Blogs & Ecology

With Job Cut, Ohio Town Looks to Green Economics

Few people know how to pull a rabbit out of a hat better than Felix Rohatyn, who is credited with saving New York City in its fiscal crisis thirty years ago. Today in Forbes he calls for an "investment oriented stimulus package", noting that paying for infrastructure is not a bailout but an investment in the future. After the usual suspects like roads, bridges, transit and schools, he goes on:

Prince Charles meets Asimo

Prince Charles is current champ in our quote of the day count, beating out Tom Friedman and our beloved Michele Bachmann. While in Japan on a visit he delivers another:

"It is not an exaggeration to say that we face the biggest challenge our planet has ever seen, literally a battle for survival.

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Source: TreeHugger

Viral marketing is a concept that few of us environmentalists are naturally inclined to take up in a technical sense. Yet there’s no denying that green has got wonderful potential when it comes to creatively using the internet to spread messages.

Report Shows California's Investment in Green Boosts Economy
According to a study released by UC Berkeley this Monday, thinking green will work wonders for the state's economy despite global financial difficulties. ...

On Monday, Waleed Aly had a superb opinion piece in the SMH which sadly went largely unnoticed. In the piece he argued persuasively that the biggest long-term impacts of major economic crises are the changes to the socio-political terrain that they tend to trigger.

The prime example, of course, is the dramatic shift towards fascism and other forms of xenophobic politics triggered by the Great Depression, not only in Europe but across the globe.

Tyler Hamilton at Clean Break reminds us of what Bob Lutz said a month ago when I asked him if a recession could kill the Volt, much of which seems to be coming to pass a lot more quickly than anyone might have anticipated:

I've just seen this excellent video that I felt was worth posting. It is from Van Jones talking about his new book, The Green Collar Economy, putting a concise argument for spending half the money that was spent on the Wall St bail-out on delivering an economic and environmental boom.

MEMO: You own the Housing industry now, Here is what you should do with it.

Now that the United States Government owns all the mortgages, the guarantors of the mortgages, and the reinsurer of all the insurers, and possibly pretty soon $700 billion worth of foreclosed houses, what should you do with it?

George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian almost exactly a year ago that a recession might not be a bad thing, and that perhaps there can be too much growth. He also wondered if we all have enough cars and cellphones, and don't need to keep making them. Perhaps he should be careful what he wishes for.

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September 28th is World Rivers Day -- a great opportunity to stop and appreciate the many benefits rivers give us, our families, our communities, our businesses, and to the broader environment. The United States has more than 250,000 rivers -- that’s 3.5 million miles of rivers. Consider how rivers touch your own life. Rivers give us drinking water. Rivers are places to learn and explore. Rivers give us time with family and friends. Rivers give us recreational adventures. Rivers are beautiful landscapes where the wild things are. These waters are the lifeblood of the land and our communities.

This article by Christine Milne was published in New Matilda on 24 September

In one of those perfect ironies, Prime Minister Rudd's announcement of his $100 million push to make Australia the global coal hub last Friday came on the same day that yet another so-called "clean coal" project, Santos' Fairview operation in Queensland, was scrapped.

The Fairview collapse "was to do with getting the funding balance right", according to a Santos spokesperson quoted in the Australian Financial Review last Friday. That, of course, is code for "we want more money from governments", tactfully argued by a company whose last half-year profits were $304 million and whose project has already been handed $75 million in taxpayer funds.

photo: Zach Rathore

I know some of you were probably thinking along these lines, that with a slowing world economy greenhouse gas emissions might start dropping in line with industrial output. Its a kind of environmental schadenfreude. Things may be going to hell in a hand basket from one economic perspective, but we can take pleasure in the fact that the environmental damage caused by industrial activities will be a little less. Too bad that won’t be the case. Per Lekander, an analyst with UBS had this to say:
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A study by California's Air Resources Board released this week reported that continuing to reduce the state's greenhouse gases would both boost the state economy and Californians' income. More below the fold....

The pictured gazebo was purchased at a major home center two years ago, for less than two hundred US dollars. When first bought, the cloth top, if taken down during the cold weather months, seemed like it might last three or four years. The decorative extruded steel support framework, which stays fastened to the deck surface year-round, originally looked like it would last five to ten years and still does. (I've been touching up any rust spots with black enamel as they appear.)