Monday February 8, 2010
San Francisco has been out front on a lot of green issues--from banning plastic bags to transforming pet feces into energy--and now the City by the Bay is leading the way in helping property owners go green, by allowing them to add the cost of various eco-upgrades to their property taxes and pay them off over a couple of decades.
Today, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to establish GreenFinanceSF, a new program designed to help tens of thousands of San Francisco homes and businesses become more water- and energy-efficient, use more renewable energy, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions while creating local green jobs.
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Friday February 5, 2010
Do you ever watch television pundits discussing important public policy issues and wish you could cut through the sound bites and talk back, or maybe just hear from real people instead of a bunch of talking heads? Now you can.
Two-Way Street--a new commercial-free program distributed by American Public Television and shown on various PBS stations across the United States--invites viewers to debate critical issues with a panel of top-notch experts that may range from Nobel Prize-winning economists to best-selling authors.
Each episode of Two-Way Street will focus a full hour of audience/expert debate on a single topic such as drug use and its decriminalization, the effect of corporate farming on public health, the costs of U.S. military presence abroad or the future of journalism in the Internet age. Two-Way Street is taped before a live studio audience whose members engage the expert panelists in an interactive debate about the issue chosen for each episode. Other viewers can join in by using webcams to submit questions and comments over the Internet.
"We wanted to create a show where the audience is part of the debate, posing questions and comments on an equal footing with the pundits," said Bob Bowdon, host and executive producer of Two-Way Street. "We're giving a voice to the viewers that is usually unheard."
Bowdon is a good choice to host the new program. He is a veteran television producer, reporter and commentator and also runs Bowdon Media, an Internet marketing firm in New Jersey. Bowdon's former on-camera work includes six years as a news anchor and reporter for Bloomberg Television's World Financial Report and a recurring role as reporter Brian Scott in satirical news videos for The Onion. He also hosted Café Digital, a half-hour nationally syndicated program on technology and culture.
Two-Way Street debuts tomorrow [Saturday, February 6, 2010] with two four-hour marathons on station WETA in Washington, DC. Over the next week, PBS stations in California, Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Kentucky will start airing the program. Check your local listings or contact your local PBS station for possible show times in your area.
Saturday January 30, 2010
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden recently took a break from planning terrorist attacks and encouraging suicide bombers to blast the United States and other developed nations for "the global warming crisis" and to call for a worldwide boycott of American products and the U.S. dollar.
""Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury--the phenomenon is an actual fact," said bin Laden, according to a report on the English-language Web site run by Al Jazeera, which released the full audiotape on Friday [January 29, 2010]. "All of the industrialized countries . . . bear responsibility for the global warming crisis."
Obama singled out the United States for failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty that was established in 1997 and later ratified by 187 other nations.
After calling on the global economy to boycott American goods and abandon American currency, bin Laden summed up by saying: "I am certain that such actions will have grave repercussions and huge impact."
Earlier in the week, bin Laden had another message for the world. In that previous audiotape, bin Laden praised the attempt to crash an airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day, and he promised more terrorist attacks against the United States unless U.S. President Barack Obama takes steps to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Neither Al Jazeera nor U.S. intelligence services could confirm whether the voice on the tape was really Osama bin Laden, so there's some chance that the message may be a hoax. If not, then the terrorist leader complaining about U.S. handling of environmental issues is a little like Prohibition kingpin Al Capone chastising the FBI for leaving the lights on.
It doesn't really matter whether the message is justified in some sense, in this case "shooting the messenger" seems like the right idea. Sorry, Osama. If you plan, finance and carry out the murders of hundreds of innocent Americans--and repeatedly announce your intention to murder more--then you lose the right to offer us constructive criticism. That's just the way it goes.
Friday January 29, 2010
U.S. President Barack Obama today ordered the federal government to conserve energy and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2020, a "lead by example" move that could save $8 billion to $11 billion over the next 10 years and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 88 million metric tons--equivalent to taking 17 million cars off the road for one year.
The executive order, which covers 35 government agencies, came just two days after Obama urged Congress to pass clean energy and climate legislation during his first State of the Union address, and less than two months after he brokered an agreement in Copenhagen that could lay the groundwork for an international treaty to address climate change.
The affected federal agencies have until June to submit their plans to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), showing how they will meet Obama's new emissions target. OMB will score each agency on its annual performance and progress toward meeting the goal, and will release that information to the public so we can all play along.
The federal government is the nation's largest single energy consumer--the government operates about 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles nationwide and spent more than $24.5 billion on electricity and fuel in 2008. That may seem like a big dollar figure, and it is, but it represents only 1.5 percent of total annual energy spending in the United States.
Obama stopped short of requiring federal contractors and suppliers to trim their emissions as a condition of doing business with the government, and he didn't apply any emissions reduction goals or energy conservation conditions on how federal employees commute.
A few oil industry representatives and conservative pundits took potshots at Obama for promoting clean energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions while continuing to ride in cars and planes that run on fossil fuels, but suggesting that doing nothing is somehow preferable to honest efforts that fall short of perfection is tiresome as well as ridiculous.
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