Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, former US government technology advisor and president of Ethical Markets Media said, “this new total is remarkable in spite of economic uncertainty. It indicates that the global transition away from the 300-year fossil-fueled Industrial Era is accelerating toward the cleaner, greener, information-rich economies of the 21st century.”

The task ahead is to renovate tens of millions of existing buildings. Not replacing them as we did in the last century. Replacing outdated lighting and HVAC systems, training workers, and reaping the savings. Importing less oil. Using the money saved to spend on things more enjoyable.

Here is a good read on how and why we must rectify the situation or risk further withering of the America Dream. Please sign the petition(s).

More reading on another site.

Its spreading: heres another

Is this our flag?

By the way, most of those politicians oughta forget it and get a job!

I am driven to help building owners. Designing and analyzing HVAC, lighting and plug-in energy for over 30 years! If you need building energy auditing, expert energy consulting, and commissioning of existing or new commercial and industrial facilities, please do not hesitate to call on my associates and I. Visit CPM Scheduling for more information.

The truth : According to Wikipedia’s Cap and trade definition, it is where

…an aggregate cap on all sources is established and these sources are then allowed to trade amongst themselves to determine which sources actually emit the total pollution load.

What about this constitutes a tax? Why do so many neighbors of mine think it’s a tax? Answer: TMFN — Too much Fox News. Lying Fox News.

This is a free market “mechanism”. You can make money trading these credits, creating new ones and selling them on the market to an Emitter/seller, i.e. A party who operates/ owns a hydroelectric generating installation could sell credits to a party which operates/owns a fossil fuel generator. This does not make me think of a “tax”. The profits go to the swiftest and most useful, and not government bureaucracy.

Further misinformation from opponents: Cap and trade will drag the economy down and eliminate millions of jobs.

Yes, it _may_ actually hurt the job market, in a small way, for a few years. But it will stimulate investment in new technology. It will cause some pain in the business-as-usual, fossil-fuel dependent sectors. Yes, that also means some oil and gas companies will die. Too bad. But for the greater good.

Here is what the Annenberg Public Policy Center said:

According to projections by the Energy Information Administration and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the net effect of the House cap-and-trade bill will likely be to slow future job growth. Using 11 different possible future scenarios, EIA projects that future job growth might be constrained by something between 388,000 (under the most optimistic assumptions) and 2.3 million (assuming everything goes badly) 20 years from now. CBO also says employment would likely be lower than it would without the legislation – but only “a little.”

(The worse case scenario (unemployment 0.8% higher in 2030 than the “left-alone” scenario) assumes that we are completely unable to execute any carbon trades with the larger international partners, like China and India). But the American economy will be more competitive (and larger) if we do something rather than nothing. Doing nothing risks that might cost us a lot more than the risk of 0.8% higher unemployment.

Wall Street Journal reports on pros and cons of Carbon trading

FYI
Here is a map of Current Cap and trade jurisdictions

Whats interesting to me is that the three states with the
highest carbon emissions, Texas, Indiana and Pennsylvania, are not joiners. Tsk, tsk!

Hartmann tells a story of how the struggle between corporate power and individual rights has gone on for centuries, and has never been satisfactorily resolved. Much legal history in this book: corporations (starting with a milestone case in 1886 where the Southern Pacific Railroad claimed and (strangely), sued Santa Clara, California, arguing that they were being unfairly taxed, that corporations are protected by the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of all persons to equal protection, without respect to color or creed. (it was passed after the civil war ended, to keep former black slaves from being treated as property) After that, corporations had all rights of a natural person (i.e. free speech, etc.)

Corporations can’t be jailed and they are immortal. If a corporation hurts or kills someone, they can’t be held accountable by jail or a death penalty. They are only answerable to their shareholders, so profit takes precedence over good citizenship. Not good for us real persons.

Corporations are concentrating power (with money). Because they pay much less in taxes than individual citizens, they have an advantage. This is where it gets disturbing. Keep in mind that taxes are an extremely contentious subject, especially today.

Corporations spend a lot of money spreading information through advertising (or mis-information).

Look at News Corporation, the owner of Fox News. They have a large audience eager to believe what Fox says about taxation. But there is a corporate agenda at work. They are expressing corporate opinion, disguising it as unbiased reporting.

Fox News hates the left, and tell us that President Obama is a radical, that he was not born in the US, that he and the Democrats are conspiring against the people. But their “conservative” slant is a sham! They are in it to divert attention from what is important. By diverting attention to these side issues, they are actually enhancing big corporate power and .

News Corporation loves to talk about the “TEA” party”. Islamic mosques in Manhattan and gay marriage? How awful. Privatizing social security? Repealing medicare improve it? Great, lets roll the clock back. It would help large corporations profits,

NO APOLoGIES to Big oil and big coal companies. We don’t need more public subsidy of gas and oil. We do need a more sustainable infrastructure and building stock.

Remember that President Bush and his allies were in charge for 7 years before our national economy started south. The so-called conservatives have no right to complain. They got a trillion dollar tax cut in 2001, they started an unnecessary trillion dollar war in Iraq. They bailed out the banks with a 700 billion dollar program.

Leftist conspiracy? Socialist President? Hunh?

Putting the American people ahead of the banks! How radical is this?

An excellent commentary in this months Engineered Systems magazine, entitled Tomorrow’s Environment: A Failure to Plan Is A Plan To Fail by Howard McKew, exposes the weak link in the chain between energy efficient design and the long term operation and maintenance of said design. How do we know they are getting what they paid for?

Too often, we don’t know. McKew explains that measurement and verification is often left out of the design due to budget constraints. I think operations often falls under the radar for lack of understanding the need for verifying. And CMMS software, intended to help rectify this problem by making it easier to manage and maintain the many moving parts of a building, apparently doesn’t get used!

I have mentioned ACCOUNTABILITY in previous posts, and here is another sample of what I am talking about. My worrying is well-founded. Filters need to be changed, pump bearings need lubricating, dampers need to be observed in operation, temperature sensors need to be calibrated and so on. HVAC, even when it is designed to be as simple as possible, is still complicated in practice.

I am not interested in casting shame on anybody, but now I feel compelled to say something. We Americans have to have an opinion, even if we don’t have all the facts. We are watching too much news television and listening to too many talk radio shows: Take FoxNews and their talk shows. They work extra hard to convince us that scientific evidence is being manipulated for political reasons. They draw a specious connection between the Democratic Party, (supposedly led by Al Gore), and scientists as proof of a vast left wing conspiracy. These popular so-called news programs cast global warming warnings as a “plot”, to increase the size and power of government, raise taxes, and so on.

I am not convinced. It worries me that they are unable to present scientific evidence for what it is, EVIDENCE. They question scientific method at the same time. Why do these folks struggle with high school science concepts of data collection and drawing reasonable conclusions? (Bill O’Reilly is so dishonest on this score, it amazes me how many people watch him.)

We Americans have to have an opinion on everything and anything, whether we are knowledgable or not!

Back to reality and engineering. Here is a tidbit about engineering economics that would be construed as leftist by FoxNews. (Of course, they would attack it as propaganda because it is from the Washington Post. Not because they have the facts to contradict it).

quote from Washington Post January 1, 2010

Jack Beuttell, global sustainability manager with Hines (Partnership) , a property management firm that manages 10 buildings in the District, said that questions about a property’s energy consumption have become increasingly important to his company’s potential tenants.

Beuttell said that a building with a “95″ rating from the EPA’s “Energy Star” program, a rank that some of his company’s properties have earned, would typically save a tenant about $1.30 per square foot in annual energy bills over the national average for a similar building. That’s an “incredibly meaningful” figure to tenants, he said.

I like it. And not because I might benefit personally (Full disclosure: I helped engineer HVAC on a Hines project recently). It is just plain simple common sense to cut costs. It might even pump up your profits! Some left-wing conspiracy that is.

The tax cuts did not increase our national economic vitality one wit. They should be allowed to expire post-haste. Especially since we need the money to offset more energy conservation tax incentives (such encouragement creates public good). US policy should lead the world in energy conservation, not follow!

About taxes, Teddy Roosevelt(who is among my most admired people), said:

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered–not gambling in stocks, but service rendered.

The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.

Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective–a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

Words to remember in November.

Some of my friends want me to clarify what I mean above. If Teddy had it right 105 years ago, and we had a balanced budget in the 1990s (Republican controlled Congress/Democratic President combination), we should have stuck with it. Democracy like ours really suck when voters get confused and switch the formula, like we did in 2000. Once upon a time, I had a theory about an optimal combination, a Dem president and a Repub congress, and I will be damned if that didn’t work under President Clinton. Looks like we might even get back to that state, but it will take 6 more years of President Obama working with a Republican Congress just to get back to where we were when Bush got elected in 2000.