“The idea is to demonstrate that if you have the appropriate recharging infrastructure on the highway system, you can drive at normal highway speeds and treat it just like any other car. We’re asking that if the recharging infrastructure is available, can the car cut it? Can you drive one from Darwin to Adelaide and make it? My aim is to prove that point – and this is the perfect event for it. This event is about proving whether you can do that with alternative energy cars.”

Simon Hackett, as he sets off to break the world distance record for a production electric vehicle

And he has put in an innovative way to track the real time progress of the car.