Archive for the 'Environment' Category

Solar Overtaking Coal Power As Less Expensive, Cleaner

by Editors @ Tuesday, August 24th, 2010. Filed under Environment, Green Industry

Breakthrough - Solar Now Cheaper than Coal

Their mission: to deliver cost-efficient solar electricity. The Nanosolar company was founded in 2002 and is working to build the world's largest solar cell factory in California and the world's largest panel-assembly factory in Germany. They have successfully created a solar coating that is the most cost-efficient solar energy source ever. Their PowerSheet cells contrast the current solar technology systems by reducing the cost of production from $3 a watt to a mere 30 cents per watt.

This makes, for the first time in history, solar power cheaper than burning coal. These coatings are as thin as a layer of paint and can transfer sunlight to power at amazing efficiency. Although the underlying technology has been around for years, Nanosolar has created the actual technology to manufacture and mass produce the solar sheets. The Nanosolar plant in San Jose, once in full production in 2008, will be capable of producing 430 megawatts per year. This is more than the combined total of every other solar manufacturer in the U.S.

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Oil’s Dirty Not-So-Little Secret: Why Electric Cars, Bicycles and High-Speed Rail Are Better and Cheaper

by Editors @ Saturday, August 14th, 2010. Filed under Economy, Environment

Gas Is Really Costing Us About $15 a Gallon

 

Calculating the true cost of

living in a country built on oil

 

By Mark Engler

TomDispatch.com

August 13, 2010  |  

This might be an opportune time to make a disclosure: I am a BP shareholder. Admittedly, I’ve never attended the company’s annual meeting, and if I did, I would have very little weight to throw around.

I own two shares of BP stock. I received my stake in the company as a Christmas gift in 1989, when I was 14 years old. The previous June, I had taken a "summer enrichment" course in the Des Moines public schools, designed as an introduction to the world of business. The teacher gave each of us in the class a modest hypothetical budget to invest in the stock market.

Earnest young capitalists, we made our picks and then followed the quotes in the morning paper. I invested heavily in Amoco and finished the summer feeling that my portfolio had done quite well. As a result, my younger brother decided that I should receive a real piece of the enterprise that was once John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. He conspired with my mom to get me an Amoco share for the holidays.

I’ve watched the oil industry as an interested party ever since. In 1998, my Amoco stock split, turning my one share into two. Then, a few months later, the company was acquired by BP. This "oil mega-merger," as the BBC called it, gave me a stake in yet another energy titan. It also allowed the combined corporation to shed 6,000 jobs, prompting its new chief executive, Sir John Browne of BP, to confidently assure the press that "he hoped the merger will increase pre-tax profits of the two partners by 'at least' two billion dollars by the end of 2000."

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Fast Capital and the City: ‘One Vast Gated Community for the Rich’

by Editors @ Thursday, July 22nd, 2010. Filed under Economy, Environment, Marxism

David Harvey's Urban Manifesto:

Down With Suburbia; Down With

Bloomberg's New York City

 

BY Greg Lindsay

Fast Company, Wed Jul 21, 2010'

via http://solidarityeconomy.net

 

"New York? The whole damn place has been turned into a suburb," sneered David Harvey, startling a roomful of New Yorkers who prided themselves on the same things he derided: the makeover of the city's parks; the new network of bike lanes; the pedestrian malls along Broadway. "The feel of the city is losing its urbanity and being made okay for suburbanites to enjoy Times Square," he continued, going on to condemn New York's gentrification not on aesthetic or nostalgic grounds, but for being at the root of the financial crisis.

Harvey is having a bit of a moment in America, as much as any neo-Marxist economic geographer can. Earlier this month, his lucid explanation of the "econopocalyspe" (accompanied by animated whiteboard doodles) was a modest hit on Boing Boing. Richard Florida borrowed his concept of the "spatial fix"--the idea that capitalism gets bigger and badder every time it's wriggles out of a crisis--for his latest book, The Great Reset. And Harvey's own book-length explanation of the crisis, The Enigma of Capital is set to be published on these shores in September.

On Tuesday night in Manhattan, Harvey made a rare American appearance to discuss "experimental geography" and the role cities and suburbia played in the crisis. Starting from the idea of a "geographic unconscious"--"the way we think of space and time as 'natural' when they're really constructed,"--Harvey blamed suburbia for brainwashing Americans into being good capitalists.

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Tough Battle Ahead on Green Jobs and Climate Crisis

by Editors @ Sunday, May 16th, 2010. Filed under Environment, Green Industry, High Road Economics

Good Jobs, Green Jobs 2010:

Using Green Energy Manufacturing

To Solve the Jobs Crisis Is Shaping Up

To Be a Very Tough Battle

 

By Carl Davidson
SolidarityEconomy.Net

Washington DC's DuPont Circle area is best known for foreign embassies and sidewalk cafes and a lively night life. But for three mild and sunny spring days this May 4-6, nearly 3500 people stayed inside the Hilton Hotel for the 2010 'Good Jobs, Green Jobs' conference, trying to solve the country's economic problems and the world's climate change crisis.

This was the third and largest gathering to date on the green jobs theme organized by the Blue-Green Alliance, a coalition of several hundred environmental, community and trade union groups pulled together primarily by the United Steel Workers and the Sierra Club. Last year's gathering of 3000, fresh from Obama's victory and several new recession-fighting initiatives, was highly spirited and visionary.

Now a tough year had passed and the mood had shifted. There was still plenty of idealism and optimism, especially among the younger activists, but many were sobered by the fierce resistance of the GOP and finance capital to any timely or significantly large reforms. Climate change was being denied, clean energy legislation was stalled, stimulus spending for jobs was too small, health insurance reform was barely acceptable, and the wars were dragging on.

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Wave Power Collaboratives Offer Jobs and Green Energy

by Editors @ Saturday, April 24th, 2010. Filed under Environment, High Road Economics, Labor Movement

 

Wave Power Potential:

A Whole New 'Cool'

for West Coast Surf Lovers

 

By Ron Ruggiero

Apollo News Service
April 14, 2010

If you mention “West Coast” and “waves” in the same sentence, most people think of tanned, Bermuda shorts-clad California surfers.

The work of Clackamas-based Oregon Iron Works (OIW) could change that in the coming years.

Oregon Iron Works is building the first-ever commercial wave energy system in North America. In December 2009, Ocean Power Technologies, a renewable energy company that specializes in wave-powered electricity generation, awarded Oregon Iron Works a contract to build buoys for its latest project off the coast of Reedsport, Oregon. Phase one of the project includes the production and installation of one “PowerBuoy,” while phase two includes an expected nine additional buoys that, when finished, will generate 1.5 megawatts of electricity.

Though today’s wind farms and solar arrays generate much more power than a small array of buoys, this project is an important stepping stone in the development of wave-power technology. According to David Gibson, project manager for Oregon Iron Works, “Wave energy is about where wind was 20 to 30 years ago. So, there will be a long curve in improvement as we develop wave systems. The United States is very good at innovation. This is an opportunity for us to step up and make an enormous contribution to the development of this new technology.”

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China, ‘Clean Coal’ and New Technologies

by Editors @ Thursday, January 7th, 2010. Filed under China, Environment

World's Top Polluter

Emerges as Green

Technology Leader

 

By SHAI OSTER

BEIJING -- Dec. 15, 2009 - Xu Shisen put down the phone and smiled. That was Canada calling, explained the chief engineer at a coal-fired power plant set among knockoff antique and art shops in a Beijing suburb. A Canadian company is interested in Mr. Xu's advances in bringing down the cost of stripping out greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal.

Engineers led by Mr. Xu are working to unlock one of climate change's thorniest problems: how to burn coal without releasing carbon into the atmosphere. China's Push for Clean Coal

Mr. Xu is part of a broader effort by China to introduce green technology to the world's fastest-growing industrial economy -- a mission so ambitious it could eventually reshape the business, just as China has done for everything from construction cranes to computers.

China looms large over the global climate summit in Copenhagen, where Chinese officials are pressing the U.S. and other rich nations to accept new curbs on their emissions and to continue to subsidize poor nations' efforts to adopt clean-energy technology. China is the world's biggest source of carbon emissions. Less understood is the way China is now becoming a source of some of the solutions.

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Worker Co-ops: Green and Just Jobs You Can Own

by Editors @ Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment

 

A South Bronx Worker Co-op

Turns Trash into Treasure

 

By James Trimarco and Jill Bamburg

Yes! MagazineOmar Freilla wants to see worker co-ops, like ReBuilders Source, everywhere. ReBuilders Source, owned and operated by workers from the South Bronx, sells salvaged building materials that would otherwise be destined for a landfill. Photo by Erica McDonald for YES! Magazine


Photo: Omar Freilla wants to see worker co-ops, like ReBuilders Source, everywhere. ReBuilders Source, owned and operated by workers from the South Bronx, sells salvaged building materials that would otherwise be destined for a landfill. Photo by Erica McDonald for YES! Magazine

Difficult times call for creative strategies. Time and again during periods of economic hardship and market failure, cooperatively owned businesses have emerged as a democratic, grassroots, and DIY response. It happened during the economic upheavals of the 19th century and again during the Great Depression.

Today, as the current economic crisis deepens, co-ops are again coming to the fore as producers and consumers seek stable sources of employment, goods, and services. There are no easy numbers to quantify this growth, but signs of a new upsurge are becoming clearer. The farmer-owned agricultural cooperative Land O’Lakes, for instance, chalked up its strong performance in 2008 to its co-op status.

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Yankee Doodle Ecologist: Tom Friedman and the Green Revolution

by Editors @ Tuesday, December 15th, 2009. Filed under Economy, Environment, High Road Economics, Socialism

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

by Thomas Friedman.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

$27.95. Pp. 438.

 

By Jerry Harris

SolidarityEconomy.Net

Thomas Friedman is always the head cheerleader for the next big thing. At first it was globalization and now it’s the green revolution. Friedman’s instincts are good, it’s just his analysis and politics are lacking. There are certainly valuable and interesting insights in his work, but his adolescent enthusiasm for capitalism often turns his critique to shallow propaganda.

The book’s title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded is a good indicator as to how Friedman understands environmental problems. Underline that word crowded because the book takes us on a Malthusian ride through the Third World. It’s overpopulation, not capitalism and its need for every expanding accumulation that is destroying the world’s environment.

Friedman marches us through China, India, Brazil and Nigeria offering a myopic view that only occasional refers to the developed countries and their use of energy and resources. When it comes to energy markets transnationals such as Exxon and Shell disappear as does any discussion of imperialism and its history in the Middle East. Instead Friedman targets “petrodictorships” and “Sheikhs…with bags of cash” indoctrinating madrassa students to “breed like rabbits” and “swarm” over the Islamic world. (p. 88)

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Word to the Wise: China Launches New Green Industries

by Editors @ Thursday, December 10th, 2009. Filed under China, Environment, Socialism

Chinese Leader Calls

for Development of

Environmental Industry

From Xinhua

Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang Tuesday called for advancement of environmental protection industry to strengthen a stable, coordinated and sustainable economic development.


Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang (C) visits the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 8, 2009. (Xinhua/Liu Jiansheng)

The environmental protection industry concerned aspects such as infrastructure building, equipment manufacturing and services and it should be considered as a strategic emerging industry, Li said during an inspection tour in the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences and China National Environmental Monitoring Center.
He said as the Copenhagen conference was held currently to address the climate change, "the development of green, low carbon and recycling economy has become a global trend."

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Putting the Obama Stimulus Toward Green Manufacturing

by Editors @ Sunday, October 4th, 2009. Filed under Economy, Environment, High Road Economics

Green Power Revives

Defunct Battery Plant

By Dennis Spisak

Mahoning Valley Green Party


NEW CASTLE, Pa. - Just outside this town in the western part of the state,
famous for its chili dogs and fireworks, a low-rise battery plant sits along a
side road named Clover Lane.


To miss it is to miss a back-from-the-dead story, one that Gov. Rendell hopes
will inspire a manufacturing revival across Pennsylvania.


With a workforce of 59, Axion Power International is no industrial giant. But
its resurrection - from a shuttered lead-acid battery plant to one now turning
out lead-carbon batteries for use in electric cars, among other eco-friendly
applications - is cited by Rendell and his representatives as evidence of the
green economy's transformative powers.

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Green Structural Reform Works – If Wall St Doesn’t Sabotage It

by Editors @ Monday, August 3rd, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Economy, Environment

 

  Now Hiring:

Green-Collar

Workers

 By Prashant Gopal

Yahoo! News

July 31, 2009 - When Alden Zeitz started the Wind Energy Program at Iowa Lakes Community College five years ago, 15 students enrolled.

This year, 102 students enrolled in the two-year training program for wind turbine technicians, including some students who abandoned another career for the economic promise of green technology. The wind energy industry hasn't been immune to the recession, but students are counting on the federal government's injection of $80 billion in clean energy projects to change that.

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Green Reconstruction vs. Speculative Capital

by Editors @ Thursday, May 21st, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment, High Road Economics

How a Green Economy

Is an Antidote to

Casino Capitalism


By Robert Pollin

New Labor Forum

April 2, 2009 - The convergence of a profound economic crisis and the inauguration of Barack Obama as President has created both tremendous challenges and opportunities for progressives in the United States. Two of the overarching economic issues around which progressives will need to struggle are: first, how to build a clean energy economy, creating millions of good jobs in the process; and second, how to create a financial system focused on channeling money toward productive investment as opposed to destabilizing speculation.

In fact, the link between these matters becomes clear once we pose the simple question: how can we pay for the transition to a clean energy economy? Realistically, there is no way to construct a clean energy economy -- driven by solar, wind, and geothermal power and biomass fuels, and operating at dramatically higher levels of energy efficiency -- unless trillions of dollars are channeled into this project over the next 20 years.

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Prairie Power: Iowa Communities Own Wind Power Farms

by Editors @ Thursday, May 14th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment, High Road Economics

  Community-Owned

Is Business Model for

Two Wind Farms in Iowa



By Apollo News Service

4/21/2009 - The farmland of Iowa’s Emmet and Dickinson counties will soon be home to the nation’s two largest community-owned wind farms. Red Rock Wind Energy LLC and Emmet County Energy LLC, both based in Estherville, Iowa, announced in December their intent build 300 and 200-megawatt wind arrays respectively near Estherville, a northwest Iowa agricultural community of 6,000 residents east of Sioux Falls near the border with Minnesota.

Both projects are much larger than Minnesota’s 100-megawatt Trimont array, currently the country’s largest community-owned wind farm.

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‘Solidarity Economy’ Emerging in North Carolina

by Editors @ Friday, April 10th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Economy, Environment, Global Justice, High Road Economics

The 'Plenty':

Local Currency Is One Tool

of Local Coop Economy

 

From Democracy Now

April 9, 2009:


AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to look now at how one North Carolina town is trying to become more self-sufficient by moving towards, well, being able to feed, fuel and finance itself. The town of Pittsboro, North Carolina—we just passed it yesterday—it houses the nation’s largest biodiesel cooperative, a food co-op, a farmers’ market and, most recently, its own currency, the Pittsboro Plenty. Pittsboro is one of a number of communities across the country printing their own money in an attempt to support local business.


We’re joined right now by community activist, entrepreneur and author Lyle Estill. He is also the author of Small Is Possible: Life in a Local Economy, and he’s founder of Piedmont Biofuels. He is also author of another book, as well.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! It’s good to have you with us, Lyle.

LYLE ESTILL: Thanks.


AMY GOODMAN: Plenty—where is that currency? I had it here somewhere. How could I lose that? Ah, here it is. Here it is. This is a—looks like—a little bit like Monopoly money. And tell us about Plenty. What does it stand for?

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Skip the Gas Guzzlers, Leapfrog to the Green Car

by Editors @ Sunday, April 5th, 2009. Filed under China, Environment, High Road Economics

 BYD electric car

China's E6 Electric Car:

Seeking a Great Leap

in Clean Transportation

By Jonathan Watts

The Guardian, UK

When BYD Auto launches one of China's first mass produced fully electric sedans later this year, it will be trying to conquer the world rather than save it. But such is the explosive growth of China's car market and thirst for petrol that the two goals are likely to become ever more synonymous.

The E6 plug-in is currently under wraps at the company's sprawling industrial complex in Shenzhen, but it will soon be at the vanguard of a company's -- and a nation's -- plans to dominate the global market for "clean-transport".

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