Read on: http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/05/10/the-big-short-how-wall-street-destroyed-main-street/

Energy secretary Steven Chu has been in office for only a little over a year, but he's nonetheless managed to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the US tackles climate change. (Photo: Peter Yang)

It’s late November 2009, and US energy secretary Steven Chu is leaning against a fake sink in a fake kitchen. Chu is 62 years old and athletically trim with graying black hair.

He’s wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, argyle socks, and gold-framed glasses. Chu is a renowned physicist, a cabinet appointee, and the winner of a Nobel Prize. But that’s not why he’s now being treated like a rock star. This morning a small crowd of scientists, politicians, and local businesspeople are flocking to him because he’s got cash, specifically $75 million in stimulus funds for the Ohio subsidiary of the American Electric Power utility.

Read on: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_stevenchu?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Smog in Shenyang in northeast China’s Liaoning Province. (Hei Yubai/European Pressphoto Agency)

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

In what follows, I will offer a brief survey of the economics of climate change or, more precisely, the economics of lessening climate change. I’ll try to lay out the areas of broad agreement as well as those that remain in major dispute. First, though, a primer in the basic economics of environmental protection.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

by Corby Kummer | Atlantic Monthly | March 2010

(IMAGE CREDIT: ELI MEIR KAPLAN)

BUY MY FOOD at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.

Read on: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/walmart-local-produce

A view of loading operations from the bridge of the Eugen Maersk at Bremerhaven, Germany. (Image: Gordon Welters for The New York Times)

It took more than a month for the container ship Ebba Maersk to steam from Germany to Guangdong, China, where it unloaded cargo on a recent Friday — a week longer than it did two years ago.

But for the owner, the Danish shipping giant Maersk, that counts as progress.

In a global culture dominated by speed, from overnight package delivery to bullet trains to fast-cash withdrawals, the company has seized on a sales pitch that may startle some hard-driving corporate customers: Slow is better.

By halving its top cruising speed over the last two years, Maersk cut fuel consumption on major routes by as much as 30 percent, greatly reducing costs. But the company also achieved an equal cut in the ships’ emissions of greenhouse gases.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environment/17speed.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A new housing development in Lathrop in 2006. One in eight houses in the town are now in some stage of foreclosure. (Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Nobody is home in the cities of the future.

Read on: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/slumburbia/?th&emc=th

What? You want me to do something more to help the environment? I recycle, ya know!

So environmentally, my frame of mind was: No pain, no gain.

Read on: http://invw.org/2010/02/consumers-really-can-affect-global-warming-particularly-if-they-live-in-the-united-states/

Library of Congress/Dorothea Lange - A famous Dust Bowl image of "Migrant Mother"

We’re less mobile and more place-bound, and it’s not just the recession that’s slowing restless America’s nomadic habits. This is good news for Seattle, the environment, and mossbacks.

by Knute Berger | Crosscut | January 20, 2010

Developers love predicting that growth isunstoppable and inevitable, but the Great Recession is showing how untrue this really is. Some previously booming areas of the country are now declining in population, especially the Sun Belt and parts of the West. More people are now moving out of Florida, Nevada and California than are moving in. The huge growth in recent decades was driven not by their inherent desirability but by bad banking and loan practices that artificially goosed development and made growth a business in and of itself. Americans were encouraged to be on the move because their mobility was exploitable by banks, builders and Wall Street.

But the Great American Slowdown is a bigger trend. A new Brookings Institution study finds that domestic migration is at post-war lows and has been steadily sliding for the last half century. In the 1950s and ’60s, 20 percent of Americans changed homes every year. In the boom 1990s, it was 16 percent. But in the last two years, it’s dropped to just over 12 percent. Americans are becoming more place-bound. It’s partly due to an aging population, and higher rates of homeownership. But the current downturn has speeded the trend having “cemented” many people in place, says the Washington Post. You can’t sell a home, buy a home, or find a job, so make the best of where you are.

Read on: http://crosscut.com/2010/01/20/mossback/19512/

It is possible to improve the lives of the poor, the middle class and the well off, by addressing one big problem.

It turns out that reducing economic inequality can reduce a whole range of social problems, from teenage pregnancy and youth violence, to heart disease and depression.

The authors of a new book say the world’s rich countries have benefited about as much as they can from economic growth. Improvement in the quality of life now hinges on increasing economic equality.

Read on: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/jerrylarge/2010787375_jdl14.html?syndication=rss