cas-cade (n) a succession of devices or stages in a process, each of which triggers or initiates the next
(definition taken from The New Oxford American Dictionary)
How likely except for the internet is it that the Netroots Nation conference would be viewable literally by folks world wide. Considering the name of the organization, how likely is it that a non-Republican/corporate oriented gathering would be able to garner much, if any, publicity … except for the internet?
In both a devices and stages sense, the internet has proved itself to be a cascade. While I’m focusing on social improvement, businesses and governments are transforming or have transformed themselves due to the massive information connections the various ‘net “tubes” make available.
But I want to go one step lower. Net Neutrality!
In the simplest terms net neutrality describes an even playing field that does not discriminate based upon content. Net neutrality says that Disney or MacDonald/Douglas cannot be given, or sold, a more favorable access to the ‘net than Green Mountain Daily or Netroots Nation because of a web site’s offerings.
Net neutrality today is based upon promises whereby various transport companies such as Comcast (who was caught interfering with peer to peer downloads over their network). As Vermont Yankee has shown us, however, corporate promises are only as good as … well … the promising corporation wants to make them.
The diversity we see today on the internet is solely because in the US we’ve taken a controlled anarchistic (libertarian if you will) view of how it should be run. Thus one can get hard core porn or children’s cartoons; traditional and non-traditional politics; medical information; family vacation pictures and so much more. If net neutrality is allowed to slip there is absolutely no doubt the powers in control (whomever they be) will push for a more homogeneous electronic fare.
I have no doubt in my mind that such as Netroots Nation would have been made prohibitively expensive to broadcast over the internet, and thus to billions of possible viewers, if the internet had grown out of a proprietary business plan as opposed to the government (military don’t ya’ know) turned educational turned public venture project it is.
Look to Apple’s Mac and the PC computers as great examples. IBM (because they didn’t believe there was a future for small desktop computing) released the entire PC design to the public, and it quickly became a standard. On the other hand Apple closely controlled their design and build, and this has kept the Mac a creature of Apple’s business as opposed to plethora of PC compatible computer brands out there. Guess which costs less for comparable computing power and has a wider variety of hardware, software and service providers?
You got it … the PC.
Because the internet was a creation of our federal government, and because the standards that make up the internet were made public a cascade of events occurred. Standards were publicly submitted and reviewed and accepted or rejected. Big corps won some and big corps lost some as did the little people and governments and whatever else.
But there is one other thing to bear in mind. The Siren lure of the ‘net for a huge number of people is because of the great disparity of offerings out there. Before people used the internet for shopping, folks were passing around emails and building personal websites and showing photos which led to a familiarity with the ‘net that made internet shopping as acceptable as it is as quickly as this happened.
Net neutrality is what brought many, if not almost all, of us to the internet. Next to the US government, net neutrality is the most important thing in the social explosion we know as the internet.
If we want to find Netroots Nation next year as easily as we did this year we need to zealously fight for and protect this notion called net neutrality. There is huge huge money in dumping this, and we’re either going to be paying those bills or falling by the wayside should net neutrality dissolve.
The Vermont state police have once again decided that warrants were an unnecessary part of their process. Unfortunately for them, they were no match for mild mannered, 4′ 10″, 56-year old, librarian by day, civil rights defender by… okay, also by day… Judith Flint.
The short version: the state police showed up at Kimball Public Library to seize the library’s computers because they had a tip that Brooke Bennett may have used them at some point and she asked them for a warrant.
As reported in, of all places, The Fresno Bee (used to avoid linking to an AP article; otherwise I’d use the Herald):
Children’s librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on “Love That Dog” when police showed up.
They weren’t kidding around: Five state police detectives wanted to seize Kimball Public Library’s public access computers as they frantically searched for a 12-year-old girl, acting on a tip that she sometimes used the terminals.
Flint demanded a search warrant, touching off a confrontation that pitted the privacy rights of library patrons against the rights of police on official business.
[…]
“What I observed when I came in were a bunch of very tall men encircling a very small woman,” said the library’s director, Amy Grasmick, who held fast to the need for a warrant after coming to the rescue of the 4-foot-10 Flint.
The police did return with a warrant eight hours later (see? How difficult was that?), but concerns remain. Continuing from the Bee article:
Once in police hands, how broadly could police dig into the computer hard drives without violating the privacy of other library patrons?
[Vermont State Police Colonel] Baker wouldn’t discuss what information was gleaned from the computers or what state police did with information about other people, except to say the scope of the warrant was restricted to the missing girl investigation.
“The idea that they took all the computers, it’s like data mining,” said [deputy director of intellectual freedom issues for the American Library Association] Caldwell-Stone. “Now, all of a sudden, since you used that computer, your information is exposed to law enforcement and can be used in ways that (it) wasn’t intended.'”
Go Judith Flint! Go Amy Grasmick!
And as far as the Vermont State Police go, why would you waste your time during a frantic search trying to obtain computers that you have no right to obtain when it’s easy enough to go to a judge first?
The three member State panel has been refused access to Vermont Yankee Monday.An inspection Monday by the NRC and State officials looking into the leak and cooling tower bracket malfunction will not be joined by members of the newly appointed team.This bodes poorly for the panels success.Gov Douglas has from the start vaguely questioned two members impartiality as if to lay the groundwork for this type of tactic.Commissioner O’Brien said last week that He promised to talk to Entergy corporate officials about the state’s ongoing concerns. To state the clearly obvious an awful lot more is needed,cooperation to start.Gov.Douglas has yet to my knowledge comment on the Yankee leak and other problems last week that resulted in the plant shutting down to 25% of power.The aging nuclear plant supplies one third of Vermont’s electric power .
MONTPELIER — The state Department of Public Service has declined to let members of a panel created by the Legislature to do a special audit of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant join an inspection of the plant set for Monday, officials confirmed Friday.
“They’re trying to stonewall our appointees,” Shumlin said Friday.
He said the legislative appointees, retired nuclear engineer Arnold Gundersen and former federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Peter Bradford, needed to be full participants in the Vermont Yankee review for lawmakers to have confidence in the plant’s continued operation.
Stephen Wark, spokesman for the DPS, said Friday he could not comment of the matter because of an agreement that the deliberations of the Public Oversight Commission be kept secret.
Diane Screnci, spokeswoman for the NRC’s Northeast regional office, confirmed that no member of the Public Oversight Commission would be attending Monday’s inspection.
“The Department of Public Service has not requested that any member of the panel observe the (inspection),” Screnci said. “And they would have to tell us; they would have to request this specific person and they haven’t at this point.”
Recognition of how difficult it is to get a movement like this going. Creative Commons had taken off, and I decided to do this, I had forgotten how hard the first steps are.
We’ve been successful at getting funding. We’re still hiring th enetroots activist person.
I want to hear ideas and criticism from you. Blogger council: advisers willing to give feedback.
The state of Vermont is going about reducing it’s solid waste output in completely the wrong way. Why crack down on Vermont Compost and Intervale Compost, two entities working hard to do the right thing and reduce the amount of trash we bury in landfills? Enforcement is not the way here, the state needs to work with responsible people trying to do the right thing. After all, where else is this waste to go but the landfill?
Yes, ok so there’s some site issues. I’m not disagreeing, but come on, suggest/help find an alternative. Food waste to compost is such a noble and worthy cause. Making a resource out of a waste, that’s what we need more of, not less. What’s the alternative? Burying it in the ground and letting future generations deal with the issue? Not that I think it’s much better than landfilling, but at least New Hampshire has kept up with technology. With modern pollution controls, they incinerate all their waste and generate electricity from it.
No landfills, plus. Electrical generation, plus. Unfortunately there is still hazardous ash left over, minus. Also some pollution that eludes the controls set in place, minus. I see it as breaking even, versus lanfilling which is just a minus. Is this what Vermont should move toward???? What options do we really have left if the state won’t let anybody do anything with waste other than landfill it?
In this case we’re not really talking about dangerous pollutants or hazardous household chemicals, its just food waste. The only problems that you can run into both relate to the site. The first is leachate of the nutrients from the compost into the groundwater. The second is animals, whether it be flies, rats, raccoons etc. Solve these two issues and you’ve got a successful waste reduction operation. Even Martha Stewart in the latest issue of her magazine uses Vermont Compost for her garden.
So please State of Vermont, work with these good people, don’t arbitrarily regulate them. Let VT compost go back and get whatever permits they need, don’t close them down. If there turns out to be issues still, then work with them to solve them. Same with the Intervale, so there’s site issues that can’t be overcome. Work with them, help them find a new site that will work, it’s in everyone’s best interest. Move forward, not backward, after all they’re just good people trying to do the right thing for everyone!.
Questions asked by: Orange Clouds 115 and Natasha.
Homework for all participants [and all you readers out there]: There are some myths about food in media, your job is to reframe the message when you see a food myth.
——————-
Mark Winne – author of “Closing the Food Gap”
Jane Goodall’s comment on the book: “It’s heartening to find a book that blends passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor.”
Q: With rising food prices, fed program food dollars not going as far any more. What needs to be done, and how can we move that discussion forward?
A: Lower income people paying much more for food. Food cost is already 20% of income for lower income familes vs much less for rest of us.
They’re already lining up at food banks and food stamp offices in record numbers. They’ll take an additional hit from these rising costs. We HAVE to act immediately in terms of responding to human need.
We haven’t always informed our compassion with analysis and long term thinking.
[there’s more]
We have to start asking why we still have food banks in richest country in the world? We have 50k places where people can get emergency food. Why do we spend 60 billion/yr in food assistance programs (food stamps, wic, etc.) and yet hunger and food insecurity is the same as when we first started measuring hunger in 1996? It’s not much different than 10, 12, 20 yrs ago. Our programs don’t do more than manage poverty. It’s not enough just to make donations, or advocate for food stamps. It’s important to get to the root causes. Ask state, local, fed govt to take poverty seriously and end the real cause of hunger in this country.
Q: Aren’t there enough inexpensive healthy foods? No one forces poor people eat junk.
A: In the 8th ward of DC, if you’re looking for a cheeseburger, fried chicken or a sandwich, you’ll do pretty well. You won’t find fresh veggies, you won’t find affordable healthy food. The same percentage of people are poor as are obese. I call it the Urban Food Desert. 800 counties in the country are food deserts – more than 20 miles to a food store. This is the result of the abandonment of our communities by the American grocery industry. They walk away from the poorest parts of the city. Public transit also failed. It didn’t connect people to the supermarkets in the ‘burbs. People are forced to shop at small mom & pop stores, bodegas, etc., where the food choices are limited. You have to be really committed to eat well: go long distance, make really good decisions about how to use food dollars to buy the best food possible. If you’re coming out of our public schools, you won’t be prepared to buy and prepare good foods. Families that haven’t learned to prepare food well will not be able to pass that info down to their children. We’re not providing that info in our public programs. All the programs that provide nutrition info to low income families are underfunded.
Q: You’ve done excellent work on local level food policy, what can we do in our communities?
A: A lot of the action is in DC. The Farm Bill, Child Nutrition bill, etc. Better options at state and local level: All kinds of opportunities to have your voice heard, talk about how food is produced in your community. Work on how to make sure poor people in car dependent communities can get good food. Develop food policy councils – groups of local stake holders with the intent of coordinating their work in the local food system and influence policy at state and local level.
One example relating to apple cider production:
A farmer ended up with e-coli in cider, people got sick, the state over-reacted and imposed regulations that would shut down all small producers in state. A food council intervened, brought dept of agriculture together with educators to work with producers. They hired a person to be in charge of helping the small farmers to produce healthfully, saving the farms while still protecting public health.
——————-
Judith
Small and sustainable farmer
Q: It is said that we won’t be able to feed the world if everyone farms organically.
A: Rumors that organic farming will starve the world are bad science funded by industrial agriculture.
In human terms: say someone is eating nothing but terrible junk food. You say: we’ll make you healthy. Here, eat just apples. That doesn’t work. That’s similar to the studies at the land grant universities. They took chemically saturated land, stopped using the chemicals, then a grew cover crop or used only one kind of organic fertilizer, and looked at the results and declared it doesn’t work.
But that’s not organics. Organic agriculture is a systematic approach. Examine the soil, examine the microbes, use livestock to fertilize, grow cover crops, rotate crops, etc. If you do this you get a very different result.
Q: Study by USDA on organic ??? (nut) orchards
A: 5 yrs into the program, finding more nuts, bigger nuts, and MUCH higher anti-oxidants. They’re now cutting funding for the program. Calling it organic seems to be the issue.
Q: How do we support small farms?
A: Besides going out and financially supporting them by buying from them directly and shopping farmer’s markets, we need to deal with policy. HUGE Industrial ag (Tyson, Cargill) are creating the policy, and creating huge problems in our farm policy (social justice, animal welfare, pollution). These in turn create food safety and health problems. Then they deflect the problem: mountains of manure, we’ll regulate them to “protect wetlands.” Then they subject ALL farms to these regs – even the tiny ones that are designed to prevent these problems to begin with. This process drives small farms out of business.
We need consumers to tell policy makers to control big ag excesses, but realize that’s a broken system to begin with, make the policy that doesn’t ream small farms.
——————-
Michelle Simon
author: “Appetite for Profit”
Q: Average people: isn’t it a parent’s responsibility to make sure their child eats well? Why should the govt be involved in what people eat?
A: There’s a national debate about why people aren’t eating the right way. Why are there increasing health problem with not just adults, but with children. It has recently been recommended that we start giving cholesterol lowering drugs to children.
How did this happen? How can we fix it?
Major food cos are convincing American public policy makers not to do anything about advertising. “There’s nothing to look at here.”
The message is: “Parent’s you need to do a better job” But that’s nothing more than a deflection of criticism. PR is the name of the game.
Food industry must hook consumers while they’re young. Industry undermines parental authority with their advertising and promotions. As increasing tech has given advertisers more means to target kids, kids are being given new ways to go behind their parents’ backs.
So we have to HELP parents do their jobs. We don’t say “Parents that’s up to you” about child pornography, about cars speeding on residential roads, and so on, so why would we do that about nutrition?
Q: Why isn’t “good corp citizenship” causing companies to self-regulate?
A: If you look at latest snack food offerings, you’ll see “trans-fat free!” or “0 trans-fats!” because it helps their bottom line without changing anything about the healthfulness of the food.
Corporations are bound by law to make money for their shareholders [and maximize those earnings]. We can’t leave it to voluntary methods because there’s no moral element in corp decision making – the only goal is money.
Some results: SpongeBob is now on baby carrots, spinach, etc. It’s not the answer. Need to get food marketing out of the way entirely. Let them eat when they’re hungry, and give them real foods. Voluntary self-regulation won’t solve the problem. Cannot and will not work.
If they start doing the voluntary self-regulation, they do it until they stop doing it. That’s the way voluntary self-regulation works and has always worked.
Q: Why isn’t it enough for us to act as individual consumers?
A: It’s too small a portion of the population, and they’re stopping with themselves “I’m shopping at a farmer’s market, game over.” It’s not enough that the affluent can get good healthy food. Everyone has an obligation to ensure that everyone else has the SAME access to good, healthy food.
——————-
Margaret Cohn
Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture
Q: ’08 farm bill – how can we make sure it’s implemented.
A: We got some important gains – program to promote farmer’s markets. Got $1 mil/yr prev yrs. NOW $3/$5/$10/$10 over the next 4 yrs. Major increases in organic research and extension. To retain those gains: USDA is the implementer. The bill is the framework, USDA determines how it looks when implemented.
Conservation security program is an example – nationwide program USDA tried to prevent. So USDA schedules sign-ups at height of farming season, so farmers won’t have the time to sign-up.
A new administration will help. There are mechanisms for getting information about national policy advocacy. Action alerts. [join the mailing list]
Q: Ways to influence bills
A: The distinction betw auth (farm bill every 5 yrs) and appropriations (annual). Appropriations power lies at ag subcommittee of appropriations committee. So we focus our campaign on the members of that subcommittee. A lot of what happens is done without constituent ever seeing the priorities letter coming out of subcommittee via letter to ag chair.
Once we have our program, we have to ask the subcommittee what they will give us, they give us the smallest, easiest to implement piece. If we want something more, we need Nebraskans getting back to Nebraska’s legislator, etc. I want to hear back about how to do this more effectively.
Has anyone here written on state or local blogs? That’s where the politicians look.
First of all, thanks to everyone who helped me get here. It’s been a really great event. I’m utterly exhausted, but totally energized! I liveblogged this in the AM, but didn’t have time to cross post ’til now. Enjoy!…
(note: all is paraphrased. Please pardon typos, I can’t type that fast! It’s really, really long, much more after the fold.)
———————–
Adam Siegel
My name is A Siegel, and I’m a carboholic…
[intros Jerome]
———————–
Jerome a Paris:
[Several charts of oil prices over the last few years] Mentioned that it was up to $130 3 weeks ago. It’s down to 130 again, so the problem is over, bubble is popped! [laughter]
The price of oil has moved from non-noticeable to noticeable, and is now heading to painful. As you can see prices have gone up, but in actual terms, it’s not EXPENSIVE yet. If you’re just grumbling about it, it’s not high enough yet to cause demand destruction.
Markets do not know where the price is going. [more charts] They were saying for a long time, that no matter what, the price is going to be at $20. … and now the assumption is that the price is going to be wherever it is right now. So they’re staying close to the pack and not going anywhere.
We should have known for a long time that there is a problem brewing. Since 1984, every single year, we’ve been burning more oil than we’ve been finding. The graph shows we are not going in the right direction with consumption.
Why are prices so high now? Production has been catching up with production capacity. We no longer have spare capacity. As you know anything that reduces production has to go with hand in hand demand destruction, and when China and others increase consumption, we must decrease ours more to keep overall consumption even. Otherwise the price rises.
Oil producing regions are peaking and declining really fast. You have countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran in an economic boom, buying cars, burning more and more oil, the volume available for export has been declining for several years, even more than the production capacity.
Reducing consumption means demand destruction.
It’s not just oil, coal is not going to be the solution. The energy value of coal peaked in 1998. Gas is not going to be a solution either. We are going to move away from oil whether we want to or not. We still have a choice of solutions right now, if we start solving it now. Famine is the market solution if we let prices make the choice. It’s our choice now, it won’t be later.
———————–
Mark Sumner:
Photos of Thomas Jefferson, Donald Rumsfeld, Thomas Gold.
These people are believers.
Jefferson:
Expected to find the mastodon in Louisiana. People then did not believe it possible for an animal to become extinct.
Rumsfeld:
Will find weapons of mass destruction. Why? It made no sense, in light of inspection reports that said they aren’t there, and our own intelligence that said they weren’t there.
Thomas Gold:
[pulsars astronomer]
Claims oil coal, natural gas not really fossil fuels, but bubble up from the middle of the earth due to some mysterious process. Claims it can be found in places we would not look. On the face it’s a little ludicrous, but after research, really ludicrous.
BUT we’re behaving like there’s endless oil. US oil production is falling no matter the incentives, the price, and so on. Anyone pretending that any drilling anywhere in the US will fix our problems doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Anyone that thinks we can find, hiding mysteriously, some oil source that will reverse this trend is looking for mastodons. 98 countries produce petroleum, 68 are past peak, 60 are in permanent decline.
Clean air act: the industry’s estimated cost of the clean air act was off by 3 orders of magnitude (too high). It really cost far, far less. Electric bills went down despite claims that they would increase by 50%.
You cannot trust the industry when they tell you what these programs will cost to implement. They will be off by orders of magnitude. They will not factor in gains from all the new infrastructure we’ll build.
Important point: what Gore talked about yesterday doesn’t do anything about oil.
Transportation doesn’t run on electricity, it runs on oil. We need to entangle the systems. If we electrify transportation THEN electrical generation can solve the problem.
—————-
Adam Siegel:
Principles:
– Improve capacity for broader change
– 50 state impact, tangible, near term
– Public private, federal state local partnerships
– Not a comprehensive solution, but part of the solution
– Establish freshman class leadership.
Concepts:
– Energy smart communities
– Energysmart rail (reduce 10% in a decade)
– Energy smart mail
– Green the schools
energy smart education (make a profit while improving performance)
– Plugin hybrid electric school buses. (one of these sitting outside today)
Plugin Hybrid buses
– 6 – 10 mpg
reduce diesel pollution
reduce health risk
Emergency services – mobile backup power generatior
– Cost to buy is higher, but lower cost to own.
$60 million/yr, 5 yr, changes equation.
There are a lot of solver BBs that will help slay the dragon.
Make the right choice the preferred and easy choice.
Join the effort
– ideas?
– comments?
– Suggestions?
– Resources?
skills
time
enthusiasm
Hope to work with a bunch of freshmen to develop a freshman package for energy.
Engage with us.
UPDATE [The other half of the presentation]:
———————–
Debbie Cook:
Crossroads between bliss and dead end. I think there’s definitely some middle ground.
In Ireland, James Schlesinger said: “Conceptually the battle is over, the peakists have won. … Americans have to be hit over the head with a 2 x 4.”
We can drill another 1.5 million wells in TX. We can blow off every top of every mountain in the country. We can starve two billion people who can’t afford food [photo of corn ethanol]. We can dig and drill more. We can consume all the water and natural gas to unconventional oil, just so we can hang on to our “quality of life.” [collage of photos of stuff that adds no real value to our lives.]
The expected reserves from new discovery (big jack) are insufficient.
We’re pumping 8 times as much oil now than we were when I was born, but are we eight times happier? Are we happier than my grandmother? They had roads, coffee houses, transportation (rail), police on bicycles, santa clause, baseball, and lovers. Our grandparents missed out on so much stuff! [photo of family with more plastic junk in their yard than you can imagine.]
We’re still in search of the Emerald city. But it was there all along. We go to Europe to see all these quaint villages, but we can’t seem to build it in America. We’re going to need more community gardens. The French have small farms interspersed with small villages. You don’t have to do everything large.
[missed most of this: Ithaca is going to have a “podcar city” meeting for transit planning. Very interesting.]
Communities are always in transition. What will we be in 50 years?
– Energy smart america campaign
– Develop a process for creating policy
– Conservation in a hurry
– Remove barriers to renewables
– localize food , services, jobs
– Eliminate biofuels subsidies
– Zero energy buildings
– Electrify transport
———————–
Mark Begich, Anchorage mayor:
In Alaska, I have seen forests in my community where we never worried about spruce bark beetles, and now they’re drying out due to the beetles and there are fires like I’ve never seen.
In one storm, 75 feet of a village’s land disappeared. 75 feet DEEP (back from the shore). Now roads are like driving on a roller coaster in the interior because the permafrost is melting.
Rarely will you see me talk about emissions. Most people are concerned about what it’s going to cost. We try to present in terms of economic benefit down the road. We have implemented a $1/ton extra refuse site charge. We hired a renewable resource coordinator with the money.
Now we’re working on 20 – 30 projects with university interns. We put the resources in to make these programs successful. If you short ’em out in terms of dollars, you won’t succeed. What people want to see are practical real events. We changed all the Christmas lights to LED lights in Anchorage. When preparing to set it all up, the electrical guys said “We won’t have enough power to run all those lights.” They didn’t understand how much less power they use. Once we tapped ’em in, we saved 80% on our electrical and had more lights. So people saw this and went to the store and wanted some of those lights for themselves. They went to the store, but there was only one little shelf with some lights. This year, people went to the store and there were all sorts of LED lights.
Small business people didn’t know what to do with their waste. Their business focus doesn’t allow them the time to figure out how to deal with it. An intern in this program decided to change the cardboard receptacles to have a flatter opening, which causes people to flatten their boxes, and now business are saving tons of money because the cardboard is being put in there but trash isn’t and thus it isn’t being contaminated. As a result, the cardboard can all be recycled, saving tons of waste (and the associated disposal fees) from the landfill.
In Sitka, there are few roads, with a 35 mph max. I rode in a Zen there, but the owner had to modify it to drive 25 mph, because the old laws don’t understand the new technology [contextual comment by Liane: since it’s an electric car, it’s classified like those other electric vehicles we see more commonly: golf carts, and thus regulations require the max speed be reduced]. [typical speed limit on the island is 35 mph, min is 25, in rare places max is 45.]
In Anchorage, we’re now retrofitting all the city lights. We have 18 hours of night in winter. Lighting costs us millions and millions of dollars. There are 16,000 lights. When we replace them, we will save $1.6 million a year, cost only $5 million to install.
There’s a TON of low hanging fruit in government buildings.
Create $200 billion bond bank, our policy is retrofit every single government building in the country (small communities and large), do it with the savings on energy. Take the difference to seed new ideas and fund R & D. Can do it without ONE new tax dollar. Big ideas create new ideas.
———————–
Adam Siegel:
Doing the public buildings will help people learn about it. If you put a green roof on a school, parents and inspectors will learn about it.
———————–
Congressman Jeff Merkley
We’re talking about energy smart schools, energy smart rail, and energy smart mail. We need an Energy Smart Congress and Energy Smart Senate!
Do you remember in the movie “The Graduate” the famous line about the future? “The future is…” [audience reply “plastics!”].
The future today is Energy.
We see so many changes in our environment due to one degree temperature change, if we don’t act now as congress, by the time a small child is my age, the temp will go up 5 – 9 degrees. Let’s take on those issues together.
We redrafted a bill that valued property rights AND land use. I’d like to say we had the best energy smart legislation and legislature. We need to do the same with a new energy smart US congress and senate. If you see a plug-in school bus, you realize you can plug in everything. We need completely plug-in car system in America. We need a strategy to take on the efficiency of our existing and new buildings.
Conservation is often the way to take on the alternative energy investment and alternative fuels. If we’re out front, then what’s good for the planet will be good for the economy. Some ideas will be dead ends. Some will work out very well.
We need to think in terms of a distributed grid. We need to make every house a contributor. We need that leadership with the next president and the next senate. A cap & trade without loopholes can create a transition. What we did for sulfur dioxide, we need to do with global arming gases. We in this room can be a huge factor in making it happen. What you do on blogs is telling people what the mainstream media doesn’t get to. Energy’s at the heart of our national security, foreign policy, economic policy.
UPDATE:
After typing all this, I got to prove that when appropriately sleep deprived, I can give our President a run for his money in a race for “blithering idiot.” Enjoy my 1 minute, 57 seconds of rambling captured for posterity:
Okay… so this is quickie, but it’s good. First, Paul Hodes (yay! We worked on his campaign) is joining the chorus of members of congress from neighboring states who are weighing in on Vermont Yankee:
Hodes wants a description of how the NRC will notify New Hampshire federal and state officials of future incidents, documents on the latest incident and information on what is being done to ensure the water cooling system is safe.
Might I humbly suggest that Representative Hodes read Green Mountain Daily? We seem to be breaking a lot of this news before the print media.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has shot down plans by Entergy Nuclear to tap into Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning savings account to pay for the handling of spent fuel.
The federal regulators also criticized the company’s projected rate of return on the $440 million fund.
The NRC said that if Entergy was allowed to use the fund for spent fuel management, there would not be enough money to fully dismantle and decontaminate the plant.
Entergy had submitted the plan to the NRC this winter, and the NRC ordered the company to submit a new plan within 90 days. The plan must be submitted five years before any nuclear reactor might shut down. Vermont Yankee’s 40-year license expires in 2012.
This is great news. I blogged about this January. Entergy’s been playing their own shell game, trying to use funds reserved for decommissioning to do other work, and the NRC actually said no.
It’s good to see that sometimes they get it right.
There's been differences of opinion, particularly between Steve and Doug, on the effectiveness of financial incentives for companies considering a relocation to Vermont. Vermont was in competition with Michigan, a state offering a larger tax incentive package.
Utility Risk Management will be relocating to Vermont, not only in consideration of $140,000 in incentives, but because of the strong work ethic and talented work force. What was unsaid in the Free Press article is that Vermont is the national leader in providing risk management services in respect to captive insurance. Utility Risk Management will enjoyr a considerable amount of professional expertise and a work force segment with plenty of experience and national connections in this field.
The company will be growing from a staff of 4 to about 20. Two of the four declined to relocate, so the projected number of new jobs will be even more significant. Risk management companies pay well and are an example of “clean” business.
Are tax incentives effective in order to recruit new business? In my opinion, the answer isn't “Yay” or “Nay.” Each business has its own needs and deserves an individual assesment of what kind of incentive package it can be offered.
My view is that Vermont needs to focus on the recruitment of entrepreneurs and small businesses that offer the most significant opportunity for growth. We need to use any and all recruitment tools in an effective, efficient, and cost-conscious manner in order to attract the best and brightest business people and professionals.
Recruiting new businesses should be viewed in the same way investors build their investment portfolio. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Diversify. Consider overall risk from the “portfolio” of new business “picks” and potential picks. Balance the need for growth against the current and projected future of the economy.
The “Good” vs. “Bad” conversation doesn't get us too far when it comes to policy, including economic development policy.
Bush Sewage Plant Initiative Makes The Ballot In San Francisco
A voter initiative in San Francisco to rename a sewage plant in honor of George W. Bush has received a sufficient number of signatures, and will appear on the November ballot. The idea was hatched by a group calling itself the “Presidential Memorial Commission,” which by their own admission was formed over drinks at a bar.