Spiritual Principles for a New Economics
© 1996 by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson
http://www.visionarylead.org/sp_econ.htm
"From our experience and experimentation with different economic systems, and living according to the spiritual laws of manifestation, there seem to be important principles that govern economic well-being. We would like to share these with you, in hopes that they might be useful in your group or individual life. Please use your own intuition in determining their truth and relevance to your own situation - each individual is unique."
1. THE EARTH HOUSEHOLD
Economics literally means "earth household" a key image for understanding what right economics requires. If we care for the planetary economy as we would our own household, we can see that it must work for all members of the earth household, or it will not work for any part of the human family in the long term. Just as we wouldn't tear our house apart to make a fire to keep warm, or dump garbage in our living room, so we must learn to see the larger household of the earth as we do our own. And we must be concerned about the effect of our actions on future generations who will inhabit the earth.
2. CIRCULATION
The body of our planet is a living organism, (called "Gaia" by the ancients), and all economic interactions from the individual to the international take place within this body of moving energies. If circulation through the system is blocked through manipulation, hoarding, etc., then all parts of the organism suffer. When there is free circulation of goods, resources and services throughout the body, nourishing all parts of the system, then the system as a whole flourishes. Equally, when the whole is cared for all the parts within it are nurtured.
3. CREATOR/PRODUCER FIRST, A CONSUMER SECOND
As individuals develop their creative abilities connected to their spiritual Source, the need to consume from an inner sense of lack transforms into the ability and urge to create and give to the world. We then find our true creation or calling, and trust that what we put forth from our inner Self will be of value to others, and we will receive what we need to live in exchange.
4. ABUNDANCE AND SHARING
When we realize the great abundance-producing, creative energy and potential within us, we overcome the fear of lack or "scarcity consciousness." We are then able to share as we no longer fear "running out." And when we see with the eyes of unity the polarity of giver and receiver dissolves, as we realize that to receive is also giving the opportunity for others to give.
5. FAITH
As we have faith or trust in the abundance of the Life of the Universe we find greater abundance flowing to us. Faith allows us to act "as if" there is abundance and to do what we know is spiritually right for ourselves and others, trusting that it will work out economically for everyone, despite how it may appear to the rational mind. Faith eventually grows into knowing God's law works as we experience it in our lives.
6. AS WE GIVE, SO SHALL WE RECEIVE
We "prime the pump" of the universe by creating a vacuum in our lives by giving our time, money, energy and love to others. Giving is an act of faith that the abundance of the universe will circulate in return. The ancient law of tithing 10% of all income to spiritual purposes honors the Source from which all abundance emerges.
7. CUSTODIANSHIP/STEWARDSHIP
From a higher perspective, we can ultimately possess nothing on the material level, although it may possess us - (because we are too attached to and worried about it!). We can, however, be good custodians of what God has given us. The Great Economist is highly resource - and energy-efficient, and we harmonize with universal laws when we keep our resource channels clear and flowing. When we care for and improve what has been entrusted to us, and release to others things we don't use, we see a new inflow of abundance. And of course an attitude of gratitude brings plenitude.
8. DECENTRALIZATION OF CONTROL
Wealth-producing resources are the "common heritage of all mankind," as recognized by the United Nations in the Law of the Sea Treaty. The benefits of developing productive capacity through ideas, technology, labor or capital need to be shared between those who create the innovation and the social-planetary web that makes the production and wealth possible.
9. LOVE/GOODWILL
Love is the state of being that creates a positive sense of connectedness and allows harmonious economic interaction to take place. In legal terms it is called the "meeting of minds" and is the basis for all contracts, and in business it is called the "goodwill" a business has generated with customers which is assigned a dollar value in the worth of the business. It is the deeper ground of being which gives rise to the values of trust, honesty and fairness.
10. INTERDEPENDENCE
The attempt to achieve total self-sufficiency and self-centered independence emerges from the dominance of the illusory separativeness of the ego consciousness. As we participate in economic life we learn that we are part of an interdependent web of complex interactions, and changes in one part of the web affect all the participants. Thus establishing just, harmonious and honest relationships is the key to economic well-being for all.
11. A FAIR PROFIT
When an individual or business through their labor transforms material substance or provides a service which truly benefits others, without creating harm anywhere, then a fair and equitable profit for the work done is in order. Profit thus allows the service or "good" to be continued to be provided to others. Profit must include considerations of being good for the whole, on all levels both short and long term, or distortions are created.
12. MONEY AS CONCRETIZED ENERGY FLOW
Money is a symbolic medium of exchange among humanity and represents accumulated human and planetary creative energy. It is essentially neutral and its value depends on the uses to which it is put. The highest view of money is to see it as a sacred trust to be used for the good of all humanity.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs
America can reduce poverty by enabling underground businesses
by Kai Wright, from The American Prospect
Excerpted from Utne Reader here;
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
Loretta Harrison is a born hustler.
“I been making and selling things since I was about 8 years old,” says the 45-year-old unemployed mom. She buys wholesale in Manhattan—balloons, socks, scarves, you name it—then loads up a pushcart and sells at retail prices on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. She’s peddled Icees off the back of a tricycle, teamed up with her teenage son to hawk bottled water for a dollar at stoplights, and organized “passion parties” where she brings together groups of women to gab about sex and buy erotic toys. “I love sales,” she says. “For me to have something that somebody else wants and for them to go in their pocket and bring out hard-earned money to get what I have is just—it’s like a high to me.”
Harrison hasn’t worked a traditional full-time job in nearly 14 years, since her eldest son, Malcolm, had a series of seizures in the second grade that resulted in brain damage. “After that, you know, he was a paranoid schizophrenic,” she says. “He’d think he didn’t have enough sugar in his cereal, and he’d run away and tell people we were bothering him. Punch out the windows and stuff.” So she quit her job delivering mail in the neighborhood to take care of him and her then-newborn daughter. “That whole year,” she says, “my Ready Teddy bags were the only thing that kept me going.”
Ready Teddy is Harrison’s pride and joy. It’s a crocheted teddy bear–and-tote combo that she’s been making since 1992. In the past, she’s sold the bags in a Brooklyn craft store for $35 a pop but now moves them herself for $20. “When I had people selling for me, I would charge them $15. They’d sell it for $20 and take out $5,” she explains, rattling off pricing and staffing schemes that have never been written down, let alone put into a business plan.
In fact, Harrison can’t so much as give a ballpark estimate of how much money she’s made or lost year to year on all of her little businesses. She figures that between her sales and her wage jobs—as a supermarket cashier, a newspaper carrier, a crossing guard—her income has probably peaked at $25,000 in a year. “As far as keeping records and whatnot—Loretta’s not so good at keeping records,” she jokes. “Especially when you get the money and you end up having to spend the money to live.”
Whether and how Harrison can actually live off her sales schemes are larger questions than she knows—and ones that may be getting more attention in coming years, as policy makers grope for solutions to the joblessness that’s strangling cities. Unemployment was at 10 percent at the end of 2009. More families went hungry in 2008 than at any time on record—an estimated 17 million households—and the poverty rate reached higher than it has been in more than a decade.
The conventional debate over how to help families who find themselves counted among those doleful statistics focuses on the social safety net—do we boost supports like welfare, provide low-skill job training, or just force folks to try harder to find work? The assumption lurking behind all of these answers is that poor people are broken and need to be fixed, or at least propped up. But a rarely noticed industry of small-business advocates and lenders say the problem is the other way around. What we need, they argue, is an economy that values the remarkable entrepreneurial instincts that people like Harrison already have. Their research suggests that with relatively small investments for training and with loans of as little as $500, small side hustles like Harrison’s could get neighborhoods like Jamaica churning with enterprise.
Microenterprise, as it’s called, has long been associated with the developing world. The Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus pioneered the idea back in 1976 with a $27 loan to a group of Bangladeshi businesswomen following a famine. A global industry has since parceled out billions of dollars in microloans, and Yunus has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. But while the idea owes its fame to the developing world, it has also been slowly building in America since the mid-1980s—it’s just been ignored by an economic and political culture obsessed with the pursuit of large, rapid growth.
Now, with the U.S. economy in disarray, domestic microenterprise advocates believe this is finally their moment in the sun. Both Grameen and the celebrated peer-to-peer lending tool Kiva.org have announced new U.S. ventures since the recession began. And after years of hostility from Bush-era Washington, micro enterprise development has won the support of both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
The effort is thus far relatively tiny: The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO), a trade group, estimates that $100 million to $150 million is invested annually in U.S. microenterprise development. But industry researchers argue that Harrison is among an estimated 10 million low- to moderate-income people who could turn their ideas and hustles into thriving, job-creating businesses—and rescue inner-city economies in the process.
America’s roughly 6 million small businesses—defined as firms with fewer than 500 workers—employ about half the nation’s private-sector workforce. Another 21.7 million people ran their own businesses without employees in 2007. Politicians of all stripes love to laud these folks. In the American political narrative, small-business owners do everything from creating jobs to building communities. And they’re the people for whom Congress is still trying to pry open traditional credit markets. As President Barack Obama proclaimed in May 2009, “The entrepreneurial spirit lies at the core of our nation’s economy and identity.” Microenterprise-development advocates say politicians and bankers shouldn’t view people like Harrison any differently.
Microenterprise is defined, officially, as any business with fewer than five employees that takes less than $35,000 to get off the ground. According to the Aspen Institute’s Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination (FIELD), the vast majority of these ventures are both owned and staffed by an individual or a family. The AEO estimates that more than 24 million such businesses exist in the United States.
The idea of building upon tiny, family- run businesses has never caught on in U.S. economic-development circles. But according to Aspen’s most recent count, at least 500 organizations around the country either lend money or provide training to people who are trying to use small business to thwart poverty. The field started off providing capital largely to residents in black neighborhoods (particularly to black women) who had been walled off from banks for decades; it has since grown and splintered into both money lending and business training. Fifty-eight percent of the clients of today’s microenterprise-development groups are people of color, according to FIELD, and about 60 percent are women.
The changes driven by microenterprise programs are incremental but nonetheless meaningful. In 2008 Aspen surveyed about 1,400 clients served by micro enterprise-development groups. Over half of those who were living below the poverty line when they joined the programs had risen above it within a year. Average household income went from just under $30,000 to $36,000.
The programs have demonstrated a clear ability to help clients build sustainable businesses. In Aspen’s 2008 survey, nearly two-thirds of people who didn’t have businesses when they entered a program successfully got one started. Those new businesses split about evenly between full-time and part-time ventures; the full-time ones generated median revenues of $40,000 in 2007. That’s not Wall Street money, but it’s enough to move a family out of poverty-wage labor. And the biggest programs show even more potential. ACCION USA—the nation’s largest microlender—spokesperson Laura Kozien says, “For every microloan that ACCION approves, 2.7 jobs are created in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods.”
Tasha Stoudymire started working in department-store photo studios in high school when she took her newborn son for a portrait and ended up applying for a job. Over 11 years, she scraped her way up from $5.15 an hour to $16.70 an hour. “I couldn’t stand it,” she says of the sacrifice demanded by earning that money. “My son said to me, ‘Mama, you work more than you stay home. You go to work and you come home and sleep and shower.’ That hurt me.”
After a series of family and medical issues kept her away from the job, Stoudymire was let go. Now, at age 30, she has a new plan: opening a combination day-care and child-portrait business out of her Queens home. Skills aren’t the hard part. She just has to figure out how to make it all work as a proper business.
One night in the late fall, Stoudymire and a dozen other mothers and grandmothers attended a child-care business-development class conducted by the Business Outreach Center Network, a group that offers training and small loans to mostly immigrant clients. The women listened raptly as a trainer walked them through the impressive array of expertise they already have. “The word just—let’s eliminate that,” the trainer chided one woman, a gray-haired grandmother with a small, informal day care who introduced herself too humbly. “You’re not ‘just’ a child-care provider. You’re a child-care provider.”
Over the next two hours the women traded hard-won child-rearing and babysitting wisdom. Throughout, the trainer nudged the women toward a business owner’s mind-set, noting their legal responsibilities, marketing advantages, and money-saving opportunities. “Start looking at things in your house right now that could be used. Take off your adult cap and think as a child. What’s a toy?” She put a shoebox face down, propped the lid on its edge like a ramp, and sent a toy car sailing downward. “You don’t have to buy this! You’ve all got on shoes.”
Stoudymire and her classmates will go through 22 sessions like this, learn how to acquire free start-up supplies, and qualify to apply for a $1,000 grant. Since 2003, the BOC Network has put almost 800 New York City women through this training and given them more than $170,000 in grants. By BOC’s tally, the businesses those women later built created more than 275 jobs.
At the previous week’s orientation, Stoudymire burst into tears of joy as she listened to the talk about the market advantage of providers who understand kids’ developmental challenges and can help navigate city bureaucracy. She had that feeling all innovators get, that conviction that they know something nobody else does. And she embraced an emotion few have found in the recent economic downturn, declaring, “I’m excited.”
Excerpted from The American Prospect (Jan.-Feb. 2010), a perennial Utne Reader staff favorite for its smart, authoritative political reporting. A 2010 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for political coverage and general excellence.www.prospect.org
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
by Kai Wright, from The American Prospect
Excerpted from Utne Reader here;
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
Loretta Harrison is a born hustler.
“I been making and selling things since I was about 8 years old,” says the 45-year-old unemployed mom. She buys wholesale in Manhattan—balloons, socks, scarves, you name it—then loads up a pushcart and sells at retail prices on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. She’s peddled Icees off the back of a tricycle, teamed up with her teenage son to hawk bottled water for a dollar at stoplights, and organized “passion parties” where she brings together groups of women to gab about sex and buy erotic toys. “I love sales,” she says. “For me to have something that somebody else wants and for them to go in their pocket and bring out hard-earned money to get what I have is just—it’s like a high to me.”
Harrison hasn’t worked a traditional full-time job in nearly 14 years, since her eldest son, Malcolm, had a series of seizures in the second grade that resulted in brain damage. “After that, you know, he was a paranoid schizophrenic,” she says. “He’d think he didn’t have enough sugar in his cereal, and he’d run away and tell people we were bothering him. Punch out the windows and stuff.” So she quit her job delivering mail in the neighborhood to take care of him and her then-newborn daughter. “That whole year,” she says, “my Ready Teddy bags were the only thing that kept me going.”
Ready Teddy is Harrison’s pride and joy. It’s a crocheted teddy bear–and-tote combo that she’s been making since 1992. In the past, she’s sold the bags in a Brooklyn craft store for $35 a pop but now moves them herself for $20. “When I had people selling for me, I would charge them $15. They’d sell it for $20 and take out $5,” she explains, rattling off pricing and staffing schemes that have never been written down, let alone put into a business plan.
In fact, Harrison can’t so much as give a ballpark estimate of how much money she’s made or lost year to year on all of her little businesses. She figures that between her sales and her wage jobs—as a supermarket cashier, a newspaper carrier, a crossing guard—her income has probably peaked at $25,000 in a year. “As far as keeping records and whatnot—Loretta’s not so good at keeping records,” she jokes. “Especially when you get the money and you end up having to spend the money to live.”
Whether and how Harrison can actually live off her sales schemes are larger questions than she knows—and ones that may be getting more attention in coming years, as policy makers grope for solutions to the joblessness that’s strangling cities. Unemployment was at 10 percent at the end of 2009. More families went hungry in 2008 than at any time on record—an estimated 17 million households—and the poverty rate reached higher than it has been in more than a decade.
The conventional debate over how to help families who find themselves counted among those doleful statistics focuses on the social safety net—do we boost supports like welfare, provide low-skill job training, or just force folks to try harder to find work? The assumption lurking behind all of these answers is that poor people are broken and need to be fixed, or at least propped up. But a rarely noticed industry of small-business advocates and lenders say the problem is the other way around. What we need, they argue, is an economy that values the remarkable entrepreneurial instincts that people like Harrison already have. Their research suggests that with relatively small investments for training and with loans of as little as $500, small side hustles like Harrison’s could get neighborhoods like Jamaica churning with enterprise.
Microenterprise, as it’s called, has long been associated with the developing world. The Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus pioneered the idea back in 1976 with a $27 loan to a group of Bangladeshi businesswomen following a famine. A global industry has since parceled out billions of dollars in microloans, and Yunus has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. But while the idea owes its fame to the developing world, it has also been slowly building in America since the mid-1980s—it’s just been ignored by an economic and political culture obsessed with the pursuit of large, rapid growth.
Now, with the U.S. economy in disarray, domestic microenterprise advocates believe this is finally their moment in the sun. Both Grameen and the celebrated peer-to-peer lending tool Kiva.org have announced new U.S. ventures since the recession began. And after years of hostility from Bush-era Washington, micro enterprise development has won the support of both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
The effort is thus far relatively tiny: The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO), a trade group, estimates that $100 million to $150 million is invested annually in U.S. microenterprise development. But industry researchers argue that Harrison is among an estimated 10 million low- to moderate-income people who could turn their ideas and hustles into thriving, job-creating businesses—and rescue inner-city economies in the process.
America’s roughly 6 million small businesses—defined as firms with fewer than 500 workers—employ about half the nation’s private-sector workforce. Another 21.7 million people ran their own businesses without employees in 2007. Politicians of all stripes love to laud these folks. In the American political narrative, small-business owners do everything from creating jobs to building communities. And they’re the people for whom Congress is still trying to pry open traditional credit markets. As President Barack Obama proclaimed in May 2009, “The entrepreneurial spirit lies at the core of our nation’s economy and identity.” Microenterprise-development advocates say politicians and bankers shouldn’t view people like Harrison any differently.
Microenterprise is defined, officially, as any business with fewer than five employees that takes less than $35,000 to get off the ground. According to the Aspen Institute’s Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination (FIELD), the vast majority of these ventures are both owned and staffed by an individual or a family. The AEO estimates that more than 24 million such businesses exist in the United States.
The idea of building upon tiny, family- run businesses has never caught on in U.S. economic-development circles. But according to Aspen’s most recent count, at least 500 organizations around the country either lend money or provide training to people who are trying to use small business to thwart poverty. The field started off providing capital largely to residents in black neighborhoods (particularly to black women) who had been walled off from banks for decades; it has since grown and splintered into both money lending and business training. Fifty-eight percent of the clients of today’s microenterprise-development groups are people of color, according to FIELD, and about 60 percent are women.
The changes driven by microenterprise programs are incremental but nonetheless meaningful. In 2008 Aspen surveyed about 1,400 clients served by micro enterprise-development groups. Over half of those who were living below the poverty line when they joined the programs had risen above it within a year. Average household income went from just under $30,000 to $36,000.
The programs have demonstrated a clear ability to help clients build sustainable businesses. In Aspen’s 2008 survey, nearly two-thirds of people who didn’t have businesses when they entered a program successfully got one started. Those new businesses split about evenly between full-time and part-time ventures; the full-time ones generated median revenues of $40,000 in 2007. That’s not Wall Street money, but it’s enough to move a family out of poverty-wage labor. And the biggest programs show even more potential. ACCION USA—the nation’s largest microlender—spokesperson Laura Kozien says, “For every microloan that ACCION approves, 2.7 jobs are created in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods.”
Tasha Stoudymire started working in department-store photo studios in high school when she took her newborn son for a portrait and ended up applying for a job. Over 11 years, she scraped her way up from $5.15 an hour to $16.70 an hour. “I couldn’t stand it,” she says of the sacrifice demanded by earning that money. “My son said to me, ‘Mama, you work more than you stay home. You go to work and you come home and sleep and shower.’ That hurt me.”
After a series of family and medical issues kept her away from the job, Stoudymire was let go. Now, at age 30, she has a new plan: opening a combination day-care and child-portrait business out of her Queens home. Skills aren’t the hard part. She just has to figure out how to make it all work as a proper business.
One night in the late fall, Stoudymire and a dozen other mothers and grandmothers attended a child-care business-development class conducted by the Business Outreach Center Network, a group that offers training and small loans to mostly immigrant clients. The women listened raptly as a trainer walked them through the impressive array of expertise they already have. “The word just—let’s eliminate that,” the trainer chided one woman, a gray-haired grandmother with a small, informal day care who introduced herself too humbly. “You’re not ‘just’ a child-care provider. You’re a child-care provider.”
Over the next two hours the women traded hard-won child-rearing and babysitting wisdom. Throughout, the trainer nudged the women toward a business owner’s mind-set, noting their legal responsibilities, marketing advantages, and money-saving opportunities. “Start looking at things in your house right now that could be used. Take off your adult cap and think as a child. What’s a toy?” She put a shoebox face down, propped the lid on its edge like a ramp, and sent a toy car sailing downward. “You don’t have to buy this! You’ve all got on shoes.”
Stoudymire and her classmates will go through 22 sessions like this, learn how to acquire free start-up supplies, and qualify to apply for a $1,000 grant. Since 2003, the BOC Network has put almost 800 New York City women through this training and given them more than $170,000 in grants. By BOC’s tally, the businesses those women later built created more than 275 jobs.
At the previous week’s orientation, Stoudymire burst into tears of joy as she listened to the talk about the market advantage of providers who understand kids’ developmental challenges and can help navigate city bureaucracy. She had that feeling all innovators get, that conviction that they know something nobody else does. And she embraced an emotion few have found in the recent economic downturn, declaring, “I’m excited.”
Excerpted from The American Prospect (Jan.-Feb. 2010), a perennial Utne Reader staff favorite for its smart, authoritative political reporting. A 2010 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for political coverage and general excellence.www.prospect.org
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
Thursday, April 22, 2010
US Renewable Energy Advocates in Germany
US Renewable Energy Advocates in Germany; Discussing COP15 and beyond from the trenches
http://renewableadvocates.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/a-feed-in-what/
A Feed-in WHAT?!
21 January 2010 by RE fan
Want something to work on that promotes the use of renewable energy so that the US has something to show at COP16? A renewable energy policy that began in the United States (Jimmy Carter: 1978), was popularized by Germany, is slowly (ever so slowly) making its way back to its maker—the “feed-in tariff” or FiT. (A tariff? could be dangerous. Well, make sure you read paragraph 4) Gainesville, FL adopted a FiT in March 2009 and has experienced huge gains in solar installations. There are a few other FiTs in Vermont and California too. That’s great, but what is a FiT anyway?
The Sunshine State!
Using sources of renewable energy (eg. solar, wind) is currently more expensive than traditional sources (eg. coal). Unless purchasing renewable energy is incentivised, the prohibitive high prices of renewables may mean that these clean energy technologies never take off, where economies of scale can allow renewable energy to reach grid parity (ie. same price as traditional energy sources). Basically, a FiT requires that utilities pay above market prices for energy produced from renewable sources and this is guaranteed for a set amount of time. The extra cost is distributed among the consumers where (in Germany) they may pay ~ 3% more on their electricity bill. So once you install solar panels, which are likely to be subsidized, the utilities will pay you for the electricity you produce!
Renewables Pay
In Germany, this incentive is designed to taper off to promote more efficient and greater production of renewables. The added cost per German household in 2007 was 3-4 Euros per month, or approximately 1 latte, as reported in the National Journal. Neville Williams, author of “Chasing the Sun: Solar Adventures around the World” (I recommend this to anyone interested in the potential impact that renewables can have in developing countries), comments on both the FiT adoption in Florida and Germany’s added costs to the consumer. He says the added costs in Florida is much cheaper than building new power plants for the needed energy.
For what it represents, the name “feed-in tariff” is quite misleading and may actually be one of the main reasons why it has not succeeded in the US thus far. Using the word “tariff” is big no-no for politicians. The original German term is “Einspeiseverguetung” Einspeise (feed-in, from “ein” and “speisen”) Verguetung (compensation, fee or payment). Basically, it is “compensation” for you (the producer) “feed(ing)-in” the renewable energy you produce to the grid. Wherever this policy is implemented, renewable installations take off! Germany has the solar isolation (amount of sunlight hitting the earth) equivalent to Alaska and they still accounted for almost half of all solar installations worldwide in 2007.
The U.S. can do Better
Think this is a great idea? It can be. There are some logistical/technical problems associated “tying into the grid” such as how to balance production using variable (coal) and intermittent (wind, solar, etc) power sources to meet demand. This has produced some headaches. For example, I was told that one really windy day a while back, wind turbines produced so much extra electricity in Germany that a coal-fired power plant had to be shut down for a while. All RE had to be purchased and to prevent excess electricity from being wasted the plant had to go offline. Cool right? Well, it is very difficult to stop and start a coal-fired power plant. Imagine having to synchronize something like this with more RE in the mix. That’s where careful planning, redesigning the grid and scientific breakthroughs in energy storage come in…what are you waiting for? Get to work!
http://renewableadvocates.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/a-feed-in-what/
http://renewableadvocates.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/a-feed-in-what/
A Feed-in WHAT?!
21 January 2010 by RE fan
Want something to work on that promotes the use of renewable energy so that the US has something to show at COP16? A renewable energy policy that began in the United States (Jimmy Carter: 1978), was popularized by Germany, is slowly (ever so slowly) making its way back to its maker—the “feed-in tariff” or FiT. (A tariff? could be dangerous. Well, make sure you read paragraph 4) Gainesville, FL adopted a FiT in March 2009 and has experienced huge gains in solar installations. There are a few other FiTs in Vermont and California too. That’s great, but what is a FiT anyway?
The Sunshine State!
Using sources of renewable energy (eg. solar, wind) is currently more expensive than traditional sources (eg. coal). Unless purchasing renewable energy is incentivised, the prohibitive high prices of renewables may mean that these clean energy technologies never take off, where economies of scale can allow renewable energy to reach grid parity (ie. same price as traditional energy sources). Basically, a FiT requires that utilities pay above market prices for energy produced from renewable sources and this is guaranteed for a set amount of time. The extra cost is distributed among the consumers where (in Germany) they may pay ~ 3% more on their electricity bill. So once you install solar panels, which are likely to be subsidized, the utilities will pay you for the electricity you produce!
Renewables Pay
In Germany, this incentive is designed to taper off to promote more efficient and greater production of renewables. The added cost per German household in 2007 was 3-4 Euros per month, or approximately 1 latte, as reported in the National Journal. Neville Williams, author of “Chasing the Sun: Solar Adventures around the World” (I recommend this to anyone interested in the potential impact that renewables can have in developing countries), comments on both the FiT adoption in Florida and Germany’s added costs to the consumer. He says the added costs in Florida is much cheaper than building new power plants for the needed energy.
For what it represents, the name “feed-in tariff” is quite misleading and may actually be one of the main reasons why it has not succeeded in the US thus far. Using the word “tariff” is big no-no for politicians. The original German term is “Einspeiseverguetung” Einspeise (feed-in, from “ein” and “speisen”) Verguetung (compensation, fee or payment). Basically, it is “compensation” for you (the producer) “feed(ing)-in” the renewable energy you produce to the grid. Wherever this policy is implemented, renewable installations take off! Germany has the solar isolation (amount of sunlight hitting the earth) equivalent to Alaska and they still accounted for almost half of all solar installations worldwide in 2007.
The U.S. can do Better
Think this is a great idea? It can be. There are some logistical/technical problems associated “tying into the grid” such as how to balance production using variable (coal) and intermittent (wind, solar, etc) power sources to meet demand. This has produced some headaches. For example, I was told that one really windy day a while back, wind turbines produced so much extra electricity in Germany that a coal-fired power plant had to be shut down for a while. All RE had to be purchased and to prevent excess electricity from being wasted the plant had to go offline. Cool right? Well, it is very difficult to stop and start a coal-fired power plant. Imagine having to synchronize something like this with more RE in the mix. That’s where careful planning, redesigning the grid and scientific breakthroughs in energy storage come in…what are you waiting for? Get to work!
http://renewableadvocates.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/a-feed-in-what/
Monday, February 8, 2010
A High School For Green Teens
Excerpted below is a delightful and inspiring story of green community leadership from the weblog titled, The Green Fork on the Eat Well Guide, website, a free online directory for anyone in search of fresh, locally grown and sustainably produced food in the United States and Canada.
A High School For Green Teens
February 4th, 2010 by kerry
http://blog.eatwellguide.org/2010/02/a-high-school-for-green-teens/
With unemployment in the dismal double digits, there’s a lot of chanting and ranting about jobs right now. China’s cleaning our clock when it comes to clean tech, even as its growth continues to rely on dirty ol’ coal. And so does ours, for that matter. The difference is that China’s forging ahead with alternative energy while we bury our heads in the tar sands.
Our national unemployment rate seems stuck at 10 percent and in some urban areas, it’s risen above 15 percent, according to CNN. Creating more jobs is clearly job number one. But what color will those jobs be? A generation or so ago, jobs came in just two basic colors: blue collar and white. Now, we’ve got one black-collared Jobs, trotting out another supposedly game-changing gadget in his trademark mock turtleneck (color Pee Wee Herman among the unimpressed ).
The real game changer, though, is the thousands of green jobs we could be creating, if only we’d reallocate our deficit-depleted resources. And the Steve showing us how to do this is named Ritz, not Jobs.
Steve Ritz is a trail-blazing teacher with an impressive track record of achievement working with students in one of the most challenging environments in New York City, the South Bronx–that eternally dumped-on borough whose name is synonymous with urban blight.
Ritz has figured out how to grow good food, good jobs and good citizens by tapping into one of our greatest wasted resources–urban youth. And he’s doing it in Hunts Point, a quintessential “food desert” that, ironically, just happens to also be one of the world’s largest food distribution centers; 2.7 billion pounds of fresh produce from 49 states and 55 foreign countries passes through Hunts Point’s New York City Terminal Market annually on its way to more affluent neighborhoods.
Sadly, those endless truckloads of fresh fruits and vegetables don’t do the locals much good. In fact, all the fumes from that commerce contribute to the South Bronx’s extraordinarily high rate of respiratory illness, with a death rate from asthma that’s about three times the national average.
Hunts Point is also part of the poorest congressional district in the country, with over half the population living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is at a whopping 28 percent. And the neighborhood’s 41st police precinct consistently records the highest violent crime rate per capita in New York City.
Undaunted by these grim statistics, Ritz took classes with a 40 percent attendance rate and brought them up to 93 percent. More remarkably still, his students have consistently achieved 100% passing grades on the state Regents exams in math and science.
Ritz’s current goal is to establish the Hunts Point High School for Sustainable Community Initiatives, an open enrollment NYC public school that would train local youth in emerging fields such as green roofing, urban agriculture, natural resource management, brown field remediation–in short, all the 21st century post-petroleum vocations in which our labor force needs to be skilled.
At his current position teaching at the Discovery High School in the Bronx, Ritz just oversaw the installation of a living, edible green wall in partnership with a for-profit enterprise called Green Living Technologies, a pioneering developer of cutting edge urban agricultural systems.
Green Living Technologies is sponsoring a team of Ritz’s students, bringing them to Boston later this month “to be the first high school students in America to be trained and certified as green wall and green roof installers,” Ritz told me, adding that this is “proof that we are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity nationally as we transform the landscape and mindset of the South Bronx.”
http://blog.eatwellguide.org/2010/02/a-high-school-for-green-teens/
A High School For Green Teens
February 4th, 2010 by kerry
http://blog.eatwellguide.org/2010/02/a-high-school-for-green-teens/
With unemployment in the dismal double digits, there’s a lot of chanting and ranting about jobs right now. China’s cleaning our clock when it comes to clean tech, even as its growth continues to rely on dirty ol’ coal. And so does ours, for that matter. The difference is that China’s forging ahead with alternative energy while we bury our heads in the tar sands.
Our national unemployment rate seems stuck at 10 percent and in some urban areas, it’s risen above 15 percent, according to CNN. Creating more jobs is clearly job number one. But what color will those jobs be? A generation or so ago, jobs came in just two basic colors: blue collar and white. Now, we’ve got one black-collared Jobs, trotting out another supposedly game-changing gadget in his trademark mock turtleneck (color Pee Wee Herman among the unimpressed ).
The real game changer, though, is the thousands of green jobs we could be creating, if only we’d reallocate our deficit-depleted resources. And the Steve showing us how to do this is named Ritz, not Jobs.
Steve Ritz is a trail-blazing teacher with an impressive track record of achievement working with students in one of the most challenging environments in New York City, the South Bronx–that eternally dumped-on borough whose name is synonymous with urban blight.
Ritz has figured out how to grow good food, good jobs and good citizens by tapping into one of our greatest wasted resources–urban youth. And he’s doing it in Hunts Point, a quintessential “food desert” that, ironically, just happens to also be one of the world’s largest food distribution centers; 2.7 billion pounds of fresh produce from 49 states and 55 foreign countries passes through Hunts Point’s New York City Terminal Market annually on its way to more affluent neighborhoods.
Sadly, those endless truckloads of fresh fruits and vegetables don’t do the locals much good. In fact, all the fumes from that commerce contribute to the South Bronx’s extraordinarily high rate of respiratory illness, with a death rate from asthma that’s about three times the national average.
Hunts Point is also part of the poorest congressional district in the country, with over half the population living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is at a whopping 28 percent. And the neighborhood’s 41st police precinct consistently records the highest violent crime rate per capita in New York City.
Undaunted by these grim statistics, Ritz took classes with a 40 percent attendance rate and brought them up to 93 percent. More remarkably still, his students have consistently achieved 100% passing grades on the state Regents exams in math and science.
Ritz’s current goal is to establish the Hunts Point High School for Sustainable Community Initiatives, an open enrollment NYC public school that would train local youth in emerging fields such as green roofing, urban agriculture, natural resource management, brown field remediation–in short, all the 21st century post-petroleum vocations in which our labor force needs to be skilled.
At his current position teaching at the Discovery High School in the Bronx, Ritz just oversaw the installation of a living, edible green wall in partnership with a for-profit enterprise called Green Living Technologies, a pioneering developer of cutting edge urban agricultural systems.
Green Living Technologies is sponsoring a team of Ritz’s students, bringing them to Boston later this month “to be the first high school students in America to be trained and certified as green wall and green roof installers,” Ritz told me, adding that this is “proof that we are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity nationally as we transform the landscape and mindset of the South Bronx.”
http://blog.eatwellguide.org/2010/02/a-high-school-for-green-teens/
Accelerating Solar Power Adoption: Compounding Cost Savings Across the Value Chain
This is a very important article excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Institute's (RMI)website. See more about the RMI below.
Accelerating Solar Power Adoption: Compounding Cost Savings Across the Value Chain
AUTHOR: Newman, Sam;Doig, Stephen;Hansen, Lena;Lacy, Virginia
DOCUMENT ID: 2009-03
YEAR: 2009
DOCUMENT TYPE: Journal or Magazine Article
PUBLISHER: American Solar Energy Society
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-03_AcceleratingSolarPowerAdoption
This paper discusses common barriers to solar power adoption and techniques for getting around those barriers. The authors argue that for solar power to become a significant contributor to energy supply, and hence greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the industry has to achieve high annual growth rates for decades. The challenge cannot be overstated, especially once subsidies can no longer be relied upon to drive industry growth. Several barriers, including high costs, lack of reliable demand, supply chain dynamics, and utility integration issues, threaten to prevent adoption rates from rising as fast as is required. In particular, high costs are a major barrier, since solar power must soon be cost competitive unsubsidized.
Fortunately, large cost reduction potential is available, which has not been captured during the hectic expansion of the industry. Based on experience in other industries, the basic tools of end use efficiency, whole systems design, lean manufacturing, and economies of scale will let technology manufacturers and PV installers drive down costs by a factor of two or more. These savings, enabled with support from government policies, industrial collaboration, and process efficiency gains, can bring today’s PV technologies to grid parity in many markets, allowing the exponential growth curve to continue.
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-03_AcceleratingSolarPowerAdoption
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)
Vision and Mission
Vision
RMI’s vision is a world thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever.
Mission
Our mission is to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources.
RMI's style is non-adversarial and trans-ideological, emphasizing integrative design, advanced technologies, and mindful markets. Our strategic focus, executed through specific initiatives designed to take our work rapidly to scale, is to map and drive the transition from coal and oil to efficiency and renewables.
We work extensively with the private sector, as well as with civil society and government, to create abundance by design and to apply the framework of natural capitalism.
Accelerating Solar Power Adoption: Compounding Cost Savings Across the Value Chain
AUTHOR: Newman, Sam;Doig, Stephen;Hansen, Lena;Lacy, Virginia
DOCUMENT ID: 2009-03
YEAR: 2009
DOCUMENT TYPE: Journal or Magazine Article
PUBLISHER: American Solar Energy Society
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-03_AcceleratingSolarPowerAdoption
This paper discusses common barriers to solar power adoption and techniques for getting around those barriers. The authors argue that for solar power to become a significant contributor to energy supply, and hence greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the industry has to achieve high annual growth rates for decades. The challenge cannot be overstated, especially once subsidies can no longer be relied upon to drive industry growth. Several barriers, including high costs, lack of reliable demand, supply chain dynamics, and utility integration issues, threaten to prevent adoption rates from rising as fast as is required. In particular, high costs are a major barrier, since solar power must soon be cost competitive unsubsidized.
Fortunately, large cost reduction potential is available, which has not been captured during the hectic expansion of the industry. Based on experience in other industries, the basic tools of end use efficiency, whole systems design, lean manufacturing, and economies of scale will let technology manufacturers and PV installers drive down costs by a factor of two or more. These savings, enabled with support from government policies, industrial collaboration, and process efficiency gains, can bring today’s PV technologies to grid parity in many markets, allowing the exponential growth curve to continue.
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-03_AcceleratingSolarPowerAdoption
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)
Vision and Mission
Vision
RMI’s vision is a world thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever.
Mission
Our mission is to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources.
RMI's style is non-adversarial and trans-ideological, emphasizing integrative design, advanced technologies, and mindful markets. Our strategic focus, executed through specific initiatives designed to take our work rapidly to scale, is to map and drive the transition from coal and oil to efficiency and renewables.
We work extensively with the private sector, as well as with civil society and government, to create abundance by design and to apply the framework of natural capitalism.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Majora Carter: Activist for environmental justice
Majora Carter fights for environmental justice in her hometown of New York's South Bronx. She's working not just to hold back the polluters who target low-income neighborhoods like hers, but to bring back the green -- and create green jobs.
Why you should listen to her:
Majora Carter is a visionary voice in city planning who views urban renewal through an environmental lens. The South Bronx native draws a direct connection between ecological, economic and social degradation. Hence her motto: "Green the ghetto!"
With her inspired ideas and fierce persistence, Carter managed to bring the South Bronx its first open-waterfront park in 60 years, Hunts Point Riverside Park. Then she scored $1.25 million in federal funds for a greenway along the South Bronx waterfront, bringing the neighborhood open space, pedestrian and bike paths, and space for mixed-use economic development.
Her success is no surprise to anyone who's seen her speak; Carter's confidence, energy and intensely emotional delivery make her talks themselves a force of nature. (The release of her TEDTalk in 2006 prompted Guy Kawasaki to wonder on his blog whether she wasn't "every bit as good as [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs," a legendary presenter.)
Carter, who was awarded a 2005 MacArthur "genius" grant, now serves as executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, where she pushes both for eco-friendly practices (such as green and cool roofs) and, equally important, job training and green-related economic development for her vibrant neighborhood on the rise.
"We could not fail to be inspired by Majora Carter's efforts to bring green space for exercise to the South Bronx. We need more ideas like these to bring solutions to minority communities."
http://www.ted.com/speakers/majora_carter.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ-cZRmHfs4
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal.html
Why you should listen to her:
Majora Carter is a visionary voice in city planning who views urban renewal through an environmental lens. The South Bronx native draws a direct connection between ecological, economic and social degradation. Hence her motto: "Green the ghetto!"
With her inspired ideas and fierce persistence, Carter managed to bring the South Bronx its first open-waterfront park in 60 years, Hunts Point Riverside Park. Then she scored $1.25 million in federal funds for a greenway along the South Bronx waterfront, bringing the neighborhood open space, pedestrian and bike paths, and space for mixed-use economic development.
Her success is no surprise to anyone who's seen her speak; Carter's confidence, energy and intensely emotional delivery make her talks themselves a force of nature. (The release of her TEDTalk in 2006 prompted Guy Kawasaki to wonder on his blog whether she wasn't "every bit as good as [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs," a legendary presenter.)
Carter, who was awarded a 2005 MacArthur "genius" grant, now serves as executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, where she pushes both for eco-friendly practices (such as green and cool roofs) and, equally important, job training and green-related economic development for her vibrant neighborhood on the rise.
"We could not fail to be inspired by Majora Carter's efforts to bring green space for exercise to the South Bronx. We need more ideas like these to bring solutions to minority communities."
http://www.ted.com/speakers/majora_carter.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ-cZRmHfs4
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal.html
Monday, February 1, 2010
Social Compact
About Social Compact
Social Compact is a non-profit organization that breaks down barriers to public investment in underserved urban areas. Since its founding in 1990, the organization has become a powerful force for change in overlooked urban markets by delivering the reliable, representative, and up-to-the-minute information about a community’s economic health needed to make critically important investments possible and partnering with investors, municipalities, and community leaders to leverage this valuable information in the decision-making process.
BETTER DATA = BETTER INVESTMENT
Over the last decade, Social Compact has focused its work on the development and deployment of a collection of innovative economic and demographic analyses custom tailored for inner-city neighborhoods. When these analytical tools, most often as part of a Social Compact DrillDown profile, are applied to a wide range of transactional data sets, the resulting information is an invaluable tool for attracting local investment. Findings have been successfully used by cities and businesses to provide quality financial and municipal services, encourage property as well as small business development, and attract retail investment.
Unlike most other methodologies, Social Compact’s analyses are not derived from census data and are calibrated to measure the vibrant, informal economies of underserved urban areas, integrating information about real estate, consumer expenditures, utility usage, bill payments and other critical factors. The organization’s groundbreaking research replaces outdated and outmoded, deficiency-based data on lower-income communities with current and reliable market analysis.
Cumulatively, Social Compact has identified:
• Aggregate household income $35 billion (22%) higher than census trend projections
• 350,000 more households than census trend projections
• 1.25 million more residents than census trend projections
BETTER NUMBERS = BETTER NEIGHBORHOODS
More than 20 cities have partnered with Social Compact to conduct analyses in over 350 urban neighborhoods. Because Social Compact is uniquely able to statistically capture the real-life picture of a community’s economic health, it can incisively identify and quantify opportunities in areas traditionally overlooked and underserved by businesses, financial establishments, and other services. Social Compact’s reports, and the investment that often follows, can catalyze the redefinition of a neighborhood’s business profile, create jobs, bolster the tax base, improve the availability of goods, and help create better-served, healthier, and safer neighborhoods.
http://www.socialcompact.org/
Social Compact is a non-profit organization that breaks down barriers to public investment in underserved urban areas. Since its founding in 1990, the organization has become a powerful force for change in overlooked urban markets by delivering the reliable, representative, and up-to-the-minute information about a community’s economic health needed to make critically important investments possible and partnering with investors, municipalities, and community leaders to leverage this valuable information in the decision-making process.
BETTER DATA = BETTER INVESTMENT
Over the last decade, Social Compact has focused its work on the development and deployment of a collection of innovative economic and demographic analyses custom tailored for inner-city neighborhoods. When these analytical tools, most often as part of a Social Compact DrillDown profile, are applied to a wide range of transactional data sets, the resulting information is an invaluable tool for attracting local investment. Findings have been successfully used by cities and businesses to provide quality financial and municipal services, encourage property as well as small business development, and attract retail investment.
Unlike most other methodologies, Social Compact’s analyses are not derived from census data and are calibrated to measure the vibrant, informal economies of underserved urban areas, integrating information about real estate, consumer expenditures, utility usage, bill payments and other critical factors. The organization’s groundbreaking research replaces outdated and outmoded, deficiency-based data on lower-income communities with current and reliable market analysis.
Cumulatively, Social Compact has identified:
• Aggregate household income $35 billion (22%) higher than census trend projections
• 350,000 more households than census trend projections
• 1.25 million more residents than census trend projections
BETTER NUMBERS = BETTER NEIGHBORHOODS
More than 20 cities have partnered with Social Compact to conduct analyses in over 350 urban neighborhoods. Because Social Compact is uniquely able to statistically capture the real-life picture of a community’s economic health, it can incisively identify and quantify opportunities in areas traditionally overlooked and underserved by businesses, financial establishments, and other services. Social Compact’s reports, and the investment that often follows, can catalyze the redefinition of a neighborhood’s business profile, create jobs, bolster the tax base, improve the availability of goods, and help create better-served, healthier, and safer neighborhoods.
http://www.socialcompact.org/
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