Zane Safrit

WH announces moratorium on new solar power plants

No. Seriously. This isn't an Onion kind of story.

The White House, or in particular the Bureau of Land Management, announced last week they were imposing a 2-year moratorium on the building of new solar power plants on lands held by the Bureau of Land Management. US Halts Solar Energy Projects Over Environment Fears.

During this 2-year period, no new applications will be accepted though current ones will be fast-tracked for approval.

Obviously the footprint from solar development is significant," said Celia Boddington, a BLM spokeswoman.

Significant means...what? Bigger than a breadbasket? Bigger than the oil industry wants it? Growing faster than the oil and nuclear industry wants it?

Footprint. Are you talkin' Big Foot footprint or carbon footprint? Does it matter? When we see nonsense rationale's it's obvious it doesn't.

"(The solar plants) cover thousands of acres potentially, and we need to determine what the environmental consequences are of that, look at what it means when you spray the land with herbicides or remove vegetation."

Do you see a lot of solar power plant applications for jungle locations....? Exactly. They're located in desert regions where there is no vegetation that needs to be removed. Desert, lack of vegetation, solar access. They go together.

So let's see if I'm clear on this.

* Solar power has been dismissed, ignored and unsupported on a bi-partisan manner for over 30 years. And now that there are applications on hand for solar power facilities to provide power to 20 million homes...it's time to put a moratorium on it.

* Tax credits for solar power resources are a pittance to those granted nuclear, oil, and coal-fired plants.

* The recent moratorium on new nuclear power plants has been removed.

* The current moratorium on off-shore drilling will be removed if the oil industry, the Governor of Florida and the current administration have their way.

* We know the negative impact of both nuclear and oil-well drilling/processing plants have on native vegetation and the acreages required. The land is unrecoverable, at least with today's technology.

* Coal-fired plant applications are on the rise even though coal-fired power plants are a key source of acid rain, the deforestation of the Great Smoky Mtn National Park, global warm, rising carbon dioxide...devastation to communities throughout West Virginia, acid and other chemicals leeching into ground water.... But there are no moratoriums on new coal-fired power plant applications.

So...in summary, what we've learned is:

1)  That if there's no evidence of environmental damage from a new source of clean, renewable energy...after 30 years of use...we need to place a moratorium on its further expansion...until we find something, real or imagined, that's wrong with it.

2) Current energy resources that have a proven track-record for more than 30 years of environmental damage, and now devastating impact on our economy...have a green-light for expansion.

Got it?

Story of the Day: A non-sustainable economy

Milk, coffee, fresh fruit and bread were among the items that got more expensive by an average of 0.9 percent in April, the largest one-month increase since January 1990. Gasoline prices were up nearly 21 percent compared to a year ago.

Workers' wages, meanwhile, dropped for the seventh consecutive month. - In weak economy, foregoing $4 lattes.

These are the indicators of a non-sustainable economy. Wages down; prices up. At some point, there's no demand for consumer goods driving higher prices and our consumer-based economy stalls, then falls into tailspin. 

We're already seeing signs of this stalling as 'core' prices, everything consumable but food and fuel, rose only .2% in May.

Oddly, some people celebrated; some economists celebrated, too. They celebrated as if it's a victory of some sorts.

Prices aren't rising because there's no demand. The demand is eaten in their household budgets for food and fuel. Those are the non-core items. We should call them the 'cannibal' items. They're eating our economy.

Notes from Interview with Andy Brudtkuhl

Here's some notes from Andy Brudtkuhl's conversation with me this morning on BlogTalk Radio. You can listen to our conversation at www.blogtalkradio.com/zane-safrit. 

Andy created IowaFlood.com to share with the masses the stories with the still ongoing Iowa floods.

Twitter. Twitter was the most important social media technology for Andy’s platform, IowaFlood.com.

Twitter was the meeting place for members in the Des Moines Iowa area to share their stories on the Iowa floods. It was these conversations that drove Andy to create IowaFlood.com.

His first goal was to centralize the coverage by all the traditional, mainstream media. And then share it with his community members on Twitter.

Then he saw a broader, more personal, real-time coverage with his members on Twitter and their use of Flickr and YouTube and blog posts.

He expanded his vision to instead share THEIR stories with the masses, along with the coverage from traditional, mainstream media.

2 hours. That’s how much time he needed to launch the site from idea inception to buying domains to going live.

Kudos to Andy for not waiting for perfection instead choosing to get something up that worked and be open to ideas and suggestions for the site from the community members.

Resource Used:

Domain names: GoDaddy.com

Blogging Platform: WordPress.

Hosting: Mosso.com ( Shouts to them for their proactive customer service call to help optimize his site.)

Social Media Firehose: Yahoo Pipes. This pulls in to one feed the  content from various feeds with various social media resources based on key words. (Upper right corner on his site. Embed code is there to share the feed on your blog or website.)

Photo-sharing. Flickr. It’s easy to find photos about the floods in Iowa with keyword tags.

Content-sharing: wufoo.com. It’s a template you can add to your site to allow users to submit content directly to you. (Right, Andy?)

Video-sharing: YouTube. (duh)

Site Power: Community Members. Andy says: They power the site.

3 Indispensable Resources:

* Twitter

* WordPress

* Community Members.

Shouts:  Des Moines Register for their help with content and feeds.  We both agreed it’s nice to see them embrace the social media community and resources. Their Twitter Id is: dmregister.

Template for future events.  Andy’s created a template for future platforms devoted to events: conventions, concerts, art fairs, emergencies, disasters.

Andy’s Contact:

* Business: 48 Web Consulting
* Blog: Get a New Browser

Prediction: Michigan football roars bak in 2009 with some Florida-like speed and creativity.  Looking forward to it.

Andy’s Takeaway: Get on Twitter and Embrace Your Community.

Shouts to Andy: Without getting all sappy, a lot of shouts go to Andy, and his community, for building the site. It shows a lot of technical savvy. And it shows a lot of heart for his community. Kudos, Andy.

"Core" inflation Rises .2% for May

Can someone help me out?

Why do some economists...

prefer to measure price increases in products other than energy and food. While this gauge, called the “core” index, does not measure the full effect of inflation on Americans, it does offer a guide to how long inflation might linger. For May, core producer prices rose at a tepid pace, 0.2 percent, in line with economists’ expectations. Producer Prices Rose 1.4%...

Maybe it's because these 'core' prices rose in line with their expectations?

You see, 'core' inflation figures don't include figures for the prices of ...food and fuel. That's fuel to get to work and fuel to work.

And it's hard to see how prices for these two items aren't categorized as 'core' for inflationary considerations.  Hard to work on an empty belly. Hard to get to work with an empty gas tank.

Is there something more 'core' to our economy than food and fuel?

Harder still to buy consumer goods when an increasing percent of your stagnant or declining real income must go towards...food and fuel. And if no one's buying goods made from 'core producer' resources...there's no demand driving prices upward. ( I mean, Hello!?! I'm an art major and I can figure this out. )

So when economists who prefer to measure 'core producer prices' celebrate the accuracy of their predictions and the strength of our economy because 'core' prices haven't risen....while conveniently ignoring the lack of demand for these products...because fewer people have interest (or need) in them as there's no room for such sentiment in their household budget...it undermines the 'core' of their value to society (and we all know it's more philosophy, politics or dogma, really).

For the record, the Producer Price Index (which does include prices for gas and food)  rose 1.4% in May. That's an annual rate of...16.8%. Prices for consumer goods rose 1.8%...That's an annual rate of 21.6%.

The article in the NY Times predicts consumers may see higher prices soon from the impact of rising prices in the Producer Price Index. Since prices in May for consumer goods rose faster than prices for wholesale goods, me thinks retailers expect prices for wholesale goods to continue to rise in the coming months. And they've already priced their goods accordingly...for those who can still afford them.

Changes...by 2050

From Ken Sethney's post, Are You Going Global?:

I recently attended a conference with my former colleagues at Vistage International where keynote speaker Michael Milken made a shocking prediction. He said that by 2050, the US economy would rank 29th. China would be 1st.

Ok. What was your reaction when you read it?

Mine was mixed.

* Skepticism. A lot of changes have to occur for our economy to drop from #1 to #29. And they have to happen fast. That's only 42 years from now. I'll be a ripe ol' 95.

* Plausible. I can see China's economy being number one at some point. I can also see it imploding from all the changes forced on it to reach that goal.

* Scary. It could happen. Given our declining infrastructure, from neglect and legacy investments, and our declining educational systems, as well as our national debt which will require a growing percentage of federal budgets to service, and how that means higher interest rates to attract foreign capital to buy our debt, the growing gap in incomes in the US, the decline in real income growth except for the top 1% of earners, our lagging farther and farther behind with broadband penetration per capita, our declining health care system, our aging population, our declining number of engineers,  all that means...yeah, I could see it happen.

What do you think?

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Tax Credits for SUVs. None for Hybrids?

Kiplinger's Business Resource Center celebrated the 2008 tax credits for SUVs: SUVs for Business are Big Tax Savers This Year.

That's because Congress recently sweetened an already hefty first-year tax break for folks who buy these vehicles and use them for business. That new sweetener is "bonus" depreciation, which lets businesses write off 50% of the cost of an asset placed in service this year, on top of the $25,000 maximum on first-year write-offs.

For the new SUV that costs $50,000...the business user can write-off up to $40,000...this YEAR!

And for the hybrid car models, we find tax credits of...zero. According to the IRS, the tax credits for 2008 hybrid models is...ZERO.

No credit is allowed for purchase of these vehicles after Sept. 30, 2007.

The credit amounts reflect a decrease in the credit beginning on Oct. 1, 2006, as a result of the manufacturer’s having sold 60,000 qualified hybrid motor vehicles

So. We have tax credits for cars that:

1.  increase our demand for oil/gas,

2. raise our prices for oil and gas,

3. continue our dependency on overseas sources of oil,

4. discourage innovation in The Big Three auto makers,

5. lead to more layoffs as they offer cars no one wants...

And we have  no tax credits for car models that do the opposite.

Now I understand.

The Disposable Economy: Local And Global

Last weekend, glorious that it was, I unloaded all of our household...stuff. I dragged it out of the basement, out of the attic, out of our backyard, right up to the curb. And Monday, the city came and hauled it away. Somewhere, anywhere. I didn't care where. It was gone and out of our house. I'm happy.

The whole city gets happy like this once a year. Drive around town and you'll see pile after pile, of household junk on the curb, waiting for the city trucks to rumble up, pick it up and haul away. Somewhere, anywhere. We don't care where. It's gone. We're happy.

But The Disposable Economy Has to Change. Why?

It’s a terrific environment for people who want and/or like new things but terrible for the environment. Sooner rather than later, consumers need to start realizing that there is a cost associated with buying cheap products with a short shelf life. Think about what all the consumer electronics you’ve purchased over the past five years would look like if you threw them into a pile on your front lawn.

As leading members of this global Disposable Economy, we, in effect, have a nationwide trash pickup day, every day, every week, every year.

Where's it all go? Somewhere, anywhere. We don't care where. It's gone and out of our houses. We're happy.

Link from Dave Winer's Twitter Post

Another First for this Boom

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

[T]he Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.

Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling. - For Many a Boom that Wasn't. NY Times.

This is the first time where a period of economic expansion resulted in a decline in income for the middle-class. Not sure how you drive a consumer-based economy with a decline in real income for that portion of your buying class that does the bulk of the buying. Just not sure how that works. Anyone?

Waiting to exhale

Zillow's website reports:

...one out of every two homeowners who purchased during the market peak in 2006 is now underwater on their mortgage. - Zillow Quarterly Reports

Las Vegas home values fell 25 percent year-over-year and nine out of 10 (89.9%) homeowners who purchased in 2006, when the median down payment was 2 percent, now owe more than their home is worth. - Zillow MediaRoom

Link: BusinessWeek

Note: Detroit was one of the hardest hit areas. It's real estate prices dropped to 1998 levels.

So that's why GM bought it's own building?

Detroit's drop in real estate value comes from a different reason. It's not from the impact of speculative sub-prime lending in the residential markets. It's from the impact of the Big Three's decision-making or lack thereof. High-unemployment is the result. No jobs. No jobs means no money to buy houses. People are leaving. And with their declining market-share, that comes from selling muscle-cars with V-8's at a time of peak gas prices, and the greater unemployment numbers in the area that result...real estate's not rebounding for a long time in Detroit.

Oil: 3 Points

1. It's estimated that by 2030, the  China and India will import as much oil as the United States and Japan do today.

2. Honda's car fleet averages 35 miles per gallon. Congress mandated American car makers reach that goal in...2020, 12 years from now.

3. Western oil corporations control less than 10 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves. - The Big Thirst by Jad Mouawad

There's a squeeze-play coming soon to a home, a community, a lifestyle, near you, near me, near us all.