The plans could raise questions about the company’s ability to generate cash flows from its operations. Last week in an investor conference call, Mr. Musk played down the notion that Tesla would soon tap the public markets to raise new money. “We don’t have any plans right now to raise funding,” he said.

Tesla (TSLA) has a market cap of over $10 billion. It’s currently trading at $91.50, well over its 52 week low of $25.52, so clearly it’s a good time to raise capital if you need it. Tesla has its believers and its critics. Consumer Reports just called the Model S the best car it has ever tested. But much of the financial debate revolves around what’s the eventual market for an expensive all electric car, with short sellers arguing

there is not much of a market for its cars beyond a small group of enthusiasts. These skeptics say they think that excitement has evolved into a stock mania.

I think the bigger worry beyond its immediate market potential should be what happens when the market does actually start to establish itself – i.e., as the technology improves and maybe energy prices rise. All of the major car companies are already offering some form of electric car. But the market is so small none of them are chasing after it with a vengeance. What happens if some of its bigger rivals decide to actually subsidize and grow the market? That’s what Toyota did with the Prius until it had widespread consumer acceptance.

The long-term answer for what will make a successful electric car company may not be about the technology or the marketing but the structure of the company itself. Amazon had first mover advantage similar to Tesla, but it was able to move into multiple markets to help subsidize money losing operations in others, besides having easy access to capital.

Could a diversified automotive company do to Tesla what Amazon did to the publishing industry?

It was interesting to read Steve Case’s story. He is perhaps the most well known of all of the entrepreneurs that Kidder interviewed, but you forget what a visionary he actually was. AOL was launched back in 1985 when only three percent of the American people had Internet access. I’m sure only slightly more knew the Internet existed at that time. Personal computers and laptops were only just catching on.

You can draw some interesting lessons from the group (as Kidder does), but things like first mover advantage still mean a lot and other obvious things like perseverance and hard work play critical roles as well.

The past two decades have truly been an incredible time for entrepreneurs. It will be interesting to see if the next two are as fruitful, particularly if the new Maker Revolution takes off, which promises to change not just how we connect with each other and gather information, but how we work and manufacture things.

Last year, G.M. sold 23,000 Volts in the United States, less than 1 percent of its overall sales and well below the expectations set by the company.

The Volt’s major competitor over the past several years has been the Nissan Leaf, a similarly priced all-electric vehicle. But now the two companies strategies seem to be diverging. Nissan, with excess capacity, is promising to offer a base model for $6,000 less than its current sticker price of around $35,000. GM, on the other hand, will be introducing the Cadillac ELR – a luxury version of the Volt, which promised to be sold for significantly more.

The Times quotes one analyst on GM’s strategy:

“There are wealthy people who don’t consider price to be an obstacle when buying electric,” said Joseph Phillippi, head of the market-research firm AutoTrends. “In Silicon Valley, they’d write a check for the ELR without thinking about it.”

At one time it seemed to make sense to have a federal tax credit of $7,500 to encourage people to buy hybrid or electric cars. While we want to promote positive environmental decisions, the way the early mass-market electric cars have been priced, it seems as if the manufacturers have been building the subsidy into their pricing models – ie, capturing the entire incentive for themselves. Would GM really be charging $39,000 if it wasn’t for the tax incentives? Maybe it didn’t matter when the government owned a significant stake in GM, but now that it doesn’t perhaps it is time to find better ways to incentivize the sale of electric vehicles.

If the federal tax credit is really designed to promote the sale of electric vehicles, maybe it should be designed on a reverse sliding scale – ie, a greater subsidy the cheaper the electric car. For example, an electric car of $25,00 could get the full subsidy of $7,500 but a car of $50,000 wouldn’t be eligible for any tax credit. This way both consumers and manufacturers would be encouraged to create a truly mass market for electric vehicles.

Of course, if that seems too complicated, we could always just go with a simple gas tax. All drivers and manufacturers would be incentivized to economize that way.

If superstorms are going to stick around, look for a rise of faith when it comes to searching for meaning as to why all of this weather is happening.

Salzman harkens back to the Celts who were big weather worshipers to put this all in historical perspective. Unfortunately, this does not mean that green will all be a rage again. She sees significant green fatigue with consumers who are more worried about the economy and tired of marketers talking about their green bonafides.

Maybe Salzman’s predictions will help you understand the friend that is seemingly addicted to the Weather Channel. But if all of this climate talk is making you nervous and don’t want to rely on a higher power to save you, there might be an app for that. She says to check out

Hurricane Hound, Hurricane by American Red Cross, Hurricane Tracker and iMap Weather Radio which sends text/voice alerts and let’s you listen to the local radio.

The car certainly defined the 20th Century. What will define the 21st Century? Hand held devices like the iPod or iPad are off to the early lead. If you are sitting at home your iPad probably isn’t far from your reach. Outside, people no longer really look where they are going because they are checking their email on the iPhone. We have even had to pass laws to get people to stop talking on the phone while driving.

There have been a lot of direct consequences of the iPad and devices like it. It has already transformed our leisure life. It has taken all of the media and games we consume and brought them to us in a new way. One of the things that made it so effective was how adaptable it was and how much you could personalize it.

So what might be the unintended consequences of all of these hand held devices? The iPad is already proving to be the gateway to the smart home. In the coming years it will surely be at the epicenter of how we control all of the devices in our life, whether it be the refrigerator, the lights or the TV. But however much it might simplify our life by serving as a universal remote, it seems to me that devices like the iPad mostly create new wants and needs.

Have we unleashed the genie of consumerism with the latest sleek mobile device? Some might have thought it hard for our society to get more consumerist, but maybe it is possible. Many of the green mantras of yesterday seem hopelessly outdates in our brave new mobile device world. Doesn’t reduce, reuse and recycle (the 3Rs) seem hopelessly outdated? I’m not sure if the 100-Mile Diet ever really had a chance in a world where we expect everything instantly at our fingertips.

Is there any other technology out there or will this Century be defined by Steve Jobs? I think there is the possibility that cars can also define the 21st Century, but much differently than they did the 20th.

Electric cars have arrived, but the technology hasn’t reached the tipping point yet – to say the least. But once it does, clearly cars will have a smaller eco footprint. That would be the intended consequence. But will there be any unintended consequences? I think something as technologically complex as an electric engine could actually become an icon for simplicity. To date so many of the things in our life are disposable – nothing more so than the iPad or a gallon of gas. But an engine that ran on something that was totally renewable, might just make people see things a little differently and then maybe live a little differently. Now that would be truly revolutionary. It might even put the genie back into the bottle.

Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.

Brooks starts his story in 2003 when McCain and Lieberman passed a bipartisan bill to curb global warming.  There have been bipartisan measures on the environment. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency was created under Nixon in 1970. But the Republican party has taken to denying global warming for quite a while now. It’s hardly a reaction to Gore. I would argue that much of the success of an Inconvenient Truth was because people were frustrated with inaction in Washington and had begun looking for answers to our environmental problems elsewhere.

Brooks is always looking for that rational middle (that somehow mirrors his views), so when it’s not there it must be someone’s fault. In this case it must be Gore’s, because he is “partisan” according to Brooks. The inconvenient truth is the Republican partly has long since lost interest in the environment or in passing any bipartisan legislation, the country and the world be damned. There are plenty of ways to tackle environmental problems. You don’t have to come at it from one ideological perspective. But you do have to try.

This was not the first green marketing revolution that failed. There was a brief frenzy around Earth Day in 1990, with companies offering products that were everything from ozone-friendly to recyclable and biodegradable. Some of the claims were weak at best, if not outright deceptive, leading to the development of the term “greenwashing.”

The green explosion of the past several years should not be seen in the same light. In some ways it was a victim of its own success. Sales of Clorox Green Works topped $100 million in 2008, but fell to $60 million the next year as consumer priorities shifted and price sensitive buyers looked for less expensive alternatives. This about face in consumer behavior forced companies such as Arm & Hammer to stop selling altogether their Essentials cleaning line in the US market.

Brands that had built up greater consumer loyalty such a Seventh Generation have faired better. Seventh Generation has been producing sustainable products since the 1980s, but also sells to a consumer that is used to paying more for sustainable products and is less likely to shift their purchasing behavior because of a downturn in the economy.

Over the past several years some companies such as Walmart and GE, with its ecomagination campaign, have built their green marketing campaigns around a long-term strategy for the company. Not coincidentally these companies launched their campaigns in 2005 before the consumer frenzy started in 2006. Corporations that were responding simply to the increased consumer demand likely produced one-off products in order to get something to market as quickly as possible. This was always frought with peril as it exposed them to inconsistent messaging (one product is green, one is not) and it was likely also only partially green (e.g., organic cotton, but unsustainable dyes on the fabric).

The next wave of green products from major marketers will be characterized by a more comprehensive approach to sustainability and will likely have the following characteristics:

1. Industry Appropriate Approach to Sustainability: Levi’s no longer markets its Levi’s Eco line which used organic cotton. Instead it is focusing its sustainability efforts around the Better Cotton Initiative, which looks at water use, labor and environmental issues. Consumers will no longer be faced with the question of buying a sustainable and non-sustainable Levi’s product. Everything will be made according to their best efforts, as Levi’s defines them. More and more industries will seek to find what is the most sustainable strategy for their sector.
2. Transparent Greening Initiatives: Nike has built its sustainability efforts around Considered Design. Under the program Nike raises the bar each year, with more and more of its shoes and clothing attaining the Considered standard.  While Nike does not go to the effort of making let’s say a perfectly compostable shoe that consumers can buy, it does create a sustainable approach to lowering its carbon footprint each year. Whether the economy is up or down next year doesn’t matter. It’s sales might be effected, but not its competitive strategy. This is similar in approach to what GE did with its ecomagination campaign. GE set numeric goals for reduction in energy use company wide. The big difference in the strategies is theat GE completely rebranded itself, while Nike doesn’t really talk much about its greening efforts, instead focusing on producing high performance athletic equipment.
3. Own vs. Third-Party Certification: Third-party certification standards can be costly and hamper a major consumer producer’s flexibility and nimbleness in the market place. Starbucks has eschewed the Fair Trade certification standard in part because there just isn’t enough Fair Trade coffee for its needs. Its also costly. Instead it has developed its own ethical sourcing guidelines, which the company says are similar in standard to other third-party verification criteria. To be effective, a company’s private certification program should still stick closely to what are generally agreed upon sustainability guidelines, as Starbucks has down.

Nothing is more intransigent than our political system these days. Here’s hoping she has an impact.

Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others — Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M Mars among them — have gobbled up most of the nation’s organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from small family farms? Not so much anymore.

Sales of organic food have been growing by over 20% for quite a while now, so all of this was inevitable to a degree. While dilution of organic standards is nothing to celebrate, the growth of the sector is. The article points out that

The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store. The industry’s image — contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms — is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic.

The article seems to imply that there is a choice between big organic and small organic, but the real battle for a number of years now has been locally produced goods and big organic which might come from anywhere in the world. If you are going to your local farmers markets, you probably aren’t buying organic, because the producers there can’t afford the cost of certification.

Organic is not the be all and end all. It is simply a certification standard. I don’t think we should bemoan the loss of choice or pastoral qualities in our food that the article implies. The choice is there for us. It just might not be in your grocer’s freezer. Grab your sack and go to your local farmers market. You might even be able to meet the person that grew the food. If you are squeamish don’t ask if the cow had a name.

It’s a trickle, but some American companies are again making products in the United States. While many of those companies have been small, like ET Water Systems, there have also been some highly visible moves by America’s largest consumer and industrial manufacturers. General Electric and Caterpillar, for example, have moved assembly operations back to the United States in the last year. (Airbus, a European company, is said to be near a deal to build jets in Alabama.)

There is no single reason for the change. Rising labor and energy costs have made manufacturing in China significantly more expensive; transportation costs have risen; companies have become increasingly aware of the risks of the theft of intellectual property when products are made in China; and in a business where time-to-market is a competitive advantage, it is easier for engineers to drive 10 minutes on the freeway to the factory than to fly for 16 hours.

All of this is not to say that low-end manufactured goods are suddenly going to be produced here in the United States. They’re not. It will be interesting to see how people react. Consumers now have a real choice. You can get an Apple TV box for $99 or you can buy the Nexus Q from Google for $299. Both are beautiful and have similar capabilities. If people start gravitating toward the Nexus Q maybe there really will be a revolution in American manufacturing, because surely others will follow.