More like this, please, via Balloon Juice. Six months of networks ads like this and an attitude develops that begins to ruin the old economy and home birth the new one – no meds and maybe a midwife, but a bouncy healthy girl suckling at Mom’s nipple when it’s all said and done.
Yesteryear’s Iowa
Soon-to-expire tax cuts for the wealthy might be sexy, but soon-to-expire ethanol subsidies are really going to complicate things for the Fondu Republicans, aka the teabagger set.
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post has gotten a hold of a letter being circulated on Capitol Hill. Authored by Senators Diane Fienstein (D-CA) and John Kyl (R-AZ), the letter draws a bi-partisan line in the sand: “Let the subsidies expire.”
We are writing to make you aware that we do not support an extension of either the 54 cent-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports or the 45 cent-per-gallon subsidy for blending ethanol into gasoline. These provisions are fiscally irresponsible and environmentally unwise, and their extension would make our country more dependent on foreign oil.
Subsidizing blending ethanol into gasoline is fiscally indefensible. If the current subsidy is extended for five years, the Federal Treasury would pay oil companies at least $31 billion to use 69 billion gallons of corn ethanol that the Federal Renewable Fuels Standard already requires them to use. We cannot afford to pay industry for following the law….
Really? Says you. Is free government green for the agricultural sector really on the block? The presidential politics of this thing that have always cemented the giveaway are worth watching if anything does change. Pandering to the big farm states will kick into high gear, but will a fictional concern over deficits lead to real environmental progress?
What the ethanol does that mean?
Primetime Green
Did anyone else happen to be hanging with their in-laws on Friday night and see this? I couldn’t believe GE would run it, and kept waiting for a trailer for the equal-time infomercial from Monsanto. Sure it’s in the works.
Massive Eco
As in, “check out the eco on that chick!” or “He’s got an eco the size of Kansas.”
That is, these don’t refer to a nice set of ta-ta’s but a sort of dialectical framework that, when and where necessary, might be detectable from the outside. You might identify yourself with/by something as benign as carpooling or as radical as making your own clothes. The continuum here is not based on the relative merits of either one in opposition to the other – which may be considered greener, for instance – but in opposition to more conventional, energy-intensive ways of doing things. The question is not does it make a difference, but does it make a difference to you. Because we don’t wake up one day and decide to start looming our own thread; but over time, we do consider things like where we live, how much we can use alternative or mass transit, what kind of roof we are going to invest in for our house, that kind of thing.
Those kinds of choices, where we pause to consider the externalities related to our decisions, are the ones that will send the most durable signals. This flies in the face of green advertising, though it has much the same aim. Instead of a particular product or company, these more-general types of choices begin to play a larger strategic role in cutting down our GHG emissions and getting back to somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 ppm, mainly by establishing multiple routes to these goals.
So, of course I’m joking about ‘massive’ – because it’s more about smaller, individual-scale choices that will have giant ramifications, and effect the public attitudes around you.
The point is, know what you think about this stuff and why you live where you do, buy what you buy (or don’t) – because unless it was your own idea, then it wasn’t and someone gave to you, effectively deciding for you. Whichever side of this point you’re on, everything else flows out from there. By taking some control of what you think and why, you won’t feel so cynical about vain attempts to save the world from far-off problems like those effecting the climate, nor so horribly pained by the antics of the idiot caucus. I promise.
Windy names for fun
Why can’t the pharmaceutical companies
The United States is on the verge of a solar boom that could provide 4.3 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
There’s just a 12-figure catch: Investors need to put $100 billion into the solar industry to keep the generation of solar electricity growing by 42 percent a year for the next decade to expand capacity from the current 1.4 gigawatts to 44 gigawatts
directly fund sponsor desert wind farms?
Federal prosecutors in Boston yesterday said British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC agreed to pay $750 million to settle civil and criminal charges that it made and sold adulterated drugs, including the antidepressant Paxil, to Medicaid and other government payers
The settlement, one of the largest ever in a health care fraud case, burnished the reputation of the US attorney’s office in Boston as the premier federal office for investigating health care fraud. It has been responsible for recovering about $6 billion in health care fines and claims in the past decade, about 25 percent of all recoveries nationally.
If you think I’ve got it backwards, GlaxosmithKline’s share price only went down .14 (fourteen cents!) on news of the settlement.
Squaring the War Circle
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuel.
Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.
What’s next, less wars? I guess there are worse things – the Defense department did build the internet, even if it was just for Al Gore at first. So now they’ll scale up a renewable energy package in record time for the greatest fighting machine the world has ever known. Maybe, in the land hopeful unintended consequences, they’ll realize they/we don’t need to spend that much on armaments after all. That dropping bombs on people continually is not the path to their hearts and minds – well, not in a good way. But will we make the connection of our ways to our means through a transformation of our might?
Reminds me of that Churchill quote.
Cost vs. Price
Another in a continuing series of the gross misunderestimation of the externalities for the ways we presently produce energy and how these skew the perceptions of renewables. Take it away, Tom:
Let’s start with a recent editorial from the home of “free markets and free people,” the Wall Street Journal. Photovoltaic solar energy, quoth the mavens, is a “speculative and immature technology that costs far more than ordinary power.”
So few words, so many misconceptions. It pains me to say that because, like many business leaders, I grew up on the Wall Street Journal and still depend on it.
But I cannot figure out why people who call themselves “conservatives” would say solar or wind power is “speculative.” Conservatives know that word is usually reserved to criticize free-market activity that is not approved by well, you know who.
Today, around the world, more than a million people work in the wind and solar business. Many more receive their power from solar.
Solar is not a cause; it is a business with real benefits for its customers.
Read all about it. Clueless minions being manipulated by the producers of ‘ordinary energy’. This is all of piece with the Jane Mayer story from last week. Like the politics, the arguments against non-fossil energy sources fall apart if their proponents grant even the most minimal parameters of reality – which is why Al Gore must be fat, and Obama must be a Muslim.
More Than Ever?
Not to be alarmist but… are we using more electricity than ever?
Sustainable growth? Remember that? Green me. When the mustache of understanding brings up sustainable growth, let’s not forget this part of it. How much electricity we are using, where the 20 million barrels of oil we use per day comes from… this is the new ‘destroying the village in order to save it’: incoherence.
Bonus: what is the appropriate use of alarmism?
*Countries in the graph picked at random. Sweden is eating our per capita lunch for some reason. Electronics?
Drilling It into Your Head
NPR has apparently found a very sturdy drum and they’ve been beating it night & day. This Morning’s Edition:
President Obama’s approach to domestic oil drilling has shifted over this year. Taken together, those shifts have managed to anger just about everyone in the oil drilling debate at one time or another.
Great. 100% chance of this, right? What an excellent, safe, can’t miss, no interest news story. Dog bites dog. We’ll trot out an oil industry shill and an officer of the Sierra Club and they’ll light up the night with worry. Think I’m kidding?
“It’s risky, it’s dangerous, and there’s a better way to meet America’s energy needs than to engage in a set of activities that are proven to be unsafe,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.
…
“Why six months? What does that mean?” asks Rayola Dougher, a senior economic adviser for the American Petroleum Institute.
Well, Rayola, part of what it means, if you must know, is that we’ll call off all drilling for six months and try to find out WTF happened to make all the shellfish have a sad when all they were doing was preparing to become food. It (the story) trudges on and on.
But then, this evening, they were striking up the band again. I mean, I only have a ten-minute drive both ways. This time it was workers from the oil industry, including medical personnel living along the Gulf who treat injured workers. It seems that they are all for not having another accident in the Gulf, and even understand some the malformations the industry itself has performed on the wetlands guarding the land and sea from each other. But
The uncertainty has rippled through the oil services industry, and puts some workers in a difficult position as they consider what the moratorium can achieve.
Lavonne Martin of Baton Rouge works for a company that provides offshore medical care.
“As an environmentalist, as a fisherman, as someone who loves our Louisiana coast, I understand it. … However, as somebody who, you know, makes a living working in the oil industry, I’m very concerned about it and what the future … economic impact may be,” Martin says.
The environment and all that… becomes a blur when connected to livelihoods through the paycheck, especially for those so close to the action. There is truth to this and it is painful and complex – the withering of a way of life, and specifically the means for powering it but not just that, is very difficult to separate from the idea that life will continue. Much less how it will. There are no poetic terms for this, not at first. These are only the first hard questions. But the reporting seems to still hold the outcome in the balance, to still pull for business and people who depend on a paycheck (!) to prevail, as if we can sustain a way of life that is being destroyed by our efforts to sustain a way of life. It’s that or nothing so that it must be.
And the preoccupation with uncertainty is… certainly curious. We’ve come to absolutely depend upon some outlandish by its very premise level of confidence in what to expect – or else panic sets in. This type of caution, need for guarantees, this quest for certainty, especially with regard to large scale endeavors, leads eventually in all the wrong directions.
Maybe we should actually embrace uncertainty for a while. Maybe it could mean many of these same people would be as loyal to and hardworking for schemes that weren’t concentrated on a dwindling resource. Who can be sure?
Ask Anybody
Or everybody. Last week, BP started asking for suggestions on ways to clean up the oil in the Gulf. Innocentive, indeed.
Recently, an explosion on an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico caused both loss of life and a sizable and ongoing oil spill. We are asking Solvers worldwide to respond quickly with ideas and approaches to react to this very serious environmental threat.This is an Emergency Situation Challenge and will be quite different than any other Challenge we have run on the InnoCentive website. No one has requested us to do this and InnoCentive is not getting paid to run this Challenge. We are doing it because we believe our Solver base can and will help and we will do everything we can to get solutions into the hands of the appropriate responders. This is an experiment and we believe our Solvers will answer this call for help. We believe trying to mitigate this international disaster is the right thing to do.
- Your submission will identify and describe a solution that can help prevent further damage caused by the explosion and ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You are required to give InnoCentive and any emergency respondents a free, perpetual, and non-exclusive license to use any information submitted for this Challenge specifically to be used for this oil spill crisis. You will still retain ownership of any idea submitted.
Look for many new exciting Emergency Situation Challenge(tm) branded products on store shelves soon. Toothpaste. barbecue sauce, charcoal…