South Korea has made big moves on the solar front. Posco, the steel giant, is in talks to purchase a major supplier of silicon for solar panels. Korea’s solar business will only grow in the coming years.
Ecuador has told the world to put a price on oil that will never hit the market. Yesterday the small South American nation signed a deal with the United Nations Development Program that leaves a huge amount of oil reserves untouched in exchange for the approximate sum of US$3.5 billion.
St. Lucia’s government signed an agreement with US-based Qualibou Energy for the development of a geothermal plant. The plant will generate 12 megawatts of electricity by 2012, and another 108 MW of capacity will be in operation by 2015.
Levi’s started a Care to Air competition where designers create a new air drying contraption, countering the claim that clotheslines are unsightly—while offering the winner a $10,000 prize. Now the finalists will present their design idea on Monday, August 16 in San Francisco.
The economic arguments against subsidies include the one that government should not pick “losers” over “winners.” Fair argument. But the reality of Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s “You Cut” scheme: just about all the suggested programs are those that (surprise!) would be in the tea party’s crosshairs. What about Republican-supported programs?
The financial reform legislation in Congress, the Dodd-Frank act, is sure turning into a monstrosity. Now it’s totaling over 2000 pages. Tucked away in the bill, in a “miscellaneous provision,” Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana slipped in language covering the disclosure of revenues from oil and mineral extracting companies.
While the American Power Act bill of the US is widely believed to have no chance of sailing through in 2010, it is pertinent to note its key provisions as future versions might carry several of its most important points.
I admit my stomach turns whenever I see that BP logo. And 20-plus years after the Exxon Valdez spill, I have a hard time buying Exxon- or Mobil- branded gas. But participating in a boycott misses the point.
Each day about 600 trucks from Amsterdam and 18 other cities drive up a huge ramp to the waste-to-fuel power plant, which lies in the western dockyards of this city of 750,000. The two incineration plants, built in 1993 and 2007, turn about 1.4 million tons of garbage into electricity.
To those Americans who dismiss Europe as a backward, leftist, and socialist land, I say, back off—the business leaders I met and to whom I listened at the GRI Conference would run circles around my business school professors and most managers across the pond! To those Europeans who slam America as a consumer-frenzied, overindulged society, I say, not so fast: based on the crowds I saw in the shopping areas and the lines I saw in the stores, I think both sides of the Atlantic know how to spend a buck (or Euro).
More than three weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, over 200,000 gallons of petroleum a day is still spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the blame game is fully underway. Regardless of who is to blame, these photos show what is at stake.
What’s been said?