Thursday, November 23 2006 @ 01:45 PM EST Contributed by: sde
At the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT in September, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave a keynote talk on the slew of new and innovative Web services his company has recently launched. His discussion of MTurk, S3, and EC2 held no surprises for me, or for readers of this column and of my blog. But one of the questions posed by an attendee, in the Q&A period following Bezos' talk, was a stunner.
Does Amazon know enough about its supply chain, this fellow asked, to assign a value to the atmospheric carbon attributable to the manufacturing and shipping of its products? Bezos thought that the answer was no, but he was clearly intrigued by the question. So am I.
Consider global warming. We are finally emerging from a long phase of denial and moving into the next phase: ineffectual hand-wringing. In a top news story I read today, for example, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan decries the "frightening lack of leadership" on this issue. Perhaps the UN will issue a follow-on report condemning that lack of leadership in the strongest possible terms. Do you think that'll move the needle? Me neither.
