Futures Investment

Emily Gertz has this to say about future investment in clean tech, which bring back to mind Connecticut’s plans for the future.

Are clean technologies the investment opportunity of the 21st century? That was the breathless question at the panel I went to on Thursday, the second day of the “Advancing Sustainable Prosperity” conference in Boston. And some of the answers suggest to me that however much the private sector comes around to acting to slow, stop, and even reverse climate disruption (and let’s hope that’s 100 percent), we can’t rely wholly on market forces to transition to a low or no-carbon energy future.

The information the panel shared was dizzying from an investor’s perspective: clean technologies have accelerated rapidly over the last four or so years to become a $70 billion market worldwide, according to Kenneth Locklin of Clean Energy Group (a trade group representing power generators and distributors advocating for sustainable energy generation, that has worked closely with CERES on its Investor Network on Climate Risk), and current growth rates this will get close to $100 billion by the end of 2007. This year biofuels are one of the most exciting investment arenas, Locklin said, displaying a graph showing skyrocketing amounts of ethanol production.

Politics and PBS

It’s good to have Bill Moyers back online at PBS after some pretty crude political shenanigans and yet another example of cultural conservativist hypocrisy about the “marketplace” of ideas. Nice interviews too with Josh Marshall and Jon Stewart. Moyers’ MO has always been to provide space for people to speak, a kind of media space that’s almost evaporated from conventional news’ formats.

American Life, This?

I caught Ira Glass on television last night. This American Life is an amazing radio program. I was a little leery of the visual version but was pleasantly surprised. TAL is an amazing offering. There’s nothing like it either on the radio or on television. Why, because even the modern pig farmer is trapped.

Taxpayers/ratepayers Continued

“The last thing we need is more tax increases,” said House GOP leader Lawrence Cafero of Norwalk. “We have a realistic, responsible budget. I didn’t want to stand up here and talk just in terms of charts, rhetoric and one-liners.”

This sort of statement is pretty point blank. It sounds good. But it’s meaningless. We can refer to ourselves in all manner of terms, such as “taxpayer” and “ratepayer.” Recall yesterday’s post on the question–partly–of the color of money and the color of corruption. CT on the current budget wants us to believe that the politicos are worried about tax increases or targeted taxes. But a rate increase for energy either way you color it hues the same: green tossed out the window. CT should take the millions it would use to build generation plants and distribute solar and wind power. I wonder if the Dems’ plan to tax online items would cost more than it would solve.

The Republicans are looking at the budget in a fundamentally different way than Rell and most Democrats.

Republicans say they cannot understand why the state needs tax increases when it has $1.1 billion in the “rainy day fund” for fiscal emergencies. In addition, the state surplus is projected at $628 million – a jump of $92 million from last month’s estimate because collections from corporate taxes have been better than expected. With the economy still relatively strong and the Dow Jones industrial average breaking records recently on Wall Street, Cafero predicted that the state’s surplus this year will reach $800 million.

It’s not STUPID stamped on my forehead, it’s a markered grin.

Just to pursue this a little more:

Blumenthal claims that a Maguire supervisory inspector, William Fritz, was told by a DeFelice worker that DeFelice was doing “substandard work,” some of which involved unacceptable materials, such as unapproved drainage pipe.

“Defendant Fritz, aware of the defects and aware of the use of substandard materials, told the worker to go away and not to advise him any further of any deficient work,” according to the suit.

Fritz, who has resigned from Maguire and is now Clinton’s first selectman, denied participating in such a conversation.

“I don’t remember ever saying that and I wouldn’t,” Fritz said. “Come on, that’s bizarre.”

Fritz also raised questions about the role of state Department of Transportation inspectors and engineers in approving project work and materials, questions that have been raised by several industry sources but which were not addressed in the state suit.

“Any of the pipe that came in on that job was certified by the state (transportation department) lab,” he said. “Any of the metal pipe that came in, the state came out and checked the pipe. And it all gets submitted through the state’s testing process.”

Ray Garcia, an attorney representing DeFelice, criticized the suit for ignoring the state’s role in any construction failures. As did Fritz, he contended that state inspectors were closely involved in the project, signing off on DeFelice work before the state issued the company regular payments for work in progress.

“It is impossible for the alleged defective work to exist at the level described by the state … without the direct current knowledge of direct (state transportation) employees who control every phase of the work all along the work timeline,” Garcia said. “So the state knew about the problems they claim currently exist and they actually approved the work and paid for it. The job wasn’t perfect, but the state approved everything for which payment was received.”

Senior state transportation officials have said repeatedly that the state has no responsibility for the project failures. They have said that since they hired Maguire as their consulting engineer, the state had no inspection responsibilities. State employees were involved, for the most part, in reviewing project paperwork, they said.

The state officials have refused to disclose the identities and responsibilities of employees assigned to the project. The transportation department also has been reluctant to make public copies of quality assurance tests done on project materials, such as pipe.

Come to Connecticut. Start a business and a life here. Stay and grow. Three examples of irony.

Future Design

A couple of depressing items in the paper this morning, both having to do with hypertexuality. The first has to do with I-84 in Connecticut and the corruption of road building. The FHA will be withholding 5m in highway aid until CT comes up with a plan to fix whatever problem needs fixing near Waterbury. Here’s some gist:

Although transportation officials have said nothing to indicate that there is any immediate hazard, the Federal Highway Administration is concerned that what experts call “stunning” failures in the highway drainage system may be creating underground washouts that could lead to road collapses.

“The type of things that might be worthy of immediate action are any cavities being developed underneath the pavement due to the drainage deficiencies,” Bradley Keazer, administrator of the Federal Highway Administration’s Connecticut office, said in an interview. “We need to have those identified and fixed so that we don’t have pavement subsidence on the interstate facility or the ramps.”

Judd Everhart, spokesperson of ConnDOT, responded this way:

“The department was surprised to receive this document, and Commissioner Carpenter will be in touch with the [Federal Highway Administration] regarding it,” spokesman Judd Everhart said. “We were puzzled by the request for a `comprehensive risk assessment’ for this project because we believe that the safety issues of immediate concern have been identified and corrected.”

Not much help here. What does ” . . . we believe that the safety issues of immediate concern have been identified and corrected” mean? But there’s more context, in terms of the legal and criminal proportions orbiting around the business:

Some industry experts say Keazer’s letter may be a sign of growing federal impatience over contracting irregularities at the state Department of Transportation, an agency that receives $400 million a year in federal subsidies for highway projects.

Last year, state prosecutors accused a half-dozen state transportation employees in connection with an alleged scheme to rig contracts to repair highway cracks. So far, one employee has been acquitted, one returned to his $135,000-a-year job after getting a special form of probation on reduced charges, another was convicted and three more are awaiting trial.

The Federal Highway Administration also has demanded the return of $9 million of the $12 million it agreed to give the state to subsidize the crack sealing.

In a separate case, later in 2006, two more transportation employees were convicted in federal court of rigging a contract to renovate part of New Haven’s train station, a program that involved federal mass transit, rather than highway, subsidies.

On the I-84 project, government and industry sources are complaining about delays in correcting the problems – delays they say are at least partly attributable to Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s promise to fix the highway at no additional cost to state taxpayers. Rell has said she wants to pay for I-84 repairs with money obtained from the parties she believes to be responsible – the state’s highway contractors and the insurance companies that guaranteed their work.

The targets here are insurance companies, the Maguire Group, and the original contractor DeFelice. The article also informs of further lawsuits to come. The questions about the I-84 project get stickier and more complicated. Last I checked, if you are coming from New York, I-84 is a pretty good way of doing it. The fix-it project has been a bang-up job.

But there’s more, too, this having to do with energy and power contracts. Mark Peters reports on some new power plants slated to beautify the CT landscape:

Power plant projects in Middletown, Stamford and Waterbury were selected to receive contracts worth more than $300 million through a ratepayer-funded program designed to promote construction of new plants.

A 620-megawatt plant proposed for Middletown was the largest of four projects awarded contracts Monday by the state Department of Public Utility Control. The natural gas-fired generator planned along the Connecticut River by Kleen Energy Systems would produce enough electricity for 550,000 typical homes.

Here people are not referred to as consumers or taxpayers, but “ratepayers” involved in public service. Here are arguments for:

Regulators and power plant developers have said the capacity contracts will ensure that badly needed new plants are built. The new generation facilities would help keep up with rising demand for electricity on the hottest days of the year and displace older, inefficient plants, which are dirtier and more expensive to operate. They also would reduce the penalties the state faces for not having enough generation to meet federal standards, the DPUC said.

“This is a significant and concrete step in transforming Connecticut generation facilities from old, expensive and dirty generation to new, clean and efficient facilities that will help to drive down electric prices,” said Donald Downes, the DPUC’s chairman.

He estimated the cost to ratepayers for the new contracts, which run for 15 years, at more than $340 million. However, the savings during that time would average more than $500 million, according to DPUC estimates.

I read those last few bits above and just had to chuckle. Part of the problem has to do with objections to these arguments on the part of Blumenthal and others, that energy upgrades provide no guarantee of reducing or providing “reasonable” rates to “ratepayers.” This is trivial because, of course, “ratepayers,” a special breed of consumer, will not be provided with “reasonable” anything, not even roads. It’s an odd formula. An agency or group can begin building a redundant machine, ignoring alternative sources for spinning or riding, and have the “ratepayer” pay for it without any guarantee that the thing will even spin or that the roads will even ride.

Public works. Poor design. This is a fantastic way to sell Connecticut.

P.S. This is all written with fond memories of Palo Verde, the “hypertext” part.

Shadow and Neil Daiman

At the moment I’m reading Neil Daiman’s novel American God’s. I also clicked to The Reading Experience and found this by Dan Green on the subject of character. He writes

In my opinion, asking for a “vivid, memorable character” amounts to requesting that a work of fiction provide us with a friend, a “person” with whom we will have what is called “sympathy.” Demanding “psychological plausibility” in fictional characters means the author should give us the opportunity to “gossip about them and cheaply psychoanalyse them.” And in the same way Heti suggests that good writers don’t think about what makes for “memorable characters ” when they’re creating them, it’s likely they don’t think much about what makes a story “engaging” or dialogue “superb” or a sense of time or place “transporting,” either. (Although maybe they do think about good titles and grammatical correctness.) Telling writers they ought to produce such things means nothing.

You should read the entire post for context.

I’m not very far into Daiman’s novel. The central character is Shadow, caught up now with Mr. Wednesday. Slowly I’m learning what Shadow is getting himself into. Shadow has been in prison for a few years. His wife is recently passed, and he’s learned of her affair. She visits him, trailing mud from the grave.

Chocolate and Vegetable Fat?

The DMWOC site contains the new shift in ingredients for chocolate along with a price difference to the substitution of cocoa butter to vegetable fat. This information is also provided.

It should be noted that in many countries around the world, the chocolate standards of identity permit the substitution of vegetable fats for cocoa butter…but only up to a level of 5 percent. However, the “Citizens Petition” submitted by the Grocery Manufacturers Association would permit manufacturers to use these substitute vegetable fats (some of which are chemically modified) up to 100 percent in their replacement of cocoa butter. This request goes far beyond any other standards used in the world and would further degrade the quality of US chocolate that we all have come to love and enjoy.

Word Death

Nice one.

“Ultimately these changes will streamline Citi and make us leaner, more efficient, and better able to take advantage of high revenue opportunities,” Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chairman and chief executive officer said in a statement.

Science and Knowing

I think it’s a good thing to ask questions about what a thing can teach, about process and method, but these sorts of critique are growing tiresome.

PARIS (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life’s origins are understood and Christians should take a broader approach to the question.

The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.

But Benedict, whose remarks were published on Wednesday in Germany in the book “Schoepfung und Evolution” (Creation and Evolution), praised scientific progress and did not endorse creationist or “intelligent design” views about life’s origins.

What good does talking about “Darwinist theory” like this bring about? “Let’s understand the limitations of shoes before we move forward and so that no one gets the wrong idea. Everyone knows that shoes are not good for drinking out of. Let’s just remember that.”