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Climate Progress

Drivers of Preference: Why Consumers Will Buy Green

By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 3, 2010 at 4:16 pm

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9RdnraXdpU8/Sg1-uDh6o7I/AAAAAAAACfA/fKBcnB1AJo0/s400/The+Gort+Cloud.jpgThis Huffpo repost is by Richard Seireeni Brand, Architect, and author of “The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands”

Seventh Generation may be the market leader in eco-friendly household cleaning products and is unquestionably dedicated to environmental and social responsibility, but these are not the main reasons people are buying their products. For a majority of their most loyal customers, who turn out to be issue-aware women with children, the primary driver of consumer choice turns out to be safety. Many women simply want fewer toxic chemicals in their homes. To draw attention to this USP (unique selling proposition), Seventh Generation recently launched their “Protecting Planet Home” campaign.

It’s often not clear why people buy the things they do. This is particularly true when it comes to choosing sustainable and/or socially responsible products. Saving the planet or supporting fair trade is never the only driver of consumer choice — an insight that becomes especially clear when choices are made between competing green products.

So, what is a ‘driver of preference’?

Read more

Health

Conservatives Use Rich Canadian Politician’s Trip To Deny High Quality Care For Millions Of Americans

By Igor Volsky on Feb 3, 2010 at 4:09 pm

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams

Danny Williams, the independently wealthy Premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador announced this morning that he is heading to the U.S. for heart surgery. The right wing, which often claims that Democrats wish to secretly transform America’s health care into a Canadian single-payer system, pounced on the news as proof that Canada’s system does not work. “Where will all our elitist overlords go,” American Thinkers’ Wesley Clark wrote about William’s trip to the U.S., when we “replace our best-in-the-world medical care system with a technologically second-rate and rationed system like Canada’s[?].”

Anti-health reform group Patients First — a project of Americans For Prosperity — cited Williams’ trip as a reason to oppose health care reform:

For the last nine months, we’ve fought against a government takeover of our health care not only because of its high cost but also its debilitating effect on the quality and accessibility of care to patients. Yesterday, we were given a reminder from fifty-nine-year-old Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams that this is the case in Canada where they have a single payer, government-run health care system…. The Premier’s upcoming trip underscores the brilliance of our system—something that hasn’t been emphasized enough lately. We have state-of-the-art facilities run by trained and caring professionals who quickly diagnose and treat health problems.

Of course, there is little evidence to suggest that Williams couldn’t have received the same heart treatment in Canada. Deputy premier Kathy Dunderdale said that Williams “has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done,” but did not reveal if he exhausted all of his options in Canada. Canadian health experts, meanwhile are insisting that “when it comes to heart procedures, there’s nothing you can get in the U.S. that you can’t get here. You just have to wait a bit longer, and the accommodations aren’t as nice.” The Cardiac Care Network of Ontario “classifies heart patients for care on three bases: ‘emergent – you’re done right away,’ ‘urgent – you’re done in a few days’ or ‘elective – you may have to wait for a while, because you’re not at any significant risk.’” There is “no question” Williams could have chosen to remain in Canada, Dr. Wilbert Keon, a heart surgery pioneer in Ottawa and a Conservative senator, said.

To Canadians, Williams’ trip suggests that “if you have money, you can forgo the hassles of public health care and pay for quicker service south of the border,” but it also underscores the high cost of American health care. “Every year, thousands of Americans undergo surgery in other countries” where they can receive the same care “at half the price.” “In 2007, an estimated 750,000 Americans traveled abroad for medical care; this number is anticipated to increase to six million by 2010″ — far outpacing the number of Canadians coming into the United States for medical treatment.

Williams traveled to America to receive the best care, so why are conservatives using his visit as an argument for opposing reform and denying millions of uninsured Americans access to “state-of-the-art facilities” where “trained and caring professionals” can “quickly diagnose and treat health problems”?

Yglesias

Is The Fed Stifling Recovery?

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 3, 2010 at 3:58 pm

One thing I tell people who are looking for advice about blogging is that a post should make one point. If you have two points to make, write two posts. I’m about to violate that by pivoting to a point about monetary policy, but that’s by way of saying that if you click on this link I’m about to offer to a post about Scott Sumner you’ll see that it initially is on a totally different point. But I wanted to pull this idea out:

In February I said fiscal stimulus wouldn’t work, as the Fed had some sort of nominal aggregate target in mind, and was going to simply offset the fiscal stimulus. And that is what happened. In March when things looked scary, like a Depression was possible, the Fed announced its big program of buying Treasuries and MBSs. Later in the year when things picked up a bit, and we were clearly going to avoid a depression, the Fed started furiously back-peddling. They started talking about ending the bond buying program and “exit strategies.” Ask yourself this; what does that back and forth behavior tell you? It tells me the Fed has some sort of implicit nominal target, and if the economy seems to fall short they’ll pull out all the stops and flood the economy with liquidity. That’s why the $800 billion dollar fiscal stimulus was a complete waste of money; the Fed wasn’t going to allow NGDP to fall much further than the actual 2.5% it fell. Shame on us for not figuring that out, and shame on the Fed for not explaining that to us.

I think maybe you need an academic’s confidence in his own theories to accept this as a reason to have avoided stimulus back in early 2009. As either a blogger or a policymaker, I’m more comfortable with the idea of joint fiscal and monetary measures to fight a downturn. But the most important point here is that fiscal policy can’t swim against the monetary tide. If the FOMC doesn’t want aggressive stimulus to aggregate demand to fight unemployment, then it just doesn’t happen. Voters hold elected officials responsible for macroeconomic performance, but this is mainly determined by the Fed. And the Fed has given every indication since autumn 2009 or so that it’s very comfortable with a slow recovery.

Note that the labor market revival after the 1982 recession was much more robust than what the Obama administration is forecasting:

20100202 arra forecasts 1

A big part of the difference, I take it, is that all during this period in the Reagan years the Fed was pretty aggressive about loosening monetary policy. Paul Volcker decided that he’d succeeded in breaking the back of inflation and it was time to get people back to work. By contrast, today’s FOMC seems to have the mentality that they’ve broken the back of the recession and it’s time to start worrying about the possibility of inflation. The Obama administration’s not blameless in this—they reappointed Bernanke and whipped for his reconfirmation—but now that they’ve done their part, it some ways the forward-looking situation is out of their hands.

Politics

Health Care Industry Front Group Cheers Death Of The Public Option With Large Washington Post Ad

By Amanda Terkel on Feb 3, 2010 at 3:30 pm

Conservatives for Patients' Rights ad One of the most aggressive industry front groups fighting to defeat health care reform has been the Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR), run by disgraced hospital executive Rick Scott and represented by the same public relations (CRC Public Relations) firm that brought us the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth.

The group’s main target was the public option. CPR fear-mongered that President Obama wanted to bring scary, ineffective, socialized Canadian and British health care to the United States. It ran dishonest public relations campaign, even tricking British and Canadian citizens into appearing in an anti-government-run health care ad. While portraying itself to the public as an honest broker in the health care negotiations with President Obama, the industry was simultaneously pouring massive funds into front groups like CPR to kill reform.

Yesterday, Scott released a statement claiming credit for the defeat of the public option and saying he would be taking a “breather”:

Accordingly, we’re stepping back from the debate and taking a breather. In the meantime, and consistent with our mission, CPR will remain focused on promoting the Four Pillars of Free-Market Health Care Reform — Choice, Competition, Accountability and Personal Responsibility — pillars that will lead to lower costs and better patient outcomes.”

Today, CPR has a large, nearly full-page ad in the Washington Post cheering the public option’s death. The top of the ad has a tombstone reading, “PUBLIC OPTION PLAN R.I.P. January 27, 2010.” More text from the ad:

In his State of the Union Address, the President didn’t doom his Public Option health care plan with faint praise, he simply BURIED it with deafening silence. [...]

Finally, those of us who opposed your government-run Public Option plan can close this chapter.

By educating on the perils of your government-run Public Option plan, we achieved our goals to protect patients’ rights and stop a government takeover of our health care choices. Today, we join with our fellow Americans concerned with protecting patients’ rights to celebrate that our months of hard work finally paid off.

ThinkProgress spoke to CPR spokesman Brian Burgess of CRC Public Relations, who said that the ad was running only in the Washington Post.

CPR was not reflecting the views of most “fellow Americans” in its campaign. Over the summer, there was actually strong public support for the public option. Through an aggressive campaign, the health care industry spread misinformation to create opposition.

Climate Progress

Debunking False Energy Claims

By Joe Romm on Feb 3, 2010 at 3:23 pm

A U.S. delegate walk past solar panels on display outside a Future House, a clean-energy resident development project in Beijing, China, on July 16, 2009 in the AP photo. As China aims to lead the world’s clean-energy race, reports from the Milken Institute and the Heritage Foundation have become a distraction on the real debate on clean energy economy. This CAP repost is by Rebecca Lefton.

The president reiterated his commitment to comprehensive clean-energy and climate reform in his State of the Union address last week and his budget proposal released on Monday. The bipartisan effort to advance legislation in the Senate remains strong, and Americans continue to strongly support action on global warming.

Yet recent reports from the Heritage Foundation and the Milken Institute“”commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers””are misleading about how these energy reform measures will affect the economy. They are a distraction from the real debate about how to best move forward to secure our economy and national security, and protect our planet from the effects of climate change. Here’s a quick look at what they got wrong.

Read more

Yglesias

The Political Virtue of Lying and Determination

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 3, 2010 at 3:14 pm

File-Frank_luntz_2009

Suppose you’re committed to defending a politically unpopular position. You think, for example, that banks shouldn’t pay any increased taxes or face any new regulation. What to do? Well as Frank Luntz explains to congressional Republicans, you just lie like crazy. You pretend that the bill you’re opposing is a giant bailout for banks, and that you oppose the bill because you’re against unpopular bailouts. Here’s his sample language:

Congress is preparing to enact legislation to pass a law with $4 trillion more for more bailouts. Should people who write the financial reform laws be the same ones who helped cause the crisis? Should taxpayers be punished and the big banks and credit card companies be rewarded? The time has come to take a stand. Oppose the big bank bailout bill.

That’s just totally false. Jon Chait has an amusing riff on this, but I think it highlights something important about the political process, namely the absolute importance of deciding what you want to do. Once a political party has achieved consensus on what it wants to do, almost all political problems are solvable. Want to oppose taxes and regulations on banks? Just pretend you’re opposing bailouts! It’s extremely easy.

What’s hard is to actually try to construct the boat while you’re sailing. If you have an agreed-upon plan, you can then huddle with focus group experts and work out the language. But that only works if everyone on your team actually agrees as to what’s going on. If there’s disagreement, then your language needs to contain some real content, since your statements involve communicating with other members of congress. At the moment, for example, nobody’s quite sure what Chris Dodd will put in his bill. Consequently, nobody’s quite sure if they agree with Dodd’s bill. And as a consequence of that, Dodd can’t just lie blatantly when he talks about his process—his utterances need to contain content that’s relevant to the merits of the issue, because key actors actually want information from Dodd about the bill. If he starts lying, nobody’s going to be sure what’s going on.

In a practical legislative controversy, this is a pretty crippling disadvantage. And then to make matters worse, the very fact of disagreement makes your ideas look bad. If all Republicans think something is bad, and Democrats can’t seem to agree on whether or not it’s bad, then heuristical reasoning leads to the conclusion that it’s probably bad.

Climate Progress

Graham: ConservaDems’ Dirty Energy Bill Is ‘Half-Assed’

By Brad Johnson on Feb 3, 2010 at 3:07 pm

Lindsey GrahamA day after President Barack Obama recognized that Senate Democrats wish to abandon global warming pollution limits in an energy bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) mocked the approach as “half-assed.” Obama’s remarks yesterday that “it’s conceivable” the Senate will attempt to pass an energy-incentives bill without a plan for reducing carbon pollution opened the floodgates for hyperbolic speculation in the Washington D.C. press that “cap-and-trade is dead.” Several conservative Democrats have advocated that climate legislation be postponed or abandoned in favor of the Bush-lite energy bill approved by Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s (D-NM) energy committee last year. However, speaking at the Business Advocacy Day for Jobs, Climate & New Energy this morning, Graham attacked this approach in no uncertain terms:

There was this idea floating around yesterday – don’t know how serious it is – that somehow it would be wise for Congress to do energy bill only. I don’t think that’s wise. The reason I don’t think that’s wise is that it is a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach. It’s putting off to another Congress what really needs to be done comprehensively.

I don’t think you’ll ever have energy independence the way I want it until you start dealing with carbon pollution and pricing carbon. The two are connected in my view – very much connected. The money to be made in solving the carbon pollution problem can only happen when you price carbon in my view. So if the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.

Democrats who are denying the critical urgency of reducing carbon emissions — or worse, claiming falsely that an incentive-only package would deliver a low-carbon economy — include Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA). Others, like Bingaman, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have indicated their willingness to claim victory with just the passage of the Senate energy package, described by Center for American Progress president John Podesta as “weak, toothless, and unacceptable.”

“If you break this apart you’ll have a watered-down solution on both fronts,” Graham — who last year similarly rebuked Republicans — concluded. “The world is moving, pollution is growing, we’ve got a chance to get ahead and lead. If we wait too long and if we try to take half measures as the preferred route on all these hard problems, they just get worse.”

Obama delivered a less compelling defense of the necessity of a comprehensive bill today, saying that “I don’t want us to just say the easy way out is for us to just give a bunch of tax credits to clean energy companies.”

A cap-and-trade system or the like is the only way America can break the grip of coal and oil companies on the future of our economy, our health, our environment, and our national security. Dependent on the millions of dollars of campaign funds that flow from these polluters, too many senators on both sides of the aisle are willing to put fossil fuel profiteers above the fate of their nation.

Below are recent quotes from senators attempting to justify failing to prevent a climate catastrophe: Read more

Alyssa

Back to Africa

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 3, 2010 at 2:42 pm

I keep meaning to link to this great post Bunmi wrote about the decline of African movie theaters, and one entrepreneur’s efforts to revive some of them, against the tides of the market.  This, in particular, struck a nerve:

In The Strand report, Sissako and the BBC’s Martin Vogle explore a run down cinema house in Bamako, which Sissako is trying to resurrect and they come across evidence of porn films shown towards the end of that cinema’s life. It recalls for me that last scene in Cinema Paradisowhere older Toto finds out the late Alfredo had left him a montage of all the kissing or explicit scenes they had been cutting out of film reels during his childhood.

There is a persistent rumor that I’m inclined to disbelieve, but that I’ve always hoped was true, that the movie theater in my hometown was, for a brief time, a burlesque hall.  If showing burlesque, or pornography, keeps theaters alive and in decent condition until a time when the residents want that communal and lonely experience of sitting in a darkened room with strangers and going away from themselves for a while, I’m all for it.  I may not be attached, communal television-watching, I may not care as much as I probably should about albums, but I remain deeply sentimental about going to the movies.

Politics

Flashback: McCain cited Colin Powell as justification for opposing DADT repeal.

By Zaid Jilani on Feb 3, 2010 at 2:40 pm

mackFollowing President Obama’s call in his State of the Union address to end the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, Congress has taken up the issue and is debating legislation that would repeal it. Last June, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — a leading critic of ending DADT — cited Colin Powell as justification for his position:

MCCAIN: My opinion is shaped by the view of the leaders of the military. The reason why I supported the policy to start with is because General Colin Powell, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the one that strongly recommended we adopt this policy in the Clinton administration. I have not heard General Powell or any of the other military leaders reverse their position, just like when on other issues, that people are expert and knowledgeable of, I rely on their opinion. But this is unique. These military leaders are responsible for the very lives of the men and women under their command, and that’s why I am especially guided, to a large degree, by their views.

Today, in a statement released from his office, Powell officially announced that he now opposes the continuation of DADT because “attitudes and circumstances have changed.” Now that Powell no longer supports the DADT policy, what other excuses will McCain offer? (HT: Andrew Sullivan)

Update

In Oct. 2006, McCain also cited Powell. Watch the video here.

Climate Progress

Energy and Global Warming News for February 3: Converting Coal Plants to Biomass; California Sets Up Statewide Network to Monitor Global-Warming Gases; The Royalty Boondoggle

By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 3, 2010 at 2:36 pm

PhotoConverting Coal Plants to Biomass

Coal-powered generating stations retrofitted to run on a mixture of coal and dried wood pellets can produce cost-competitive, emission-reduced electricity even without the advent of a cap-and-trade system, according to a new biomass life cycle analysis published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology.

For utilities under pressure to meet renewable portfolio standards, biomass should be considered along with wind, solar and small-scale hydro, says Heather MacLean, the lead researcher and an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto.

“The study results suggest that biomass utilization in coal generating stations should be considered for its potential to cost-effectively mitigate” greenhouse gases from coal-based electricity, the paper concluded.

For more on biomass conversion and cofiring, see:

Read more

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