Misc. Articles
Our Gettysburg Legacy - Speaking Out Against the Gettysburg Casino
Filmmaker Ken Burns, author David McCullough, actors Sam Waterston, Matthew Broderick, Stephen Lang, Medal of Honor recipient Paul W. Bucha, President Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan Eisenhower and Susan Star Paddock share their thoughts on why a casino at Gettysburg is unthinkable and unacceptable.
What will be your legacy at Gettysburg?
Read More...
Must-see: Bill McKibben on David Letterman
But Dave, though well-informed, gets one of his facts wrong
The founder of 350.org and the author most recently of the must-read book Eaarth - has a great interview with David Letterman. Dave is more knowledgeable on climate and energy issues than the vast majority of 'real' journalists, though he makes one mistake:
Always amazing to see a person as well known as Letterman who sees the situation in more dire terms than a guy like McKibben (see Letterman rages on global warming: "We are so screwed!")
Letterman does make an inaccurate statement toward the end (around 10:30) to effect that if we stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow, "the planet would continue to heat precipitously for another 60 years."
Read More...
Averting the Next Mortgage Meltdown While Cooling the Planet
The economy is in the tank, and, unless we do something about it, it's about to get worse. It turns out the mortgage meltdown we've been suffering through is only the first wave. Wave No. 2 may be more like a tsunami: Between now and 2014, $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans are coming due. Most of these loans are for small and medium-sized commercial buildings and businesses that are either "underwater" -- worth less than their mortgages -- or close to it. Without swift intervention, the commercial real estate (CRE) crisis will cripple the still sputtering economy, throwing more people out of work, and precipitating more business bankruptcies and community bank failures.
Yet crisis breeds opportunity. And in this case there could be a double opportunity. It turns out that buildings are responsible for about half of America's emissions of greenhouse gases that are heating our planet. And we're heating, lighting and air-conditioning these buildings like there's no tomorrow. And by "no tomorrow," I mean: no polar icecaps, more droughts, more pestilence, more crop failure, and more climate refugees. We're also throwing good money down the drain.
Read More...
World Sustainable Development Teach-In Day
The World Sustainable Development Teach-In Day titled "Sustainable Development: working toward local solutions to a global challenge" will give university lecturers and their students the chance to examine some key sustainability-related issues. The goal of the teach-in is to disseminate information on the concept, aims, and purposes of sustainable development so that it can be understood by a broad public, and will include elements relating to its environmental, social, economic, and policy aspects, and to raise awareness among university students on the complexity of matters related to sustainable development and the need for personal engagement and action. Participating university staff/lecturers and teachers will be encouraged to get their students involved in working through a set of five guiding questions that are pertinent to their discipline. They will be supplied with a list of suggested questions in advance and encouraged to hand them out to their students in order to prepare for the discussions and provide them with guidance.
Read More...
The Other Debt Crisis
As politicians and pundits around the world bemoan unbalanced budgets and the debt they spawn-the U.S. deficit of $1.3 trillion is driving a public debt of $13.4 trillion-a different accounting crisis was reported Saturday by the Global Footprint Network (GFN). August 21 was Earth Overshoot Day, the day that the world's economies used up the planet's "budget" of ecological production for 2010 and began to borrow against its capital account. Thus, economies face not just fiscal but also physical crises-ecological overdrafts that render most economies unsustainable but that go largely unremarked.
Taken together, the world's economies are ecological debtors, demanding more of Earth's ecosystems than the planet can deliver. This is possible only by dipping into the planet's natural capital: for example, by pumping groundwater faster than it is recharged, cutting forests faster than they regenerate, and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases faster than they can be safely absorbed.
Read More...
Lack of skilled workers threatens recovery: Manpower
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Workers with specialized skills like electricians, carpenters and welders are in critically short supply in many large economies, a shortfall that marks another obstacle to the global economic recovery, a research paper by Manpower Inc (NYSE:MAN - News) concludes.
"It becomes a real choke-point in future economic growth," Manpower Chief Executive Jeff Joerres said. "We believe strongly this is really an issue in the labor market."
The global staffing and employment services company says employers, governments and trade groups need to collaborate on strategic migration policies that can alleviate such worker shortages. Skilled work is usually specific to a given location: the work cannot move, so the workers have to.
The shortage of skilled workers is the No. 1 or No. 2 hiring challenge in six of the 10 biggest economies, Manpower found in a recent survey of 35,000 employers. Skilled trades were the top area of shortage in 10 of 17 European countries, according to the survey.
Read More...
More on Early Childhood Education
Dylan Matthews interviews Harvard professor Raj Chetty about a subject I blogged on a couple of weeks ago. Better early childhood education, it turns out, might not directly affect scores on standardized tests (or on things like IQ tests), but it apparently does affect other behaviors that are strongly related to higher incomes later in life:
One thing I found interesting about the effect of test scores as relates to earnings is that it seems like some of the gains you find in early childhood, that might not show up on later test scores, later emerge when you're looking at earnings data.
Yes, and that's in fact, I think, the most striking finding....[Test scores] fade out over time. So kids who had better teachers and were in smaller classes in kindergarten aren't doing all that better, really, on tests in middle school and high school. But what's surprising is that those effects reemerge in adulthood. And I can talk about why we think that is.
Read More...
Chart of the Day: Housing Prices Since WWII
In what Matt Yglesias calls "the department of stuff people are wrong about," the New York Times reports the following:
In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities - Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee - once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade.
With minor swings in sentiment, the latest results reflect what new buyers always seem to feel. At the boom's peak in 2005, they said prices would go up. When the market was sliding in 2008, they still said prices would go up.
"People think it's a law of nature," said Mr. Shiller, who teaches at Yale.
That chart at the bottom of this post, constructed from Case-Shiller data, shows the reality: home prices have actually been pretty steady over time. In fact, if you look at a fifty-year period after World War II, home prices were absolutely steady. In 1947 the Case-Shiller index stood at 110, and in 1997, adjusted for inflation, it stood at 110 again.
Read More...
Banks' Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis
Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.
Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:
They created fake demand.
A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.
Read More...
Community College Training for Managing Green Jobs
BEYOND "green-collar" jobs, like retrofitting a home to conserve energy or helping build a wind farm, an energy-conscious economy will need a new generation of environmentally smart managers, and that's where community colleges are stepping up with new courses and degree programs.
The federal government is pouring $500 million into training for green jobs, and the sector devoted to energy efficiency is estimated to grow as much as fourfold in the next decade, to some 1.3 million people, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its March 2010 report was financed by the Energy Department.
Green-collar jobs have grabbed the public's attention, and educational institutions are starting programs to train the managers who will oversee the technologies, manufacturing processes and materials that will be used to conserve energy and help safeguard natural resources.
Read More...
Report: U.S. Wasted Billions in Rebuilding Iraq
Review of Hundreds of Audits and Reports Suggests $5 Billion - 10% of Reconstruction Costs - Was Wasted
(AP) A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets
As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted - more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.
That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.
There are success stories. Hundreds of police stations, border forts and government buildings have been built, Iraqi security forces have improved after years of training, and a deep water port at the southern oil hub of Umm Qasr has been restored.
Read More...