economics
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Utilities cash in when you go solar
Net metering offers a lot to utilities and very little to ratepayers and solar array owners.
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Bank of America is now paying to tear down foreclosed homes
Bank of America is paying for the demolition of some foreclosures in Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit. Could this help these cities to find new life?
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Owning a car is like having a second mortgage
Auckland Transport Blog points out a sobering calculation from the book The Option of Urbanism: The financial cost of owning and maintaining a car is equivalent to the cost of owning a small house. (Well, a small house in a cheap area. But still.) AAA calculated that the average cost of car ownership and maintenance […]
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More links and thoughts on the medium chill
David Roberts has gotten all kinds of great feedback on his "medium chill" post. Here's a round up of links and stray thoughts.
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A golden opportunity to please conservatives and liberals alike
The U.S. EPA should opt for a smart, low-cost approach to fulfilling its mandate under a Supreme Court decision to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
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Packing heat: Why violence boils over on a warming planet
Christian Parenti's new book, The Tropic of Chaos, traces the links between politics, economics, and climate change.
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How to buy (and price) clean power
You get what you pay for. Clean power mandates in the US mandate that we buy megawatt-hours of clean energy, but they don’t mandate that those sources be reliable. This isn’t to say that clean energy can’t be reliable, but rather that it is mis-priced. Increasingly, this is causing conflicts for utilities, who have purchase […]
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There are now more green jobs than brown ones, and they pay better
Green technology and clean power are now employing more people than the fossil fuels industries, says the Brookings Institution. A separate analysis of the same data indicates that the cleantech sector of those green jobs offer median wages that are 20 percent better than regular jobs. And the rate of job creation in this sector was twice that of the regular economy from 2003-2010. All this despite the notoriously inconsistent support for green jobs in the U.S.!
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In defense of 'green jobs'
The phrase "green jobs" has been taken too literally by both advocates and detractors, leading to a bean-counting skirmishes that cast more heat than light.