Washington -- Soot, mostly from diesel engines, is blocking snow and ice from reflecting sunlight, which is contributing to "near worldwide melting of ice" and as much as a quarter of all observed global warming, NASA scientists say.
 
    The findings about the snow and ice albedos -- their power to reflect light falling on the surface -- raise new questions about human-caused climate change from the Arctic to the Alps.
 
    "We suggest that soot is a more all-around 'bad actor' than has been appreciated," NASA scientists James Hansen and Larissa Nazarenko wrote in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
 
    Soot comprises carbon particles that are, along with salts and dust, byproducts of burning fossil fuels and vegetation. In developed countries, the biggest source is diesel fuel. Elsewhere, burning wood, animal dung, vegetable oil and other biofuels is a major source of soot.
 
    Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Nazarenko, a staff associate there, found soot is twice as potent as carbon dioxide in changing global surface air temperatures in the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere.

    Hansen said Monday that the authors estimate the soot effect is equivalent estimate the soot effect is equivalent to putting a 1-watt bulb, the size of a miniature Christmas tree bulb, over every two square yards in the Northern Hemisphere. The effect is greater in northernmost snow regions, and about zero in the tropics.
 
    Levels of airborne soot as high as about 100 parts per billion were found in the Alps, enough to reduce the snow's ability to reflect light rather than absorb it from about 98 percent, down to between 80-90 percent, Hansen said. In the spring and summer, as the snow melts and some soot accumulates as crud on the surface, the remaining snow is even darker, he said.
 
    Scientists thought until recently that only carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have global reach and effect. They now are finding the same thing with these microscopic, suspended particles of pollutants, generically known as aerosols, that settle on ground hours later.
 
    Soot particles, which absorb toxic organic material, are minute enough to penetrate skin when breathed in. Soot is the aerosol most responsible for the haze in rapidly developing countries such as India and China, the scientists said.

    WASHINGTON, May 10 — The Bush administration announced new regulations on Monday that will significantly reduce emissions from tractors, bulldozers, locomotives, barges and other nonroad vehicles propelled by diesel fuel that altogether spew more soot than the nation's entire fleet of cars, trucks and buses.
 
    Michael O. Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said after a meeting with President Bush that the regulations would be made official on Tuesday, setting in motion a plan for full compliance by 2012.
 
    The new regulations require refineries to produce cleaner-burning diesel fuel and engine makers to cut diesel emissions by more than 90 percent, a reduction that health experts say could prevent as many as 12,000 premature deaths and 15,000 heart attacks every year.
 
    "This is a big deal," Mr. Leavitt told reporters after the meeting at the White House, comparing the importance of the new diesel standards to regulations decades ago that took lead out of gasoline. "The result of this is that people will live longer, live better and live healthier lives."
 
    The new regulations, the first for this group of vehicles, were developed through years of collaboration among environmental groups, public health advocates, engine makers and fuel refineries. Representatives from all of the groups said the adoption of the new standards reflected an extraordinary, and unusual, willingness of the E.P.A. to listen to everybody.
 
    "The process they used was unlike any other process I've ever seen," said Bill Becker, executive director of two groups that represent state and local air pollution agencies. "They opened the door, let everybody in and made us all feel like the favorite child of the parent."
 
    The goal of the new standards is to lower the sulfur content of diesel fuel that is used in engines, some as large as 6,000 horsepower. Sulfur not only leads to more particulate matter, better known as soot, in the atmosphere, but it also prevents newer engine technologies from reducing the levels of other pollutants.
 
    Stronger regulations for buses and trucks that use diesel fuel were adopted in the final days of the Clinton administration. They were kept in place by Mr. Bush and are set to take effect in 2007.

The new regulations build on that effort, with all nonroad diesel vehicles, except for locomotives and marine vessels, required to reduce the sulfur content of diesel fuel to 500 parts per million by 2007 and to 15 parts per million by 2010. Locomotives and boats have an additional two years, to 2012, to reach the lower standard.
 
    Currently, the average level of sulfur content is 3,400 parts per million.
 
    The environmental agency predicts that once the current fleet of diesel-powered engines is retired, the level of nitrogen oxides in the air will be reduced by 738,000 tons annually and the level of soot by 129,000 tons.
 
    Industry leaders, as well as environmentalists, said progress toward the new regulations came about through several factors, including public pressure on the administration to produce tangible evidence of interest in cleaning the air, a willingness of refineries and engine makers to bear the enormous costs of improvement in exchange for a longer phase-in period and a realization by environmental groups that the new standards will have a substantial health benefit even if they take some years to put into practice.
 
    Edward Murphy, an official with the American Petroleum Institute, said: "This means a huge investment for us, in the billions. We're concerned about the cost, but it's worthwhile because the environmental benefits justify it."
 
    Jed Mandel, a spokesman for the Engine Manufacturers Association, a trade organization, said, "The industry members are committing themselves to developing new products, not fighting the idea of getting more emission reductions."
 
    Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, which has battled the White House on other environmental issues, said the new regulations placed the biggest financial burden on two companies that make a variety of diesel-powered engines, Cummins and Caterpillar. But because one company, Cummins, is based in Indiana, a state Mr. Bush is sure to win in the November election, and the other in Illinois, which Mr. Bush will probably lose, Mr. Bush is not likely to suffer any adverse consequences, Mr. Clapp said.

    The origin of Maxilube and DFT can be traced back to 1988 when OXYPRO started asking "If we can put men on the moon and land machines on Mars, how come we have to change our oil every 3,000 miles -- and our engines still wear out?" A bit of research soon revealed that the technology to prevent wear was in fact available; it was just that nobody wanted to sell it to the public for fear of upsetting the economy of engineered (planned) obsolescence.

    We experimented with applying MAXILUBE directly through carburetors to provide a "top end" treatment to gasoline engines. Carburetors became history after 1988, so we began to develop a formula that would mix easily with gasoline and diesel fuels to provide the top end treatment and clean injector systems as well.
 
    When most of the sulfur and aromatic hydrocarbons were removed from California's diesel fuel in 1993,

    After some experimentation and a lot of field testing on our own equipment, we developed a user-friendly non-hazardous non-flammable product we call MAXILUBE Anti-friction Metal Treatment. MAXILUBE allowed doubling engine oil change intervals and tripled machinery life, sometimes extending it indefinitely.
 

the resulting loss of lubricity caused many failures of injector pumps. OXYPRO immediately began marketing its "top end" treatment as DFT, Diesel Fuel Treatment. The lubricity problems disappeared and our customers have enjoyed the benefits of using DFT ever since.

If now we enlarge our viewpoint, so that instead of considering only a few individuals, we regard the social group in its entirety, free competition is seen to be that situation in which men are voluntarily cooperating. All of the group, by purchasing what they prefer, encourage those best qualified to provide the desired economic things including services. Each of the group who is offering things in the markets voluntarily seeks to cooperate by performing in that economic role where he can most effectively serve his fellows and thereby maximize his own reward in the marketplace.

In practical effect, under perfectly free competition, producers cooperate with consumers by endeavoring to provide the best of whatever is desired at the least cost. Thus "competition" and "cooperation" become, under such conditions, merely different labels for the same highly efficient economic behavior.
 
Also important in this connection is the fact that the economic behavior we label "free competition" or "voluntary cooperation" results in the greatest possible total of benefits for all who participate.

The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate very well on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it would make sense for farmers to cut back on production, shrinking the supply of food to drive up its price. But in reality, farmers do precisely the opposite, planting and harvesting more food to keep their total income from falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even further. What's rational for the individual farmer is disastrous for farmers as a group. Add to this logic the constant stream of improvements in agricultural technology (mechanization, hybrid seed, agrochemicals and now genetically modified crops -- innovations all eagerly seized on by farmers hoping to stay one step ahead of falling prices by boosting yield), and you have a sure-fire recipe for overproduction -- another word for way too much food.

All this would be bag enough if the government weren't doing its best to make matters even worse, by recklessly encouraging farmers to produce even more unneeded food. Absurdly, while one hand of the federal government is campaigning against the epidemic of obesity, the other hand is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check for every bushel of corn they can grow. We have been hearing a lot lately about how our agricultural policy is undermining our foreign-policy goals, forcing third-world farmers to compete against a flood tide of cheap American grain. Well, those same policies are also undermining our public health goals by loosing a tide of cheap calories at home.

Palmisano has made Moffat the supply-chain czar, ruling Integrated Supply Chain (ISC), IBM's fourth-largest division, with 19,000 employees and a $40 billion purchasing budget.
 
The future, as Moffat sees it, won't be so much a battle among companies as one among supply chains.

If you are not part of this world, you need to know something about the lingo. The "chain" in question stretches all the way from the raw materials at one end of a manufacturing operation to the customer's inventory at the other. In its broadest sense, it includes distribution and logistics; in its grandest aspirations, it contemplates having a customer's order trigger an instantaneous response in every ingredient.

    "Sustainable" is today's most fashionable way to describe firms once called "green." But it means much more than environmental awareness. It derives from the general concept of "sustainable development," formally defined in the 1987 report of the United Nations-sponsored World Commission on Environment and Development as meeting present needs "without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
 
    Today the idea of corporate sustainability encompasses everything from a firm's resource use and waste disposal to its treatment of its work force.
 
    Smart corporate managers are also starting to pay more attention to growing public concern about the deepening global crisis of environmental devastation and povery, say Dixon and others.

A firm that tries to address these problems, instead of ignoring or exploiting them, may win more loyal customers, more motivated workers and even more eager investors, they contend. This is especially true in the Internet Age, when the breadth and speed of information is constantly increasing, making a company's moral behavior a factor in its very survival.
 
    Many companies are winning accolades for good behavior, from DuPont's huge investments to cut back its greenhouse gas emissions to Starbucks' efforts to pay coffee farmers enough to help them stay in business.
 
    "More than 100 studies in the last 10 years point to a relationship between environmental and social conduct and financial performance," says Innovest's Dixon. "Companies that do better on these issues do better financially, as a rule. It's really a proxy for good management."

    TOKYO -- Japan has developed a technology to control runaway government spending. It is called Toyota.
 
    The auto maker is leading a remarkable public-private partnership created to manage the construction of an international airport outside the nation's fourth-largest city, Nagoya. The partly completed Central Japan International Airport is a feat of engineering, built on an artificial island in Ise Bay and connected to Nagoya by a high-speed rail link and highway.
 
    Even more striking, it is on track to become that rare major public-works project in Japan: completed on time and under budget. If it succeeds, it could serve as a template for future projects, keeping them efficient and affordable.

Japan's outstanding general government debt has ballooned to 150% of gross domestic product, by far the biggest proportion in the Group of Seven wealthy nations.
 
    Toyota Motor Corp., together with a group of Japanese companies, is putting up half of the money to build the airport--and lending its management expertise to make sure the funds are well spent. Toyota's vehicle-production system is built on a relentless drive to eliminate waste and make continuous small improvements to cut costs, and these lessons are being applied to trim construction costs and make the airport competitive with others in Japan.

"The data suggest that few companies ever grow successfully and repeatedly over long periods..."
 
Most Firms Can't Adapt
 
IBD: Is disruptive innovation like a torpedo?
Raynor: The history of disruption is not so much a story of people getting steamrolled by something they never saw. It's rather an issue of getting steamrolled by something they have watched all along and had convinced themselves was irrelevant. Once they realized it was relevant, it was too late. Western Union was once offered an opportunity to exploit the Bell telephone patents. They turned it down because they thought phone service would be useless.

IBD: Why are most companies unable to sustain stable growth for long?
Raynor: As Clayton Christensen said in "The Innovator's Dilemma," if you only serve your best customers well, you are doomed to fail. The things that enable a company to be successful can make them structurally incapable of exploring new disruptive growth opportunities. If you pursue only a sustaining trajectory, eventually and inevitably you will run out of steam. Therefore, sustained profitable growth must lie in the ability to repeatedly launch disruptive innovations.

For Henry J. Heinz, the recipe for business excellence was rooted in its simplicity.
 
"To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success," he said. Another of his credos echoed the same sentiments: "Quality is to a product what character is to a man."
 
Heinz didn't start out to become rich. He said his success in life was due to the "moral and business qualities" he learned from his mother.

"Anna Heinz was strong on passages memorized from the Bible and on the character-building qualities of the precepts she drilled into her (eight children). Her favorites were 'Do all the good you can; do not live for yourself,' 'Do not aim to be rich, for riches never come that way,' 'Always remember to place yourself in the other person's shoes,' " wrote Robert Alberts in "The Good Provider: H.J. Heinz and his 57 Varieties."