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Climate Change: The Ipcc Response Strategies
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September 28, 2008 11:00AM to 09:00PM
*EcoFare is a not for profit non partisan community event interested in promoting renewable energies, sustainability, and green living taking place Sunday September 28th in Downingtown, Pa 19335 @ the wonderful Kerr Park from 11am - 9pm Highlights of the day include:
* Hybrid cars on display and available for pre-order
* A broad array of green friendly vendors and exhibitors -- Kimberton Whole Foods, School of Rock, Alternative Energy INC., Earth Mart, Green Savers, The Sierra Club, more coming board every day -- hopefully your organization will be next
* Games and activities with prizes of value donated by local businesses -- Chic-Fil-A, Regal Entertainment, Papa Johns, BC Collectibles, fine dining outings plus much more coming soon
* A town hall discussion focused on eco-accountability, sustainability issues featuring local and regional experts in relating fields
* A Concert for a Green Earth featuring some of Philly's top rising stars (Sisters3, Cheers Elephant, Drink Up Buttercup, The Sermon, Lauren Adams, When Cars Ascend)
**All proceeds of EcoFare will go towards bettering MPG standards in America and America's 10 year Green Energy Initutive through EcoFare's steering committee. If you have interest in becoming part of EcoFare's steering committee simply let me know.
This week a new book will be available which will be a practical guide of how to "Go Green". It was written be freelance contributor to the Today Show, Sloan Barnett. The book is titled: "Green Goes With Everything", and will show how, with just a few simple, but important, changes you can detoxify your home and your family.
Here is a brief introduction by Sloan Barnett:
Now that many multi-national corporations have made a commitment to get into the clean energy business, they may be able to have some leverage over government programs and subsidies. This could be reminiscent of the leverage Big Oil has held over government subsidies. If the government doesn't cooperate, then they use their leverage. That is, they just take there business elsewhere, to a country which will give them the subsidies they want to develop clean energy technologies.
Below is a story of what GE is doing now to lobby congress to renew the Clean-Energy credits.
September 12, 2008, 2:25 pm
Industry to Congress: Renew the Expiring Clean-Energy Credits
Posted by Keith Johnson
The U.S. Congress may be “out of gas” when it comes to drafting an energy policy, as the Washington Post edit page moans, but General Electric’s John Krinicki doesn’t mind giving legislators a push.
He only had to battle giants, not the Senate (Wikipedia)
The head of GE Energy, the conglomerate’s unit that makes everything from wind turbines to nuclear reactors, flew down to Washington again today to plead with senators to extend tax credits for renewable energy. The credits, still crucial to making clean energy competitive, are set to expire at the end of the year, despite at least eight tries so far to renew them. That threatens to slam the brakes on two gangbuster years for American wind and solar power.
“I’m prepared to come down every week to say the same thing,” he told us. “If the production tax credit expires in the U.S., the wind industry will collapse. As the clock ticks, you put jobs at risk.”
Mr. Krinicki’s testimony is part of a broader Senate look today at America’s energy future. Among the heavyweights also on parade: Rick Waggoner, CEO of General Motors; Marvin Odum, the president of Shell Oil; Gary Cohn, co-president of Goldman Sachs; Dan Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and Dan Reicher, Google’s clean-energy guru.
Mr. Krinicki thinks his clean-energy arguments will find a more receptive audience in the Senate than when he made identical pleas more than a year ago. The real problem isn’t support for clean energy per se, he says, but the messy politics that makes it tough to renew the credits.
And he says the beauty of jumpstarting clean-tech with the tax credits is that it doesn’t require inventing a whole new energy policy—just renewing an existing one.
So what happens if Congress doesn’t renew clean-energy subsidies?
“If the U.S.government is not going to be reliable and predictable [on clean-energy policy], we’ll go to Germany and China,” he says, pointing to countries that have long-term, aggressive plans in place to promote clean energy. China could pass the U.S. next year to become the second-biggest wind-power country, after Germany.
Mr. Krinicki’s GE boss Jeff Immelt said something similar earlier this year, threatening to sell clean-tech equipment to countries like Turkey if the U.S. doesn’t fix its “hellish” energy policy. Still, foreign companies are still flocking to the U.S. market—GE rival Siemens just announced it will build a new wind-turbine factory in the U.S., even with the subsidy question still up in the air.
Will this Congress renew the tax credits at the buzzer? Or have two years of world-beating renewable-energy growth taken away any sense of urgency?
Permalink | Trackback URL: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/09/12/industry-to-congress-renew-the-expiring-clean-energy-credits/trackback/
Right now, they urgently are working for the quick passage of HB 2200 during the next session of the Pennsylvania Senate. This bill assure that Pennsylvania families and businesses will have powerful tools to save on their electric bills, especially since electricity rate caps come off state wide in January 2011.
Jan Jarrett, vice president of PennFuture recently said in a press release:“Reducing demand for energy and for electricity through conservation is the surest, quickest way to reduce energy prices and electricity bills,” continued Jarrett. “Reduced demand for oil – not drilling – is the major reason why the price for oil has fallen from $147 to $113 per barrel in the last month. HB 2200, the energy savings bill, must pass right away if the electricity conservation programs will be in place when the remaining electricity rate caps are removed in the next 16 to 28 months.”
To read more about this, and the pledge being asked to be made by all members of the Pennsylvania Senate, go to: PennFuture launches campaign to give Pennsylvania's families and businesses powerful tools to save on electricity billsby Alexander Green, Chairman, Investment U
Investment Director, The Oxford Club
"What is success?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, "To laugh often and much. To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children. To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty. To find the best in others. To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition. To know even one life breathed easier because you have lived; this is to have succeeded."
At the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, Todd Glass of Heller Ehrman moderates a discussion on the various solar technologies making a difference in the green movement. From thin film PVs to concentrating solar, which technology is best-suited for deployment on a utility scale? Attempting to answer this question are panelists Peter Duprey, CEO at Acciona; Ricardo Angel, senior vice president at GE Energy Financial Services; and Fong Wan, vice president of energy procurement at PG&E.
by Stephanie Bruno, The Times-Picayune
Friday August 08, 2008, 7:11 PM
Small-scale entrepreneurialism can lead to self-sufficiency and boost local economies, according to Vidar Jorgensen, adviser to the Bangladesh bank that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Jorgensen sat on a panel Thursday night in New Orleans about green and small-scale business opportunities, where he explained how his Bangladesh bank's mirofinancing practices led to its receipt of the Nobel prize.
Jorgensen is chairman of the World Health Care Congress and serves on the advisory committee of the Grameen Bank. According to Jorgensen, Grameen makes small loans of less than $200 to low-income borrowers but doesn't demand collateral. Loans are aimed at financing self-employment projects that will lead to financial self-reliance. One of the bank's initiatives enabled tens of thousands of women, "the poorest of the poor," to become economically self-sustaining.
"Most beggars are women who are divorced or widowed or abandoned. There are no jobs for them if they lose a provider, so they go door to door begging for money," Jorgensen explained. "Then someone thought, well, since they're already going door to door, what if they took something with them they could sell? Fruit or a toy or something? The bank loaned the money for them to acquire the goods to sell, and now 100,000 former beggars are self-sufficient."
If the approach can work in Bangladesh, Jorgensen suggested, it can work anywhere that populations are struggling and financially dependent. The key is to provide small but targeted assistance and to help them discover the entrepreneurial potential within themselves.
David Bach, a personal finance expert and best-selling author, also sat on the panel and spoke of the new business opportunities opening up in green industries, or industries that focus on sustainability and preserving the environment.
Bach said he was inspired to write his latest book, "Go Green, Live Rich," after he and his family moved into a green building in Manhattan and began to notice improvements in their personal health.
"I honestly believe it's going to be the economic opportunity of a lifetime," Bach said of the emerging green industry. "The green industry is going to make the tech industry of the '90s look small."
The panel was held in conjunction with the annual conference of Shaklee Corp., a company that sells a range of environmentally friendly products.
“We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. -Valclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic” (Chapter 1, page 1)Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry: Innovation inspired by nature. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
"In a society accustomed to dominating or "improving" nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her." (Chapter 1, page 2)
“They know that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved the problems we are struggling to solve. Our challenge is to take these time-tested ideas and echo them in our own lives.” (Chapter 1, page 4)
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