by Alan Durning

Posted 3 months, 4 weeks ago Ad mail isn't the biggest of Cascadia's challenges, but it ought to be among the easiest to solve. I was about to start calling direct mailers myself, demanding they take me off their lists. First, though, I conceived an experiment. I decided to stockpile every bit of advertising mail I received for 365 days. I wanted to see what Catalog Choice and DMA's program would do to stem the tide. Read More

Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago The original version of this post originally appeared June 11, 2009. It was based on the version of the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act (H.R. 2454, or "Waxman-Markey") approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. By June 26, when the bill passed the House and headed to the Senate, it had grown by almost 480 pages. What changed? Read More

Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago Under withering fire, Waxman-Markey’s cap-and-trade superstructure is still intact. If it passes in its current form, we can all be pleased, but we’ll have to hold our breath, hoping that the offset provisions work as intended. Waxman-Markey could be the most important piece of energy or environmental legislation in a generation. It’s also much-needed economic policy: clean energy can be the path out of recession. Read More

Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago “It’s hard to define what a green job actually is.”

That’s Michael Myers, an analyst for the Oregon employment department, speaking recently in Florence, on the Oregon Coast, to an audience of anxious members of the local chamber of commerce. He was answering questions about where new employment opportunities will arise and explaining the challenge of counting new, green jobs.

Across Oregon and Cascadia, many are hoping for, and working towards, a new, clean-energy economy that will usher in a healthy, lasting prosperity. There’s abundant… Read More

Posted 11 months, 1 week ago

Utilities are among the few remaining large companies that are relatively solvent and profitable. Harnessing their might to offer retrofits for all would be a powerful step toward economic stimulus.

But most utilities in Cascadia are conflicted about helping their customers save energy. On the one hand, they're legally obligated to do it. On the other hand, if they do it successfully, they don't make as much money.

Resolving this conflict in favor of conservation requires an innovative form of utility regulation called… Read More

Posted 11 months, 1 week ago In my last post, I described a nonprofit bank's program for financing building energy retrofits, as a way to speed the green-collar recovery. Here, I describe two new, innovative approaches to financing efficiency upgrades in buildings -- meter loans and local improvement districts -- and one old-school, utility-run approach that may be the best bet of all.

First, though, a couple more points about the challenges of financing energy efficiency improvements in buildings. Read More

Posted 11 months, 1 week ago In "Retrofits for All," I described an ingenious plan for extending retrofits to whole neighborhoods of energy-wasting buildings. Today, I want to take another look at one piece of that puzzle: financing.

Energy conservation loans sound eminently reasonable: The loans pay for energy upgrades and, as long as the energy savings are bigger than the loan payments, property owners come out ahead (as do the climate and the local job market). In principle, this model could invest federal, state, or local stimulus dollars well, generate green-collar jobs in the construction… Read More

Posted 1 year, 1 month ago Paul Krugman was my favorite New York Times columnist even before he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics this week. His column on Friday lined right up with my current obsession: federal stimulus spending, quick, lots of it. He writes: "Right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold."

We're plunging into what is looking like the worst recession in decades -- precisely the circumstances in which federal governments should spend more than they take in, borrowing the extra. Yes, it's… Read More

Posted 1 year, 1 month ago In my post last fall on Rob Lowe's plug-in hybrid, I argued that in the absence of a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, switching to plug-in hybrids might actually be worse for the climate than just switching to regular hybrids. I no longer believe that. Electric vehicles are winners for the climate in the Northwest. Read More

Posted 1 year, 1 month ago Over the next few decades, converting the Pacific Northwest to a place of compact, walkable communities that run on superefficient, renewable energy system -- a climate-safe economy -- will be a lot of work: paid work. But for all the exciting announcements of solar jobs and green-tech investment that pepper the newspapers, the skill sets of today's workers are not yet aligned with the needs of this future.

In previous posts in this series, I have described three good uses for revenue from the auctioning of carbon permits: dividends for all, buffering the incomes of low-income families,… Read More