Part of the promise of solar power is that not only is solar cleaner than conventional sources of electricity, but it’s a much more flexible sort of technology. Burning fossil fuel and using it to create power is something that only works well at scale. But a large-scale solar facility is really just a whole bunch of little solar panels all lines up. By contrast, it’s completely realistic to imagine a world in which most buildings include some solar panels that generate some of the power they need. There is, however, a substantial impediment to putting a solar facility atop a single-family home—there are large up-front costs.

Leslie Kaufman reports for The New York Times on a way around this problem: Municipal financing. Rick Clark, for example, took advantage of “a new municipal financing program that lent him the money and allows him to pay it back with interest over 20 years as part of his property taxes . . . [t]he advantage of this system over private borrowing is that any local homeowners are eligible (not just those with good credit), and the obligation to pay the loan attaches to the house and would pass to any future buyers.”

These kind of possibilities are one reason why I think there’s reason to believe that the economic costs of shifting to a low carbon economy are often overstated by conventional models. What we have right now is a society built around the assumption that the negative externalities of carbon emissions should not be priced and also that lavish consumption of energy in general should be subsidized. Our ability to respond to changing away from that system isn’t limited to the possibility of developing new energy technologies. We can also develop new social and political technologies that let us deploy our technical capacities in better ways.

Strange days as the President of the United States needs to reassure China that we’re not defaulting on our debt:

“There’s a reason why even in the midst of this economic crisis, you’ve seen actual increases in investment flows here into the United States,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “I think it’s a recognition that the stability not only of our economic system but our political system is extraordinary.”

He added, “Not just the Chinese government, but every investor can have absolute confidence in the soundness of investments in the United States.”

I don’t know if this was the intention, but the highlighted portion serves as a reminder, I think, that the Chinese leadership almost certainly has a bigger problem on their hands than the performance of their investment portfolio. It’s an authoritarian system that even before the crisis was suffering from a fair amount of protests and political unrest. Conventional wisdom twelve months ago was that the regime’s stability was based on its success in delivering economic growth. And now it seems they may not be able to deliver much in the way of economic growth. And that’s not just an economic problem, it’s a political one.

You would think that executives at a company that’s so poorly managed that it requires vast government aid wouldn’t be getting big bonuses but apparently not:

An official in the Obama administration said Saturday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner had called A.I.G.’s government-appointed chairman, Edward M. Liddy, on Wednesday and asked that the company renegotiate the bonuses.

Administration officials said they had managed to reduce some of the bonuses but had allowed most of them to go forward after the company’s chief executive said A.I.G. was contractually obligated to pay them.

Obviously, I’m not in a position to comment on the legal issues. But certainly there’s nothing preventing moral suasion from being deployed against the recipients of these funds. There are a lot of people in need right now in the world—people losing jobs, people suffering—and a lot of charities that probably need that money a lot more than AIG executives need it.