Bifurcation of Resources, Renewable Energy, and the Chickens Coming Home to Roost
I’d be lying if I said I spend more than a few minutes a week with the New York Times, but I do try to keep track of the columnists whose opinions I respect. Last week, next to an op-ed by Timothy Geithner that suggested that we were in the midst of recovery, was what I thought was a much more thoughtful and reasonable presentation by Richard Florida on his piece he called “The Great Reset.”
His point – one that I’ve been asserting for a decade now, is that we in the US are experiencing a bifurcation – a splitting – of the haves and the have-nots. Of course, this theme – the growing disparity between rich and poor – has been a subject of conversation since the Karl Marx and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. If I’m not mistaken, Marx suggested that this is an unavoidable byproduct of capitalism. Whether or not that’s true, here we are, 150 years later, with elaborate charts to show that the rich factually have gotten richer while the poor got poorer. (more…)
I always try to keep my fingers on the pulse of concentrating solar power as the clean energy technology that will get us through the next century. Right this minute, 10,836MW of CSP are under development, but only 423MW in operation or under construction. And since only 4% of proposed CSP projects are actually happening, it certainly raises questions about the other 96%. What delays are they encountering? What exactly happens during project development that delays – or, in some cases kills, these efforts?
