Posts Tagged by environmentalism
Is Renewable Energy a Threat To Economic Prosperity?
| February 10, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
I’m proud that Tom Konrad, famed stock market analyst and editor of AltEnergyStocks.com, offers his comments here frequently. In a post yesterday, he offered me guidance in wrapping my wits around the issue of green jobs, directing me to his thoughtful article on Forbes.com, linked below. There, Tom looks at the issue from the standpoint of basic microeconomics’ “production function” which suggests that labor can be freely substituted for capital and energy. He provides examples recently, including this one:
Shifting people out of their cars and onto mass transit will create jobs because there will have to be drivers and people managing the transit system, where before no one was paid to drive. To the extent that the transit system can be paid for out of the reduced fuel costs and car ownership costs of the former drivers turned riders, the number of jobs created will be a pure economic gain.
But I wonder if it’s that simple. Read More
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Must Eco-friendliness Come at the Expense of the Economy?
| February 8, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
Here’s a wonderful article that gets at an issue I come across constantly: the implication that environmentalism and job growth are opposed to one another. Considering we have the option to put literally millions of people back to work in renewable energy, energy storage, electric transportation, smart-grid, etc., I’m always stunned when I hear politicians peddling the idea that eco-friendliness must come at the expense of the economy.
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Energy Consumption, Economics, and Environmentalism
| January 28, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Sustainability |
To simplify where we are as a civilization and where we’re going with respect to energy consumption, economics, and environmentalism, it’s useful to postulate three broad “plans”:
Plan A: We continue on our current course. We ignore the fact that our population will soon be growing from 7 billion to 10 billion, and that an ever-growing percentage of that population is joining the ranks of consumers. Our leaders know that we’re in the process of driving off a cliff; they may lack basic decency, but they’re long on intelligence, and they exploit voter ignorance of this core truth as long as they possibly can. During this time, they and the extraordinarily powerful forces that elected them desperately look for new ways of extracting fossil fuels, while obfuscating the effects on global climate, ocean acidification, social chaos, war, respiratory disease, etc. The elite remain in power until the planet is in ruins.
Plan B: We aggressively adopt what Jeremy Rifkin and others refer to as “The Third Industrial Revolution,” which contemplates continued economic growth by focusing on renewable energy and the many other components of sustainability. Read More
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Advice to Environmental Policy Makers: Limit Further Damage
| January 8, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Sustainability |
Descending the nearby mountain I had hiked last Sunday afternoon, I slipped a bit, and almost sprained my ankle. Though I quickly recovered my balance, the brief incident caused me to think about how clever nature is; in the case of such a trauma, my body would have instantly provided pain and swelling to the injured joint, limiting motion, thus minimizing further injury.
Of course, this is one of many self-limiting systems that helps regulate individual organisms, and society at large. We laugh about the annual Darwin Awards, posthumously bestowed on people who accidentally kill themselves in the process of attempting extraordinarily stupid things, thus unintentionally performing acts of kindness, removing bits of “stupid DNA” from the human gene pool. Read More
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The Downside to Environmentalism — Sorry, What Exactly Is That Again?
| December 7, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Sustainability |
I was in a four-hour-long meeting this morning, learning about a new approach to energy storage. I can’t talk about the technology (which, frankly, I think is sketchy) but that’s not the point.
The point is this: I sat at a table with a bunch of smart people from the technology firm, as well as representatives from a private equity company (my client) that’s interested in investing, and all of a sudden, in the chat that ensued during a five-minute break, it became clear that certain of these people think of themselves as environmentalists, and certain others distinctly do not.
I thought hard: What’s the mindset of a person who thinks of himself as a “non-environmentalist?” Is there some downside that I’m not seeing to caring about the health of our planet? Are there people who favor toxicity or an end to biodiversity? Is there a legitimate approach to our lives here that has no responsibility for the welfare of future generations?
Then the icing on the cake: I came to learn that some of these “non-environmentalists” have grandchildren. Sorry, I’m lost.
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Thanksgiving – An Appropriate Time to Appreciate Mankind’s Benefactors
| November 24, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
Albert Einstein left us a number of gifts, most obviously his landmark breakthroughs in theoretical physics. The other, in my estimation, is the utter truckload of pithy philosophic quotes about mankind’s role in the universe. If you’re looking for something that will keep you out of trouble for a few hours, check this out – there are ten full pages of them.
Perhaps the most often quoted is this:
We can’t solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used to create them.
… which is often invoked by environmentalists to suggest that we’re foolish to count on the fossil fuel and nuclear industries to deal with the pollution and other externalities that come along with their products.
I’m with you all the way, good sir, and suggest that a combination of new modes of thinking are in order here:
1) Environmentalism itself, inspiring more and more people to act responsibly vis-a-vis the natural world
2) Energy conservation per se, making wholesale reductions in consumption, driven by building retrofits, mass transit, electric vehicles, etc.
3) Renewable energy – biting the bullet and making the investment in a clean energy future
Again, thanks to the ultimate man of ideas.
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Old-time Republicans Made Real Commitments to the Environment
| November 5, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
Those of us who can’t wrap our wits around the Republican party’s indifference (some might substitute “antagonism”) to the environment need to remember that the GOP didn’t always take this stance. This post on Mother Nature Network documents 10 Republicans in the days of yore who made real commitments to environmental regulation and preservation.
How did we get here from there? What motivates Lindsay Graham and the other senate Republicans in their quest to dismantle the EPA and reverse half a century of progress in this space? I sure hope someone can help me understand that. Hey! Does the fact that the oil industry maintains the largest lobby in the known universe have anything to do with this? Hmmmm.
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Meeting with the Environmental Law Institute
| April 16, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Sustainability |
I’m headed back East on Monday for meetings in Washington DC and NYC this week; I’ll try to write from the road. Among my stops is the Environmental Law Institute, where spokesperson Jay Predergrass has generously agreed to let me interview him for my next book.
From our initial conversations, these people sound extremely sharp and dedicated. I’ll be interested to learn things like how they differ in mission and function from the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), whom I interviewed for Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies. Apparently, both use the legal process as their core tool to keep environmental causes moving forward, or, to say it differently, from allowing unbridled industrialization from running roughshod over the environment.
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Does Environmentalism Come at the Expense of Economic Prosperity?
| March 9, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
Here’s a good discussion on some points near and dear to us here are 2GreenEnergy, especially the way in which the oil companies have systematically internalized their profits while externaling many of the most obvious and burdensome costs of their operations. IMO, the most important concept in the whole conversation is the rhetorical position that environmentalism and capitalism as are odds with one another, i.e., that environmentalism comes at the expense of jobs and economic prosperity. This, of course, is categorically false — yet it’s a theme that we hear constantly.
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Are We Preaching to the Choir on Environmentalism?
| January 2, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
One of the many things I like about the community here is that we are most certainly not “preaching to the choir.” There are many people here whose viewpoints, while divergent from my own, are stimulating to the conversation, and, more likely than not, constitute the principal reason that people like to be here.
A reader commented the other day: Read More
