Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Zane Selvans on Think Again: Drugs
- Bryan Keith on Think Again: Drugs
- Coal Finance for Climate Activists | Amateur Earthling on Boulder’s Energy Future Is Bright
- Hanna on Straight Talk on Climate Progress in California
- Coal Exports a Bigger Threat Than Tar Sands | Amateur Earthling on Obama Delays Keystone XL Pipeline
Linkstream
- PACE Lives!
The Federal Housing Finance Administration is taking public comments on Property Assessed Clean Energy financing programs, at the insistence of California's 9th Circuit court of appeals. Here's what I told them: Property Assessed Clean Energy financing programs, as have been initiated by many states and local governments, are a potentially transformative financing mechanism, enabling property owners to make good long term investments in energy efficiency and behind-the-meter renewable energy production. They address a market failure, in that buyers often do not appropriately integrate a property's energy costs into their price assessment. So long as the state and local PACE programs are - Climate Denial Instruction In Schools
Corporate interests are pushing a model bill in many states that would require schools to teach climate change denial. It sounds creepily reminiscent of the creationism/evolution mess from a few years ago. Except with the fossil fuel industry instead of the religious right behind it. Gah. - Vision Prize
Vision Prize is an expert poll on the nature of the climate risks we face, meant to demonstrate the degree of consensus (or the lack thereof) amongst those able to judge the evidence. It's put together by Carnegie Mellon University. Will be interesting to see what the results look like... - Open Climate Science Course
The University of Chicago has created an Open Courseware style Climate Science 101, with videos of the lectures and self-assessment materials online. It's aimed at non-science undergraduates. If you, or someone you know, want to get a little more in depth knowledge about climate science on their own time, it's a great resource. - Think Again: Drugs
A great roundup of the myths surrounding the Drug War, and the cogent arguments against continuing our ridiculous, harmful, and expensive policy of ideological prohibition.
- PACE Lives!
Twitterfeed
- Roughly 2/3 of all the humans who have ever reached the age of 65 are alive today. 2 weeks ago
- What I learned about coal industry finances this week: http://t.co/UN1lXxRm 3 weeks ago
- In a room full of suits at NYU law. Everyone here wants to end the Reign of Old King Coal. Strangulation by purse strings. 4 weeks ago
- More thoughts on the dangers of giving in to a defeatist climate apocalypse narrative: http://t.co/Bwq276vQ from @AlexSteffen 1 month ago
- Authorizing US military to indefinitely detain citizens w/o trial would be unconstitutional, right? http://t.co/cRKXkpfb #tellmeimdreaming 2 months ago
Incoming Memes
Tag Archives: economics
The Rise of the New Global Elite
A nice long-form piece from The Atlantic on the phenomenon and dangers of the New Plutocrats… not just Lloyd Blankfein and his parasitic bankster ilk, but nearly everyone who stands at the so-called Commanding Heights of industry, including productive innovators. … Continue reading
Posted in linkstream
Tagged corporation, democracy, economics, economy, law, markets, plutocrat, wealth
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When do fuel costs actually matter?
Kim Stanley Robinson gave a fun talk at Google a couple of years ago in which he brought up the possibility of large, slow, wind powered live-aboard bulk freighters, among other ideas. I was reminded of it by this post … Continue reading
The Box That Changed the World
The cost of moving a shipping container between most any two points on Earth is about $5000, and only part of that cost is fuel. So if your container of goods is worth much more than that, then their price … Continue reading
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Tagged container, economics, energy, globalization, peak-oil, shipping
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Markets and Morals
A good talk from Chautauqua on the interaction between markets and morals. Some interesting examples of morally ambiguous markets: countries paying one another to take on refugee acceptance obligations and the outsourcing pregnancy to impoverished surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India. … Continue reading
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Tagged chautauqua, economics, ethics, fora.tv, india, markets, philosophy, politics, pregnancy, refugees, surrogate, video
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Fluid norms or Meta-ideology
Steve Randy Waldman takes Krugman and the US left-of-center more generally to task for their implicit assumption that our national ideological stage is somehow not subject to being shaped over time. Casino games and sport have fixed rules. Politics does … Continue reading
A life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL and LED light bulbs
Life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL, and LED light bulbs – It’s important to make sure when you’re using a new technology that supposedly saves energy, that you haven’t just shifted the energy consumption from the operational to the manufacturing … Continue reading
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Tagged bulb, CFL, economics, efficiency, energy, lca, LED, light, RoHS, sustainability, waste
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Nationalist accounting tricks
Nationalist accounting tricks – from The Economist: The only reason to make the within-borders population of a nation-state our analytical touchstone is a prior commitment to the idea that the nation-state is the correct unit of normative evaluation. You can … Continue reading
The Finite World
The Finite World – Krugman at the NY Times talking about the resurgence in global commodity prices over the last year. Economic recovery in developing economies driving the markets, with the US, and indeed the entire West, largely irrelevant. Not … Continue reading
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Tagged china, commodity, economics, finance, markets, oil, peak, resources
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Boulder’s Passive Aggressive Building Standards
Usually when people say that “better is the enemy of good enough”, they’re pointing out that striving for perfection can be a distraction from just getting the job at hand done. There are other dynamics that involve these concepts too. … Continue reading
Posted in journal
Tagged architecture, boulder, climate, colorado, design, economics, efficiency, energy, passivhaus, policy, public
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Links for the week of December 9th, 2010
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
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Tagged architecture, cars, china, climate, coal, design, economics, energy, gm, government, history, india, internet, journalism, law, media, newspapers, nytimes, passivhaus, policy, politics, search, streetcars, sustainability, system:filetype:pdf, system:media:document, technology, transparency, transportation, usa, wikileaks
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