The first step is to abandon GDP, for it does more harm than good. The more difficult task is to agree on a basic set of alternative global indicators. Sustainability must be the guiding principle. Once better common metrics are established, the world market could actually begin to function as a valuable enforcement mechanism.
via Rethinking GDP: Why We Must Broaden Our Measures of Economic Success | The Nation.
If you want to transform the economy, you have to cut Wall Street down to its proper size. One way to do that is to tax the short-term speculative activities that dominate and distort financial markets.
For ordinary investors, the costs would be negligible, like a tiny insurance fee to protect against crashes caused by speculation. But for the highfliers who are most responsible for the financial crisis, the tax could raise the cost of highly leveraged derivatives trading and stock-flipping enough to discourage the most dangerous behavior.
via Cut Wall Street Down to Size With a Financial Speculation Tax | The Nation.
With roughly 93,500 direct and indirect jobs, the American solar industry now employs about 20,000 more workers than the U.S. steel production sector. The American steel industry has historically been a symbol of the country’s industrial might and economic prosperity. But today, the solar industry has the potential to overtake that image as we build a new, clean-energy economy.
via Green jobs are real: U.S. solar employs more people than steel | Grist.
With solar, bigger isn’t necessarily better. Solar can scale economically to meet local requirements.
Blaeloch thinks that large-scale projects will not help meet climate change goals faster. She said that the large-scale projects that have been proposed will face legal challenges going far into the future and believes that in the end it’s the big projects that will take longer to develop than proven, distributed PV.
Lastly, distributed PV also won’t need the giant transmission build-out that will be required to move power from many of the remote CSP project locations – another cost savings.
via Large-scale Solar: How Big Is Too Big? | Renewable Energy News Article.
When you put a local currency on the web, it’s no longer local and it’s called peer-to-peer currency:
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency, meaning it is not issued by a central authority, like the dollar or yen. The money supply grows as the network grows and will max out at about 21 million bitcoins. But right now, you can purchase them online on the Mt. Gox currency exchange or an over-the counter market. They do not exist in physical form—only electronically, owned and traded by members of a special, anonymous peer-to-peer network. No third-party intermediary, such as a payment processor or a bank, needs to keep tabs on or process the electronic transactions.
Here’s an interesting video discussion of Bitcoin, though, be forewarned, the discussion is oriented toward illegal drugs.
Looks like Chicago’s got a good start on a transition plan:
Back in 2008, the city formed the Chicago Climate Action Plan to figure out how to mitigate the inevitable. The plan includes a bundle of useful information, such as how the city’s atmosphere is changing and ways people can get involved.
Planners are also figuring subtle ways to blend ecological improvements into the city’s facade. For example, permeable pavement and rainwater catchments will easily advance existing urban structures. The city also has the most green-roofs built or being planned for. Globally, it is the only city to have four buildings awarded LEED platinum status.
Yet if any taxonomic dynasty is entitled to the originalist mantle, to the designation of genuine emblematic earthling animal, and also to brand the rest of us the alien arrivistes, it is the jellyfish. A diverse group of thousands of species of gooey, saclike invertebrates found throughout the world, the jellyfish are preposterously ancient, dating back 600 million to 700 million years or longer. That’s roughly twice as old as the earliest bony fish and insects, three times the age of the first dinosaurs.
“Jellyfish are the most ancient multiorgan animal on earth,” said David J. Albert, a jellyfish expert at the Roscoe Bay Marine Biological Laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia.
And maybe their long tenure on earth has taught them something. So, what can WE learn from them?
via Much More to Jellyfish Than Plasma and Poison – NYTimes.com.
Instead of just hoping that Republicans continue to play to their Tea Party base and implode in a general election, Democrats should be taking this moment to lead and to educate, not just on the practical virtues of Medicare for all but on the principle of social solidarity behind it.
Wilmers, it turns out, is that rarest of birds: a banker willing to tell harsh truths about banking. That, for instance, much of the money the big banks earn comes from trading profits “rather than the prudent extension of credit that furthers commerce.” That derivatives had helped bring about the crisis and needed to be regulated. That bank executives were wildly overpaid. That the biggest banks — the Too Big to Fail Banks — were operating, as he put it, an “unsafe business model.”
via The Good Banker – NYTimes.com.
The top marginal income tax rate during World War II was over 68 percent. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, whom few would call a radical, it rose to 91 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s the highest marginal rate was around 70 percent. Even after exploiting all possible deductions and credits, the typical high-income taxpayer paid a marginal federal tax of over 50 percent. But contrary to what conservative commentators had predicted, the high tax rates did not reduce economic growth. To the contrary, they enabled the nation to expand middle-class prosperity and fuel growth.
Truth and Traditions 