Comments alexismadrigal has made

  • Good points here. I'll just add that locking consumers into purchasing patterns is a pretty standard corporate goal. Companies that already have your business (say, AT&T or Apple or Exelon) want to make the cost of switching fuels or networks or products higher, not lower. So, they do their best to drown out cost signals that work against them by introducing hassle. Of course, this is exactly what you'd expect — and I'm not saying it's even wrong — but it's why I agree with you that other types of market shaping will be necessary.On Making buildings more efficient: looking beyond price posted 6 days, 11 hours ago 5 Responses
  • I would like to see a gallery of old oil ads. They are really tremendous in all decades.On Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers! posted 1 week, 4 days ago 14 Responses
  • Great investigative work, Russ. It's much appreciated by those of us who really want to understand the dynamics of this new 'industrial revolution.' To me, this is a big part of the problem for pitching green tech as a jobs panacea. It's certainly possible that pumping money into our clean energy companies could reverse American manufacturing trends, but it's not going to happen on its own.On American stimulus funds benefiting foreign wind energy firms posted 3 weeks, 5 days ago 8 Responses

  • Who says launching GMO 2.0 is a good thing?

    Hey Matt,

    Glad you went in-depth on the GM carrot's environmental impact. That wasn't really the intent of my post. Wired is a tech/biz mag with a some environmental reportage. It has a different focus from Grist, which is a fantastic publication that I don't look to for tech reporting.

    I do take issue with the representation of my post.Where did I say that this carrot would affect the nation's nutrition? I said it "had a powerful marketing hook" and pointed to the same overheated headlines that you did! That wasn't an endorsement of its marketability. In fact, the major thrust of the post, as seen by its introduction in the 2nd sentence, was to use the carrot as a proof point for the agritech biz's plans to introduce produce, which I had previously discussed in a post entitled, "The Difficult Science and Economics of Genetically Modified Produce" (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/the-difficult- ...)

    That post makes a lot of the points you just made about the nature of GM crops.

    Carrots, or any other produce, with nutrient enhancements will meet with an "uninformed marketplace." AND they could have an impact in that marketplace. Just because we don't want that to be the case doesn't make it untrue! Isn't the media supposed to report on reality as best we determine it? I mean, if we had a very informed marketplace, we wouldn't have a corn-based food system and we certainly wouldn't eat meat from the places where it's grown and harvested.

    One thing that has occurred in the GM debate that I find very strange and disconcerting is that anti-GMO people jump on simply reporting on GM crops as supporting them in any form that the most evil agribusinessman  might see fit to plant them.  And that's just not the case.

    Do I know about the failure of golden rice and its cousins? Yes. Do I know that GM crops haven't delivered on their promises in the last 15 years? Yes. Does that mean that no genetically modified crop could ever have a positive impact in the world? I don't know and we don't know. And as long as we don't know, attempts to make them more nutritious or more marketable will remain a story. Very few other places, outside the dedicated green media, are even reporting on agritech's plans to bring GM produce into the marketplace.

    I mean, don't you WANT people to know what Monsanto and Syngenta are planning?

    In any case, all press is good press, right? Thanks for the link and sorry for the rant.

    Best,

    Alexis MadrigalOn New superfood is higher in press-release fluff and poor journalism than your average carrot posted 1 year, 10 months ago 9 Responses