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Let’s Get Joe the Investor Invested in the Green Economy
January 26, 2009

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

One of the great things about the green jobs movement is that it brings to the fore the importance of getting a diverse group of constituents benefiting from and arguing for a green economy.  As a result, more and more people are feeling invested in this new economy, because they see how it will be good for them, their family and their community.  After all, it’s a lot easier to push through legislation that will support renewable energy, for instance, if unions, solar installers, utilities, community organizations and non-profits are all in favor. 

Green Collar Jobs Are Great–Now How About Green Collar Investments?

Despite this promising trend, there remains a significant obstacle to getting a broader range of people invested in all things green: a lack of green investment opportunities that 1) have a reasonable, secure return on investment and 2) provide tangible environmental and/or social benefits.  Sure, venture capitalists are investing in clean tech like crazy, green mutual funds are springing up, and myriad publicly traded companies are working on environmentally friendly technologies.  But for Joe or Jane the investor–that is, a person with some money she would like to invest, but who can’t afford a high-profile money manager and doesn’t know a whole lot about investing–these opportunities are either difficult to understand or hard to find out about.

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environment  / Huffington Post

How Access to Information Can Tackle Poverty and Pollution
January 11, 2009

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



In the Spring of 2007 I had the opportunity to spend a month working with my good friend and colleague T.H. Culhane, the founder of Solar CITIES, an NGO that builds solar water heaters and biogas generators in the slums of Cairo, Egypt.  What is most innovative about what Solar CITIES does is that they build the systems almost entirely out of recycled materials and garbage–things like discarded butter tins, plastic barrels and metal.  At the same time, they are building a cottage industry, training local residents to design and build affordable renewable energy systems.  It is one of the first green job training programs in Egypt, and the only one focusing on slum communities. 

T.H. is one of those rare social entrepreneurs whose boundless energy, commitment and intelligence inspires everyone around him and attracts attention to his cause.  Yet to me the most striking aspect of the trip was noticing the way in which T.H. leveraged his access to information (he is also a PhD candidate in urban planning at UCLA) to enable Cairenes to see the benefits of his systems, and then to come up with better, more efficient designs themselves.  Carrying his iPod around like an instrument for social change, instead of merely a toy for the privileged, he would show videos and drawings of solar thermal systems to carpenters, plumbers and community leaders.  Eager to benefit their communities, these individuals quickly saw the upsides of solar hot water.  After all, most Cairenes currently heat their home in a way that is dangerous (due to fumes and the possibility of explosion) and expensive, whereas solar hot water is reliable, silent and clean (and if fossil fuels weren’t massively subsidized in Egypt, it would also be the cheapest form of energy in “The City of the Sun”).  They immediately began coming up with innovations–finding more durable and affordable materials, refining and even refuting the designs of so-called experts, and inventing brand new manufacturing techniques.

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environment  / Huffington Post  / philosophy

Considering All the Benefits of Residential Renewable Energy is Critical
December 14, 2008

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

Ask most people about the benefits of residential renewable energy—geothermal, rooftop solar photovoltaic and solar thermal, and backyard wind turbines, primarily–and the response is usually the same: they are good for the environment, raise property value and lower or eliminate utility bills.  While undoubtedly true, these responses present an incomplete picture of the benefits of distributed renewable energy.  In certain instances, such as last week when a single ice storm left over 1 million homes and businesses in New England without power, a residential energy system can mean the difference between seeking shelter and being able to shelter others.  Other times, particularly during peak demand, renewables stabilize the grid and lower costs for all utility customers.

The Grid Can Fail, and It’s Expensive When It Does

America’s electricity grid is an engineering marvel, but it is also old, outdated, overstrained and susceptible to failure from storms, terrorism, accidents and high energy demand.  And when the grid fails, not only is the loss of power inconvenient, it is also dangerous and costly.  For example, the 2003 blackout that stretched from Canada to New York was estimated to have an economic cost of “between $7 and $10 billion. . .due to food spoilage, lost production and overtime wages” as well as the cost of repairing and upgrading the affected parts of the grid.  While the 2003 grid failure was one of the most extraordinary outages to hit the United States, smaller scale blackouts, particularly from storms and natural disasters, are rather common.

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environment  / Huffington Post  / Renewable Energy

A Financing Mechanism Powerful Enough to Catalyze the Green Economy
December 7, 2008

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

Despite the recent (and undoubtedly temporary) drop in energy prices, the fact remains that because of the economic downturn and an aging housing stock, many families will struggle to heat their homes this winter.  At the same time, the need to create jobs, stimulate the economy, create sound investment opportunities and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions has never been greater.  There is no silver bullet for solving all these challenges, but an innovative financing mechanism for renewable energy and energy efficiency could go a long way toward putting the country on the right track.  Here’s how it works.

Homeowners Need Efficiency Upgrades–But Can’t Afford Them

Imagine you are a low-income homeowner in Providence, Rhode Island. Chances are your home is 100 years old: the walls are barely insulated, the windows single-paned, and the boiler a relic of the 1950s.  In the winter your heating bills are such that you can hardly afford to run the heat, often leaving your family shivering.  And even though a $10,000 investment would dramatically lower those heating costs and pay for itself within 5 years, you can hardly pay for the mortgage–let alone $10,000 in efficiency upgrades.

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Business  / environment  / Huffington Post  / Renewable Energy

Don’t Forget the Green Collar Entrepreneurs
November 23, 2008

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



Van Jones and others have so successfully argued for green collar jobs—defined by Green for All as a job that does something for the planet, pays family wages and provides opportunities for upward mobility–that the term has become ubiquitous among politicians, environmentalists and social activists.  This should come as no surprise, particularly in the current economic climate: after all, who can argue against creating more jobs for American families, jobs that also enhance our infrastructure, national security and environment?  In fact, President-elect Obama recently announced a plan to create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years, and many of those will certainly be green collar.

But lost in all the talk of green collar jobs is the fact that there is a significant portion of the target population–low-income, people of color, the unemployed and underemployed–who want to be green collar entrepreneurs.  For example, roughly 25% of the people that graduate from a green job training program in my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island want to start their own business.  According to Mark Kravatz, who runs the program, the enthusiasm among these entrepreneurs is inspiring; they see how green can be good for them, their family and their community, and they want to get in on the game. So what’s the problem? Simply put, they have little to no options for accessing the capital they would need to make their idea a reality. 

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environment  / Huffington Post

Why We Just Need 306,000 People to Say Thanks, But No Thanks, To Offshore Drilling
October 1, 2008

Just because Congress has allowed the ban on drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf to expire doesn’t mean we need to throw our hands in the air and watch idly as the oil companies swoop in and make a profit.  In fact, we don’t even need to allow all this petty, ridiculous talk about “Drill Here, Drill Now” to distract us from the larger challenge of lowering energy prices, getting off foreign oil and addressing climate change.  Despite the fact that our leaders have already said ‘yes’ to offshore drilling, it isn’t too late to change that answer to ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ All we need is for 306,000 people willing to show our leaders how eager Americans are, as Thomas Friedman likes to say, to do nation building here at home.

Let’s first, as many have already done, put the whole offshore drilling debate in perspective.  The U.S. currently imports 630 million gallon of oil a day.  According the Department of Energy, additional offshore drilling would bring online an additional 153 million gallons of oil A YEAR by 2017, reaching a maximum of roughly 300 million gallons by 2030.

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environment  / Huffington Post

How About A $700 Billion Bailout for the Climate?
September 23, 2008

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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environment  / Huffington Post

Fossil Fuels Are the Bottled Water of Energy
August 31, 2008

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



We already know the numerous reasons why bottled water is bad, including the energy and water it takes to manufacture, ship and discard the product, as well as the fact that tap water must meet more stringent water quality standards.  But here’s the interesting thing: fossil fuels are essentially bottled energy.  And just as the green alternative to bottled water is tap water, the logical alternative to fossil fuels is renewable energy.  Why?  Well, here are just a few reasons (hint: both depend on current flows and are locally available):

1) Like bottled water, fossil fuels are mined from countries around the world, processed, shipped and then, finally, consumed.  This process is wasteful and contributes to environmental degradation, to be sure, but perhaps the greatest downside of a global energy supply chain is that it makes for unstable geopolitics. This may sound like an argument against globalization, but it is nothing of the kind; rather, it is an argument against the globalization of energy. Think about it this way: Thomas Friedman has argued that no two countries that have a McDonalds–that is, two countries that have opened themselves up to global markets–will go to war with one another, because they stand to lose more than they gain.  That theory more or less holds up as long as we are talking about consumer products, fast food chains, and the like, but it falls apart when we start talking about natural resources.  Simply put, energy and water are not Barbie dolls and McDonalds; nations cannot do without them, and therefore the countries rich in fossil fuels hold too much sway on the global stage.

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environment  / Huffington Post  / Renewable Energy

Dealing With The Variability of Renewable Energy Forces Us To be Smart
August 24, 2008

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



The thing about fossil fuels is that they enable utilities, planners and policy-makers to, in effect, be dumb.  Because fossil fuel is essentially stored solar energy, the fuel can simply be pulled out of the ground, transported to a large power plant and burned.  No attention needs to be paid to wind speeds, cloud cover or tides.  Of course, we know that the entire supply chain of conventional energy–from extraction, to processing, to transportation and on to burning the fossil fuel–lead to social, political and environmental degradation, the costs of which are getting higher and higher. 

Moving to renewable energy sources helps mitigate those costs, yet it also forces societies to be smart about energy.  To put it simply, that’s because renewable energy sources are variable, and different regions can posses vastly different renewable resources.  This variability can be a problem for utilities, because they need to constantly supply enough power to meet demand.  According to a recent study by the Rocky Mountain Insitute (RMI), “In the past, utilities believed that they had to compensate for this variability by installing more traditional, fossil-fueled power plants. The more wind or solar power on the grid, the thinking went, the greater the need for backup generating facilities to be there when the wind or sun wasn’t.”

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environment  / Huffington Post  / Renewable Energy

Two Models for Financing the Energy Revolution
August 17, 2008

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

We Don’t Need Better Panels but Rather Better Politicians and Bankers

One of the key aspects of Gore’s challenge to produce 100% of America’s energy from renewable sources within a decade is his belief that we already have the requisite technology to do so.  And in fact, most experts will tell you that while meeting his challenge will require a lot of innovation, (we need to develop better grid control and energy storage systems, for instance) the main challenge is not technological but rather political and financial.  In other words, we’ve got the engineers and designers, but we lack the right kind of politicians and bankers.

The political challenge is best exemplified by the fact that the Congress left for its summer recess without having extended crucial tax credits for wind, solar and energy efficiency.  As Thomas Friedman pointed out, “both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits—which expire in December—to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas.” As a result of political infighting, dozens of renewable energy projects slated to begin next year have been put on hold.

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environment  / Huffington Post  / Renewable Energy

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