Lukewarmer Volker Hot on Taxes « Musings from the Chiefio

When asked what to tax, Volcker lead with the statement that we had ‘warming at least partly from human actions’ as a paraphrase. So he’s all for taxes on “warming” as I read those tea leaves. Second on the list? Fuel. He feels we need to get ‘energy independence’ via taxing rather than via making more fuel.

Maryland Green Party Senate candidate killed by SUV while cycling | Grist

Driving is not only unhealthy in the long run, through carbon pollution and particulate pollution. It's also incredibly dangerous. Car wrecks killed 26,791 drivers and passengers, 4,414 pedestrians, and 718 cyclists in 2008, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. If terrorists inflicted that kind of violence on the U.S., we'd do something about it.

Bill Clinton: Save America’s economy (and the planet) with clean energy | Grist

My second candidate: pick places that are both distressed and full of potential for energy independence. My number one candidate is Nevada, where the sun shine and the wind blows. And you've got all those real expensive hotels there with roofs that could be filled with solar panels. And you have all the hills around that could be filled with windmills.

I would say take a few places like that and go straight out and make them energy independent and document how many jobs have been created, and then everybody will want to do that.

My third candidate is prove it works for poor people. One of our best commitments is designed to provide after-school jobs and summer jobs for poor kids in Harlem, upper Manhattan Washington heights by paying them to go in and retrofit a lot of these old buildings, whitewashing the black roofs.

If you did those three things so that every day you were proving over and over again to all the naysayers that it was good economics to build a clean energy future, you can build a consensus necessary to do what has to be done. You could beat the special interest groups.

White House Solar Panels: What Ever Happened To Carter's Solar Thermal Water Heater? (VIDEO)

[comment] This article also omits a major point: Bill Clinton never replaced the panels as president, nor did Al Gore as VP lobby to have them replaced. If Reagan takes them down for his and Bush presidency, then Clinton should have replaced them. Period.