Energy efficiency: what Coca Cola’s World Cup video can teach us

Does anyone know someone at Coca Cola?

We sure could use their deft marketing expertise as displayed in the video above made by the corporate giant for the World Cup! (Click on the image to play the video.)

Granted, selling the beautiful game loved by billions is easier than promoting energy efficiency technology and policies for the base of the pyramid.

Still, making a video that mists the eyes of the most hardened anti-soccer mysanthrope is no small feat.

While we wait for Coca Cola to helps us produce the perfect video that will help the energy-efficiency-technology-and-policies-solutions community tell its story (we can start by giving it a real name!) , we’ve compiled four slideshows recently published in the New York Times that we think help visualize the energy hunger/energy obesity world we live in.

Two of these four slideshows appear in Andy Revkin’s weekly roundup of green news on the NYT’s website.

Finding Design Solutions for the forgotten ones

The first piece is a slideshow narrated by the Time’s Andy Revkin reporting on the great work being done by Amy Smith at MIT’s D-Lab. We are thrilled to see that her annual sustainable design workshop has this year brought together folks from around the world to think about simple design solutions to many of the challenges faced by those living at the base of the pyramid.

This is a good opportunity to note that Smith was an early booster of our work here at The Charcoal Project.

No, really. These photos are worth more 1000 words!

The second piece is a more sobering slideshow about the dramatic recession of Asia’s Tibetan glaciers. The images are taken from a current photo exhibition at New York-based Asia Society. The idea of documenting receding Tibetan glaciers by matching photographic images taken from the same vantage point is not new. In fact, one of our scientists at The Nature Conservancy did this back 2005 using photographs taken in the first half of the XXth century.

Read New York Times columnist Nick Kristoff’s take on the images.

Add concrete, mix, and voila!

The third slideshow is titled China’s Instant Cities and the images speak for themselves.

Quoting from the story intro: This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed.

Climate Change? What Climate Change?

Finally, the last slideshow is a collection of images documenting the record-breaking heatwave that is baking many parts of the world, including our hometown, New York City.

We hope this selection of New York Times slideshow will help people who have the power to effect change to connect the dots because the time to take action is now!

Kim & Nina