Two pieces on sustainability for your consideration:
1) I don’t know anyone who doesn’t admire the insight — not to mention the popularity — of best-selling business author and NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Here’s a good article he wrote in 2009 on the importance of sustainability.
At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.
This scene in itself isn’t remarkable. But there is a new sort of excitement about the work. China’s production of solar panels has grown quickly in the past two years; it is it now the world’s leading exporter. When Matt Lewis, a representative of the California-based nonprofit ClimateWorks, visited the factory in October, he said it reminded him of his native Silicon Valley: The workers, even ordinary line workers, had a sense that they were part of building the future, the hot new industry.
Tom Friedman spent most of 2009 beating the China-is-winning-the-green-race-drum, and he has started 2010 with the same focus.
In Sunday’s New York Times, the news side of the house joined their editorial page colleague, writing in a front page story that Chinese “efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.”
To his credit, Friedman’s push has been all about policy. He wants the United States to go all-in in a space-race-like push to match Chinese innovation in energy technology (“E.T.,” as he has glossed it). But, what has eluded his attention – and is absent again in Sunday’s news piece – is the recognition that in order to match Chinese innovation, the policy changes that would be required in the U.S. electricity markets would necessarily have to go far beyond decoupling, one of Friedman’s personal causes.
Last month Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times an interesting op ed on why America should tax more gasoline. This occurs as the United States is the least forceful OECD country regarding gas tax. US drivers pay on average less than ten euro cents of tax per litre when their German, British, Italian, Turkish or French counterparts pay as much as 60 to 70 cents per litre. Even Australia does better with more than 20 cents per litre.
The situation varies from State to State with Alaska only taxing 26.4 cents per gallon of gasoline while California taxing up to 63.9 cents per gallon. Federal authorities already tax 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel.
Since the United States’ addiction to oil is widely documented and recognized as a threat by both sides of the political spectrum, why shouldn’t it tax oil more to curb the consumption?
Last week, Mackinnon gave a great overview of the Stimulus incentives for Cleantech. The impact of over $80 billion (yes, BILLION) will be an unprecedently leap in commercialization of clean technologies, putting us well on the way to reduced carbon emissions and energy independence.
However, there are many trade-offs that are inherent to “shovel-ready” economic stimulus that do not make us greener, cleaner or more energy independent. Last week, NPR discussed the Green goals of the stimulus package. In particular, the fact that $29 billion (also, BILLION) will be dedicated to building new highways is polluting in the near-term, but also “means more cars, more development, and more greenhouse gas pollution.”