Earth, The Blue Marble, courtesy NASA
COP 21 is, perhaps, the most important international effort in history. It concluded with an agreement by 196 nations to limit CO2 emissions to hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade or 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit (NPR).
The only way to do this is to phase out fossil fuels, quickly, and replace them with efficient use of sustainable energy systems, i.e., solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and insulation.
At the 6th Annual Babson Energy Conference, “Energy, Environment, & Entrepreneurship: Challenging Assumptions, Changing Perceptions”, here, held March 30, 2012, Cimbria Badenhausen, (LinkedIn), an alum of the Marlboro College MBA in Managing for Sustainability, asked Tahmid Mizan, Senior Planning Advisor of Exxon Mobil, “Are you an ENERGY company or a PETROLEUM company?”
Mr. Mizan, of Exxon, didn’t answer the question.
Henry Ford, when asked why he doesn’t use focus groups, is believed to have said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they’d tell me faster horses.” (HBR) Continue reading
Gingrich, Romney, Santorum & Paul: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here,
“Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 227,000 in February, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in professional and businesses services, health care and social assistance, leisure and hospitality, manufacturing, and mining.”
If nonfarm payroll rises by 227,000 (an annual rate of 2.7 million) why is the unemployment rate unchanged? Again, according to the BLS,
“Both the labor force and employment rose in February. The civilian labor force participation rate, at 63.9 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 58.6 percent, edged up over the month. (See table A-1.)”
The reasons are simple:
These are summarized here, on Think Progress.org. We also lost 14,000 construction jobs last month because the Republicans refuse to rebuild the infrastructure of America.
What happens next? Again, according to ThinkProgress, here,
Mitt Romney,as president, would fire even more government workers. “We just have too many” public sector employees, Romney said, “and they’re paid too much.” Rick Santorum’s plan to cut $5 trillion in federal spending would undoubtedly lead to significantly higher government job losses.
Gingrich shut down the government once before. Altho he does want to build a lunar colony. Ron Paul wants to abolish every agency that exists, and basically return to the days immediately following the American Revolution, when the USA was 13 confederated states – before the Constitution was ratified. (Today I guess it would be 50 – or maybe 47, plus Alaska and Texas (but not including Hawaii). Governors Christie of NJ, Daniels of Indiana, Perry of Texas, and Walker of Wisconsin are reading from the same playbook as Romney and Paul.
ThinkProgress concludes:
It’s clear that even as the economic recovery continues, it will fall short of its full potential so long as governments continue to shed thousands of jobs. President Obama has proposed to address this problem by creating public sector jobs to repair our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The Republican presidential candidates have proposed to address this problem by exacerbating it.
It is as if, now that the “Cold War” is over, the Republican Party is waging war against the United States of America.
Tweet “The United States,” according to Robert Barro, who teaches economics at Harvard and is a “fellow” at the Hoover Institution, “is in the third year of a grand experiment by the Obama administration.” This is inaccurate. Obama is the President, but the US Constitution provides a framework in which power is divided into three branches of the Federal government, and the power of the each of the branches is checked and balanced by the others, and “all power not expressly granted to the federal government is held by the states and the citizens. It would be more accurate to say that the United States is in the third year of a grand experiment by the Obama administration, the Congress, the Judiciary, the Republican Party, various special interests, and the citizens.
Barro published this flawed analysis in “How to Really Save the Economy, “an op-ed in the New York Times, published Sept. 10, 2011.
“How is the experiment going?” Barro asks rhetorically. “Not well,” he answers.
How could it? On January 16, 2009, a week before the Inauguration, Rush Limbaugh, one of the leaders of the right wing of the United States said, “I hope Obama fails.” (The text is on Limbaugh’s site. An audio is on You Tube.) As I wrote, on Popular Logistics, here, a hope that the President fails is hope that the United States fails.
As was reported, here, in the Washington Post on August 6, 2011, and here on Popular Logistics, on August 8, 2011, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and the “Young Guns,” their Republican comrades in the House of Representatives, PLANNED as far back as January, 2009 to use the debt ceiling to create a political crisis. The Republicans have been trying to actualize Mr. Limbaugh’s hopes.
Barro is a professor of neoclassical economics, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution. What he doesn’t understand, and what President Herbert Hoover didn’t understand, is that under economic conditions such as we see today, while businesses and government are able to create jobs, business owners are risk averse, and won’t risk capital. The government MUST create jobs, because businesses won’t. Everyone who has a job and a 10 year old car, and is hesitant with regards to buying a new car, understands this. John Maynard Keynes understood this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this. Herbert Hoover didn’t – which is why he lost to Mr. Roosevelt in 1932, and why, 36 years later, President Nixon said “We are all Keynesians now.” (Note that Mr. Nixon has been called many things. However, “Liberal” is not one of them.)
So how do we really save the economy? See Part Deux.
One of the best kept secrets in New York City is the existence of a 40 kilowatt (KW) photovoltaic solar array on the Whitehall Street terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, pictured above, and first covered in Popular Logistics in 2007, here.
There are 90,000 public schools in the United States. Suppose we were to install a 40 KW solar energy system on each of them. PV solar modules require very little maintenance over their 35 to 45 year life expectancy. At a cost of $5,000 per kilowatt of nameplate capacity, each of these 90,000 systems would cost $200,000. This 3.6 gigawatts of distributed daylight-only capacity would cost about $14.4 billion. The total costs would probably be less because PV Solar is subject to economic forces like Moore’s Law.
It seems to make sense to use taxpayer monies to finance these systems; taxpayer monies pay the electric bills for public schools and other public infrastructure.
Every public school in the country would have a power plant that generates power, during the day, with no fuel cost and no waste. And with no associated mining, processing, transportation, fuel costs and no waste management costs. At $5.00 per watt, or $5 billion per gigawatt, the capital costs are lower than the costs of new nuclear and significantly lower than the costs of coal with carbon sequestration, with none of the risks or hazards associated with the systems: no arsenic, mercury, lead, thorium, uranium, zinc, or carbon.
But what are the other implications? What would it give us? Again. see Part Deux
As we consider the Centennial of President Reagan’s birth, it is important to note that while he cut taxes on some taxpayers, he raised taxes on other taxpayers. As the graph, presented by Barry Ritholtz at Business Insider, shows, the deficit shot up under President Reagan, as it did under Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
See also CNN Money Report.
President Barack Obama.
In his State of the Union Address <video, transcript Englsh, en español>, President Obama said “The best anti-poverty program is a world classeducation
.” He described a positive, or reinforcing, feedback loop. Education enables people to accomplish more, earn more, and better educate their children, who also accomplish more and earn more. It is one of the most important differences between the populations of New Jersey and West Virginia. This is described in detail in Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows<link>, (C) 2008, published by Chelsea Green<link>, ISBN 978-1-60358-055-7.
The President also asked for a better health care plan. I can answer that in five words: “Single Payer; Medicare For All” <link> just approved by the California Senate. Medicare works for my octogenarian father. Health Insurance Care doesn’t work for a 20-something friend of mine. He just graduated from college. He has no job and therefore no medical insurance. If he was a full-time student he’d be covered on his parents’ insurance. A simple reform would cover recent graduates until they find a job that pays a living wage and provides health insurance benefits. Another would be by expanding Medicare to cover all citizens. This is much easier said than done. Our medical care system cannot adequately care for approximately 50 million people – one out of six. This can’t be changed overnight – we need to train more doctors and nurses, and build more hospitals, but it must be changed.
Mountain strip mined for coal. Chris Dorst, Charleston, WV Gazette.
Energy is another set of systems problems. No one who has seen a once pristine valley after strip mining or “mountain-top removal” uses the term “Clean Coal.” Countries like Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Japan, and Sweden built their economies with education not extraction of natural resources. As the President alluded to, conservation and clean, renewable energy technologies – solar, wind, geothermal, hydro – can be implemented faster, at a lower cost, and with fewer negative economic externalities than traditional fuel intensive resource based technologies like fossil fuel and nuclear power. This suggests another of the differences between New Jersey and West Virginia – the “Blessings of Education” versus the “Resource Curse” <link> from which economies built on extraction of natural resources suffer.
Arklow Bank Wind Park, off Arklow Bay, Ireland. Image courtesy Oneworld.net, UK.
The President needs economic advisors who start think in terms of ecological economics <link1 / link2>, of metrics like the Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI <link>, rather than Gross Domestic Product, GDP <link>. Simply put, ecological economics is neoclassical economics with a better understanding of the long term and of costs. Spending one dollar – or one trillion dollars – to clean up a mess is not as good as allocating those resources to build factories, houses, libraries, museums – the infrastructure, culture, and community of a nation.
Columbia University
NY. Jan. 25. Mark Fulton, “Climate Change Strategist” Deutsche BankAsset Management, spoke at Cary Krosinsky’s class in Sustainable Investing at the CERC, the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Earth Institute, Columbia University.
Krosinsky, Vice President of Trucost, recently co-edited and wrote the book Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long Term Performance with Nick Robins of HSBC. He is an Advisory Board member of the Association of Climate Change Officers (ACCO) and founder director of InvestorWatch. Trucost has built and maintains the world’s largest database of carbon emissions and other environmental impacts as generated by the world’s largest public and private companies. Their data and expertise is used by leading global fund managers and asset owners to manage carbon risk. Continue reading