financial crisis

A letter to Science ponders what $700 billion could do for the natural world

A letter to the editor from Jaboury Ghazoul, in the Jan. 23 issue of Science, tries to put into perspective the $700 billion bailout:

An estimated 10 million species populate the earth. To ward against extinction, we could equitably award $70,000 to each and every one of these 10 million species from our $700 billion cash injection. The intertidal bryozoans of Scotland's West Coast would alone receive more than $3 million. In Borneo, the 350 or so species of dipterocarp trees could form a union to demand existence rights, using their $25 million to lobby for viable landscape mosaics in which they could persist alongside competing land uses ...

Public investment and regulation can be main means to green

In the face of economic catastrophe, yesterday’s controversial assertion has become today’s conventional economic wisdom. That lack of regulation is one root of the current depression is not only the view of liberals and moderates, but also of sensible conservatives. And the need for public investment to fight the depression is no longer in doubt […]

Republicans refuse bailout; Obama wants auto czar

Looks like there will be no auto bailout with this Congress and this president. The NYT reports today: The prospects of a government rescue for the foundering American automakers dwindled Thursday as Democratic Congressional leaders conceded that they would face potentially insurmountable Republican opposition during a lame-duck session next week. Nor does it appear that […]

Call it ‘green mobility’

With an auto industry bailout careening down the pike, Climate Solutions policy director KC Golden has some vitally needed insights regarding what we need to demand from industry leader GM in return. —– We should not rescue General Motors as we know it. But Congress could use the proposed bailout as an opportunity to begin […]

Chorus of intellectuals and activists call on Obama to think big

Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman to Barack Obama: be ambitious (really ambitious)! Beltway CW bellwether Fareed Zakaria to Barack Obama: be ambitious! Former Secretary of Labor and current Obama adviser Robert Reich to Barack Obama: be ambitious! Nobel-winning climate advocate Al Gore to Barack Obama: be ambitious! Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to Barack Obama: be ambitious! […]

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism: Heritage even opposes energy efficiency

Conservative think tanks remain oblivious and impervious to the facts. They cling to global warming denial and delay even in the face of the remarkable advances both in scientific understanding about global warming and in clean technology solutions. They provide the foundational misanalysis (disanalysis?) for the entire conservative movement — although “movement” must be the […]

Green investment does create jobs

Robert Pollin has issued a direct rebuttal, “Green Investments and Jobs,” to the Heritage Foundation’s lame “debunking” of Green Recovery, a study Pollin co-authored for the the Center for American Progress. My line-by-line response to the disanalysis by Heritage’s Donald Kreutzer is here. Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at U. Mass-Amherst, concludes: […]

We already have 750,000 green jobs and the potential for ample green investments

This post was originally published at the NRDC blog, Switchboard, before the presidential election. —– You can’t miss the fact that both Time and Newsweek chose the week of the presidential election to run pieces on how the economic downturn will affect efforts to solve global warming. Yes, most eyes are on the election through […]

We’ll still have Bachmann to kick around

Ugh: Rep. Michele Bachmann won reelection early Wednesday, fending off a challenge from Democrat Elwyn Tinklenberg in a Sixth Congressional District race that came to symbolize the perilous position of Republican incumbents across the nation. … Bachmann credited her victory to her vote against the $700 billion financial rescue package and her campaign to open […]