Get Energy Smart! NOW!

The day before the 40th Earth Day, VP Joe Biden kicked off a series of White House actions and announcements with an excellent initiative: selection of 25 communities for up to $452 million in Recovery Act funding to “ramp-up” energy efficiency building retrofits. Under the Department of Energy’s Retrofit Ramp-Up initiative, communities, governments, private sector […]

[Read more →]

At a recent conference, a scientist made a comment during his presentation about how we need to understand trade-offs in investments, advocating action on climate change but noting that we need to understand opportunity costs. In doing this, he referenced Bjorn Lomborg  (with a somewhat condescending tone). In my bag, as he spoke, Howard Friel’s […]

[Read more →]

“The Social Cost of Carbon may be the most important number you’ve never heard of” according to Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton in a recent publication from the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network. The Social Cost of Carbon (pdf) analyzes the efforts within the U.S. government to develop a value of the economic […]

[Read more →]

that March 2010 was, globally, the hottest March in modern temperature records. Right? That is what George Will-Ful Deceit Will will discuss with his readers, providing a thoughtful discussion of how perhaps he has been feeding them truthiness and falsehoods, with the active complicity of Fred Hiatt and The Washington Post. Yes, any moment now […]

[Read more →]

This ad comes via Canada. GreenCalgary is running an idle-free campaign with, we could say, a bit of a different twist. The negative health and environmental impacts of idling have been known for over a decade. Yet, all over the city of Calgary we are leaving our cars running while not in use for an […]

[Read more →]

The 40th Earth Day comes next week and, sigh, while globally there has been progress on many fronts (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, reduce CFC emissions, etc), the reality is that the earth (our living space) is under ever greater stress, on ever more fronts, almost literally with every passing moment. Thus, the concept […]

[Read more →]

In the quest for ethical journalism, George Will, Fred Hiatt, and the Washington Post lost their way … a long time ago.

[Read more →]

The New York Times Sunday magazine will feature a tour de force on climate economics by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. Entitled Building a Green Economy, a more appropriate title might be Climate Economics 101 and it should be required reading of every single Member of Congress and any journalist who writes on the […]

[Read more →]

Developing a lower total ownership cost (TOC) can often require paying a bit more money upfront. When it comes to energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE), that upfront incremental cost is too frequently a barrier to achieving that more cost effective longer term solution. A bond program targeted specifically for EE/RE in government facilities can […]

[Read more →]

An unlikely duo have written an OPED advocating that the United States look to other nations’ practices of incentivizing work-sharing in private and public work forces as a cost-effective tool toward reducing unemployment. The duo, Kevin Hassett of AEI (one of the most conservative DC think tanks) and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic […]

[Read more →]