Latest Articles
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Costs for utilities rise faster than politically palatable rate changes can keep up
This is one for the "Things No One is Talking About But Should" file.
Greenwire has this report ($ub. req'd) from Standard & Poor's noting that the credit risk of our utilities depends in large part on their ability to recover rising fuel costs, and this ability is diminished due to the fact that:
High fuel costs translate directly to higher customer rates, but instituting constant and often significant increases is politically and socially unpalatable.
This gets it half right.
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A chat with Portland’s Charlie Stephens about petrodollars and oil wars
This is part of a series of dispatches from Melinda Henneberger, who's talking to voters around the U.S. about their views on the environment and the election.
One thing I learned traveling around the country a couple of years ago, talking to voters for a political book I was working on, is that Americans tend to give their elected officials a super-size helping of benefit of the doubt.
One night, I was in Suffolk, Va., having dinner with some active-duty Navy women -- the real "security moms" -- who were in between tours in the Persian Gulf. One of them, a young Republican named Elizabeth DeAngelo, remarked that the war in Iraq had had no effect on her political views, because she did not consider the decision to go to war a partisan matter. "Being in the military opens your eyes that it is dangerous out there," said DeAngelo, who watched the first "shock and awe" bombs fall from the deck the U.S.S. Kearsarge, "and you have to believe that no president would want to run the government into the ground, for their legacy, if nothing else. So if a Democrat did get elected, I wouldn't think, 'Oh, no!' I don't know if the reasons if we went over there were the right reasons. But even though I didn't like [President] Clinton as a person, I can't believe -- nobody, I think, would put several hundred thousand people in a conflict for oil. Even if it were Clinton, I wouldn't think that. I think they do what they think is right."
A number of people I spoke to across the country made that same point -- that politics aside, no American president could possibly be that venal, or stoop so low as to put Americans in harm's way over a mere commodity. Much of the rest of the world does not have this kind of confidence in the best intentions of its leaders, but we do. Which is why we're still unsure about the "real reason" we went into Iraq. It's why most reporters find it easier to believe we wandered into this misadventure as the result of some Oedipal psychodrama in the Bush family, or plain incompetence. And it's why I had a really, really hard time hearing what Charlie Stephens had to tell me when I sat down with him in Portland, Ore., a couple of weeks ago.
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Democratic convention planners struggling to meet big green goals
Planners of August’s Democratic Convention in Denver are finding that it’s just not that easy to pull off Green Director Andrea Robinson’s goal of “the most sustainable political convention in modern American history.” Only three states’ delegations have agreed to purchase carbon offsets through the convention’s “Green Delegate Challenge” program. Merchandisers despair of finding fanny […]
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RNC drops $3 million to promote McCain’s energy plan
Over the weekend, the Republican National Committee launched their 10-day, $3 million campaign to tout John McCain’s energy policy with this ad: “Record gas prices, a climate in crisis. John McCain says solve it now,” says the ad. “With a balanced plan — alternative energy, conservation, suspending the gas tax and more production here at […]
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Toyota may put solar panels on new Prius to power air conditioning
A Japanese newspaper is reporting that Toyota plans to install solar panels on its next model of the popular Prius hybrid. If the company follows through, it would be the first major automaker to incorporate solar power into its vehicles. Even with the panels, though, the pimped-out Prius wouldn’t actually run on solar power (it’s […]
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Presidential campaign ads go on attack over energy issues
The first major ad buy this year from a major party aired over the weekend, a TV spot courtesy of the Republican National Committee attacking Democratic candidate Barack Obama for a lack of creativity on the energy scene. While John McCain is “pushing his own party to face climate change,” the ad says that Obama […]
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Venture capitalist John Doerr shares four lessons on climate change
I don’t know how it is that I’ve never seen this John Doerr talk from TED, but I’m glad I finally did:
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To convene is not green
The Democratic Party, nominee already selected, has apparently noticed that flying thousands and thousands of people to a meeting with no purpose has some significant environmental costs.
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Is a consumer choice necessarily the best choice?
Jim Manzi, climate change voice of non-denialist conservatives, writes: But consider this at a common-sense level: you are forcing people, through rationing, to use something like 80% less of a substance that they choose to use because they believe that it creates net economic utility (prior to externalities) as compared to any available alternative. There […]
