This Week's Economist

This week's edition of one of my favorite liberal pinko rags features a fourteen page special report on climate change, what is being done about it, and what those professional pinks across the pond think about the whole thing. I love this magazine both for its transparency when it occassions to skew the truth and for its tendency to keep such skewing to below five lines in fifty pages or so.

I just bought this issue yesterday, mainly for the cover but also because I do truly appreciate the insightfulness of their articles as well as the organization and value of each issue. I decided to write a response to one particular skewing of the truth and compliment the editors for its placement for it is an allegory for the reality of the interplay of market forces and environmental stability.

In this report there is an article called the "The Green Slump" which focuses on the investment strategies of energy firms and in particular those in renewable energy. BP and Shell are focusing there investments in renewable energy on biofuels at the expense of their investments, or in the case of Shell in lieu of, their investments in wind and solar. Now of course I merely I accused those pinks of skewing the truth, and this has more to do with the tone that these facts set for the article and report than any actually misrepresentation of fact. More to the point we find that if we actually pay attention to their placement of advertisements we can better understand the allegory at work.

On the page opposite the beginning of this article is an image of a hyperbolic trough system not unlike the DIY weenie cookers we made in the scouts, only in an industrial application. This image like nearly all of the images that take up more than half a page in this pinko periodical from across the pond is an advertisement, and like many of the advertisements in this special report, and many still in the Economist deal with ecology by way of the companies that are doing things. The placement of the ad says something to the effect that companies mentioned in this article are reducing their investment in solar energy, this company on the other hand paid to let you the reader know that it, ABB, is in fact investing in solar power. The add opposite makes me wish I had picked up BBC's Earth documentaries while I was at Barnes and Nobles purchasing my favorite news magazine as an impulse.

The article features a pair of charts. The first has to do with the share prices of a particular energy index fund compared to the S&P which it underperformed but tended to track in terms of it's ups and downs. The second is a much more interesting one which deals with the capital investments required billions of dollars to meet carbon reductions similar to those reccomended as needed to limit a temperature increase to 2 degrees celsius (I love that the American edition shows figures in US dollars but temperatures in celsius instead of Farenheit, pardon me being snarky). It seems that it would be significantly cheaper to limit temperature changes now than later. They cite new energy finance as their source for this data.

What initially prompted me to snidely refer to my favorite news magazine as a pinko rag in this post was the line "In the absence of pressure from consumers, governments need to give businesses a shove." I suppose I find this to be especially pink in light of my new job at RecycleBank, whose business model is free market efficient and will drive consumers to more sustainable practices. By offering rewards points not at all different from the sort credit card issuers offer (We have a rewards credit card BTW) to the consumer based on their recycling either as a community or individuals, we incentivize recycling. This in turn reduces trash hauling and disposal costs for communities and individuals as the haulers make more selling the recycled resources. It seems that in the energy market energy distributors would want to see their loads diminish as home solar or possibly wind along with more efficient homes could reduce their maintenance and operation costs, as well as provide energy consumers in deregulated energy markets the savings and continuity of service that would in addition to rewards points assure competitive advantage. Of course not to knock government incentives but hear in the states it would appear a goodly number of workers displaced by the housing market crash are going to be trained for the green jobs that will drive the government by way of a democratic self-interested consumer/worker to take regulatory positions that encourage more money for the creation of green jobs and increased investment stimulated by tax policies. Of course these things will take time to develop and it might be hard for commies to understand our reluctance to bang our shoes on a podium about getting green growing.