That's a wonderful use of older texts to relate to the current experience. I'll check out “The Phenomenon of Man”. I'd also like to suggest a reading of Walk Whitman's “Leaves of Grass” collection as having relevance today. His poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” speaks to me especially in the entrepreneurial experience.

Other than the Yankees comment, the rest of your post was quite elegant. I've also enjoyed reading your tweets. Here's to remaining optimistic in 2010.

Paul

Today, one just has to look at examples of real-time communications from around the world, like Twitter and Google Wave, to see that, yes, there is a layer of consciousnes becoming ever more pervasive. No matter where people are in the world, they can reach out instantaneously to others anywhere.

I work as an enterprise community manager for a global publisher and I espouse many of the Enterprise 2.0 principles which you have helped to formulate. It is a truly wonderful time to be alive. Thanks Andrew for your tremendous work bringing business into the 21st century.

Lomborg does not believe that climate change is real but as the evidence has continued to mount he has essentially co-opted the issue to make a strawman argument. He argues that climate change is real but that we shouldn't do anything about it because there are all of these other issues that are more pressing (hunger, access to clean water, disease, etc.). Essentially he turns it into a zero sum game, which of course it's not. This was his argument at the Munk debates a couple of weeks ago.

We can of course choose to address climate change AND address these other issues. In fact, because they are in fact at least partly related, you need to address all of them. Sure investing in green technology is a great idea, but if government prices carbon, it will essentially be acting as a market maker. That's essentially what Stephane Dion was trying to do with the Green Shift in our last election — unfortunately his team wasn't smart enough to package it in the right way.

As far as his $40 Trillion price tag (in lost economic growth) this also doesn't make sense. If you create a market for new goods and services as he seems to want to do then you're going to have a positive impact. And let's keep in mind that there are many industries that benefit from government largesse, the oil and gas industry being one of them. So if you have to play a zero sum game (in terms of government spending then this seems to be the place to do it.

I know this isn't the overall intent of your piece but when you like this it makes me wonder about the validity of the rest of your argument. Social software is great (I love it) but like all technology it's just a tool — it can either be used effectively or not. To a large degree it depends on the people using it. And here I'll agree with you — most people at heart are good and will use the tool to move the world forward.

I couldn't, however let the Lomborg reference go unchallenged. It's too important an issue.

Rick