Posted by paul2ed on June 30th, 2009
Posted by paul2ed on June 29th, 2009
Posted by paul2ed on June 27th, 2009
By Daniel Gross Posted Saturday, June 27, 2009, at 7:07 AM ET
It only seems as though every company in America is downsizing. “We’re hiring three or four people every week,” says Prem Nath, senior vice president at Ascent Solar, in Thornton, Colo. Spun out of a technology incubator in 2005, the company is ramping up production of thin-film energy-producing cells printed on malleable plastic, which it sells in credit-card-size patches (to power a BlackBerry) and in 15-foot strips (for roofing material). As he unfurls a coil of the ultra-lightweight material, Nath notes that National Renewable Energy Laboratory, about 20 minutes away, validated that the material converts about 10 percent of the sun’s power into electricity. Ascent is installing production lines in a huge space behind the main office.
Talk from Washington suggests that investments in renewable energy, infrastructure, and public transit may be a partial solution to our economic woes. For the last several years, the Denver region has been staging a trial run of this strategy, one that shows both its promise—and perhaps its limits.
The Mile High City occupies the high ground when it comes to clean energy—and clean living. Denver’s sheer outdoorsiness can be by turns charming and infuriating. (The question “What do you do?” is likely to be answered with an outdoor activity, not a profession.) When I showed up at Gov. Bill Ritter’s office, an aide was carting a bicycle rack out of the inner sanctum. And while the state’s jewel of a capital may be testimony to its heritage of extraction—walls of Colorado-mined rose onyx, a dome covered in gold, and Works Progress Administration-era frescoes paying tribute to coal mining—a new Colorado is dawning. In November 2004, Denver-area citizens voted to boost sales taxes to expand the region’s light-rail system, and the state’s voters approved a ballot initiative mandating that utilities draw a chunk of electricity from renewable sources. The quasi-independent republic of Boulder is a capital of composting, recycling, hybrid-driving, and general eco-fabulousness.
Read more here.
Posted by paul2ed on June 25th, 2009
Posted by paul2ed on June 25th, 2009
Posted by paul2ed on June 24th, 2009
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 11, 2009
Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.
But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.
There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.
And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.
