Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletinhomepage
Doing the Recovery Right
Robert Pollin, The Nation
For most of the past generation, the aims of environmental sustainability and social justice were seen as equally worthy, yet painfully and unavoidably in conflict. Tree huggers and spotted owls were pitted against loggers and hard hats. Fighting global warming was held to inevitably worsen global poverty and vice versa. Indeed, the competing demands of the environmental and social justice agendas were frequently cited as a classic example of how public policy choices were fraught with trade-offs and unintended consequences–how you could end up doing harm while seeking only to do good.
Over the past couple of years, there has been a dramatic reversal of thinking: the idea has emerged that protecting the environment–in particular, defeating global warming–can also be an effective engine of economic growth, job creation and even poverty reduction. A small band of determined activist organizations, including the Apollo Alliance, Green For All and 1Sky, deserve credit for pushing this idea into the mainstream. Labor and environmental organizations like the Steelworkers and the Natural Resources Defense Council were open to persuasion. By the time the presidential campaign began, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had both incorporated variations on this idea as major planks in their platforms.
Now, under President Obama, the idea of a green recovery–an investment program to promote energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy–is a central feature of his $825 billion program to defeat the most severe financial crash and recession since the 1930s.
Of course, arguments about trade-offs and unintended consequences have not disappeared. Robert Stavins, chair of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group at Harvard, recently offered this analogy: “Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner.”
A weighty intellectual pedigree does undergird the Stavins story. This is a proposition developed by Jan Tinbergen, co-recipient of the first Nobel Prize in Economics and a lifelong leftist. Tinbergen held that you need separate policy tools to address distinct policy aims–that, in other words, trying to kill two birds with one stone is not likely to succeed. As the Obama administration begins spending in the range of $150 billion to create jobs and fight global warming through a single tool of green investments, it is clearly an appropriate time to examine how much Tinbergen’s law might actually apply to our current situation.
(28 January 2009)
Related at The Nation: Think Solar, Think Small.
Feds: IT admin plotted to erase Fannie Mae
Dan Goodin, The Register
A fired computer engineer for Fannie Mae has been arrested and charged with planting a malicious software script designed to permanently destroy millions of dollars worth of data from all 4,000 servers operated by the mortgage giant.
Rajendrasinh Babubahai Makwana, 35, of Virginia, concealed the Unix script on Fannie Mae’s main administrative server on October 24, the same day the Unix engineer was terminated, according to court documents made public Tuesday. His script was programmed to remain dormant for three months, when it would greet administrators with a login message that read “Server Graveyard” and systematically replace all data with zeros on every production, administrative, and backup server in the company.
(29 January 2009)
Another story to put in the Black Swan scrapbook. Or maybe it would go better under the theme of “dangers of centralization”? -BA
We’re Working Longer Than Ever to Pay for Fossil Fuels
Eric De Place, WorldChanging
Hot off the presses: these popular charts are now updated to include final energy price data for 2008.
Take a look:
[GRAPHIC]
Americans are falling behind — most of us anyway. We’re working longer than ever before to maintain a standard of living that once we took for granted. With respect to gas prices, average Americans are much worse off than they were in 1970.
The working poor, in particular, are getting absolutely crushed. Their economic standing has deteriorated even faster than the middle class. At average prices in 2008, a full day’s work at the federal minimum wage would scarcely pay for a single tank of gas. In a car-dependent nation, that means that even basic transportation is quickly getting out of reach for low-income families.
Interestingly, the pain is being felt way up the income ladder.
(29 January 2009)
