This is a war I expect will only get more heated over the next few years: the fossil-fuel industry (last century's dominant power) and the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur set (this century's).
The first major battle has broken out in California:
Still smarting from California's recent enactment of emissions caps, the oil industry is confronting another assault in the Golden State -- this one bankrolled in part by Silicon Valley tycoons pushing to fund conservation and alternative-energy initiatives with a tax on oil output.
Two of the nation's most influential constituencies are locked in an increasingly nasty battle over a ballot initiative that could squeeze an estimated $4 billion over the next decade from oil producers in California through a tax that would be as high as 6% a barrel.
I know who I'm rooting for.
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John McGrath Posted 12:23 pm
27 Sep 2006
Still rooting for the same people.
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gogogreenguy Posted 3:23 pm
27 Sep 2006
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amazingdrx Posted 12:52 am
28 Sep 2006
Remember the 90s boom? The Clinton years, hitech internet productivity fueling investment and inovation. The "new economy".
Remember telecommuting for one instance. But instead of people working from home on the net and saving energy and traffic jams, their jobs were telecommuted to india and the philipines. With Reagan Revolution tax breaks for exporting jobs.
Remember the promise of universal affordable wireless broadband internet replacing phones,cellphones (the new improved phone monopoly), TV, radio, cable, AOL and the stifling monopolies they rode in on. All that promise of productivity was killed by bushwacker pandering to the old monopolists.
Remember when the largest market capital company in the world, General Electric, was briefly surpassed by Cisco. Now the biggest market cap trades off between exxonmob and GE.
Remember silicon valley powering the new economy and the bubble bursting as Greenspan met with then still candiate Bush during the disputed Florida fiasco. The fed mysteriously raised rates at a very troubled time when standing pat would have seemed the wiser course. Where was the inflation to justify that raise, it wasn't.
Now look at the fed standing pat in the face of inflation on every important economic front, supported by energy price rises, temporartily dipping from oil price manipulation for political ends. Artificially boosting the dow and temporarily boosting consumer spending.
If you dispute that, look at the war. The old guard is fearful. If they have a democratic congress their precious oil wars are over, and a new boom begins. A real boom. The renewable energy, plugin electric vehicle boom is going to bury exxonmob and even GE. So deep they won't get back up.
If renewable energy, distributed generation and storage, and universal wireless broadband over the power grid replaces all the old guard's favorite monopolies? Where does the dow go? As usual in an inovative boom the silicon valley powered Nasdaq will bury it.
Now that's an economic, social, political, and cultural war. And the old guard is fighting people that run the new economy with fossilized corrupt boardroom and capital hill alchoholics.
Can venture capital power renewable energy like it did the internet boom, I think so. With someone like Hillary trouncing the old monopolists from the whitehouse.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:13 am
28 Sep 2006
Nutshell version: He thinks the supporters of prop 87 are lying through their teeth, especially with regards to the claim that prop 87 won't raise the price of oil (and thus gas). But he supports Prop 87 precisely because he thinks that higher oil prices are a good thing. I'm inclined to agree on both counts.
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caniscandida Posted 3:26 am
28 Sep 2006
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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