How About A $700 Billion Bailout for the Climate?

Written on 09/23 at 11:47 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: Huffington Post environment

I wrote this article for the Huffington Post.  It can be seen in its original context here.

There are a lot of similarities between the current financial crisis and the climate crisis, except for the urgency with which the two are being addressed.  On the one hand, the present state of the financial markets hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression of the 1930’s; on the other, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in on pace to reach levels not seen in the last 500,000 years.  There is a near consensus among economists that something needs to be done to stabilize financial markets, with the only debate being about how best to do that.  Likewise, there is a near consensus among scientists that climate change is happening, is man-made and must be addressed, with the only debate centering around the cost of mitigation and adaptation, as well as the implication of various scenarios (e.g., how much sea level rise at a given CO2 level).

In response to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other storied financial institutions, both Democrats and Republicans have set aside their traditional core “beliefs” (not that it’s hard for them to set those beliefs aside), with Republicans temporarily forgetting about their hatred of government regulation, and the Democrats doing away with their dislike of giving a government official unlimited powers-in this case the Treasury Secretary (I know, they did the same with Bush after 9/11; I’ll get to that in a moment).  And despite the fact that there has recently been some opposition from both sides to the current proposal for a $700 billion bailout plan, in all likelihood the plan will pass, albeit with some minor changes.

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An Exciting Update on the Micro-Credit Project!

Written on 09/19 at 02:13 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: brown micro credit

I have some exciting news regarding the micro-credit initiative I’ve been working on. For starters, I just found out that our team was awarded a $2,000 grant by the Clinton Global Initiative!  Student teams from around the country applied for grants for student-led initiatives, and only several dozen projects were chosen out of a large pool of applicants. Needless to say, we are very excited to have been chosen, and the $2,000 will be added to the $5,000 that we’ve already received from Brown for a pilot phase.

The Business Model Is Coming Together
Amazingly, that might not even be the most interesting news regarding the project.  During the last few weeks we have continued developing relationships with community partners, and we are now on the verge of conducting roughly 6 focus groups with potential borrowers to better understand their needs; their business ideas; barriers to implementation; what they are currently doing for loans (loan sharking?); etc.  Our business model is also beginning to take shape.  The project team, which now consists of four students and a faculty advisor, will be developing the business model during the Social Entrepreneurship class that we’re taking this semester.  We spent much of the summer wrestling with the question of whether or not the group lending model employed by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh can work in the United States; in my last post, I wrote about a possible solution to the limited success of micro-finance in the U.S. Since then, we have had some realizations and come across other models that have enabled us to start figuring out the nuts and bolts of how this micro-credit program will work.

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A Conglomerate for Good

Written on 09/12 at 04:59 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: Business environment

Conglomerates Abound
There is no shortage of conglomerates whose purpose is to maximize profit, at any cost, provided that no laws are broken (of course, we all know that laws are stretched and often broken).  In fact, publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profit; that is, they are required by law to do so.  What this means is that a company cannot focus on social or environmental goals unless working towards those goals somehow helps the bottom line.  As a result, the traditional approach taken by corporations with respect to social and environmental goals has been to 1)influence laws to their benefit, 2)avoid litigation, and 3)lower operating costs (e.g., by installing CFL light bulbs, cutting wages or benefits, or reducing packaging waste).

A consequence of this paradigm is that, at least in America, public policy is too often shaped by what benefits corporations rather than individuals; getting corporations to follow the law is time-consuming and expensive, since large companies have a fleet of high-powered attorneys at their beck and call; and only limited inroads have been made on fair trade, environmental sustainability, and other important issues. 

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Green Microfinance: Advancing Social Equality and Environmental Sustainability in the United States

Click here to download a PDF of my complete thesis. Questions and comments are much appreciated!

My masters thesis in Environmental Studies at Brown University looks at how microfinance--the provision of small…

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A Solution to the Limited Success of Micro-Credit in the United States?

Micro-credit has undoubtedly been a runaway success in developing countries as a tool of both poverty alleviation and economic development.  To date, some 100 million people have been reached by micro-loans, and Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank…

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Tonight, the Oneness of Things

It is late and my mind should be drifting through the colorful abyss of deep sleep, yet instead i find that tonight sleep will not come.  I am like a hungry flower who dreams of bees so ardently that all…

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