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RiverLover
RiverLover's Journal
RiverLover's Journal
August 11, 2015
FYI, Unilever brands~
***Its nice to be able to say something good about one of the massive corporations monopolizing our (processed) food supply. I'm absolutely certain Unilever is not perfect, but at least the guy at the helm gives a damn!
ETA:: Just came across this ~
Good stuff!!
Who knew? The CEO of UNILEVER cares about the environment. His ambitious climate hopes~
The Forest Path to an Ambitious Climate Deal
by
Paul Polman
CEO, Unilever
Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
8/10/2015
In September, governments will set goals for eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, having first agreed on ways to mobilise the investments needed to succeed. Then, this December in Paris, nations will agree a potentially far-reaching climate change pact. This pact will stitch together various country-level action plans through 2025 or 2030. In parallel, companies will also announce new climate goals. These pledges will show that both the public and private sectors are doing more than ever before. Yet, collectively these pledges will fall short of what the world needs to keep global warming to less than 2° C, a threshold that scientists and governments have agreed is critical to avoid catastrophic consequences for hundreds of millions of people. To strengthen the Paris agreement global leaders should look to the world's forests.
At the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit in September 2014, over 175 countries, companies and organisations representing indigenous peoples, signed the New York Declaration on Forests - committing to cutting global natural forest loss in half by 2020, and ending it entirely by 2030, while also increasing forest restoration. A critical mass of tropical forest nations and global agricultural companies strongly endorsed these ambitious goals for the first time. And advanced economies committed to providing large-scale economic incentives to help make dramatic progress possible. Once implemented, according to the UN, achieving these goals will cut between 4.5 and 8.8 billion tons of carbon pollution per year by 2030 - about the same as ending all climate pollution from every car in the world. And doing so is more cost-effective than other climate solutions, with many benefits for the 1.6 billion people who depend on forests for their livelihoods.
Several developing countries are leading the way. Brazil has reduced forest loss in the Amazon by more than 75 percent, all while increasing agricultural productivity and rural incomes for the poor. These results came about through strengthening policies and implementing better governance, with leadership from within government, as well as the private sector and civil society....
...snip...
...But forest countries, local communities and companies cannot succeed alone. Now developed countries must fulfill their commitment to create economic incentives for action. Forest nations willing to do more than their fair share to solve the climate crisis should be rewarded through results-based payments. In Paris, developed nations should make good on their 2014 pledges to provide economic incentives by committing to financing 2 billion tons of emission reductions per year from tropical forests by 2020. ...
Read full article here~
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-polman/the-forest-path-to-an-amb_b_7964208.html
by
Paul Polman
CEO, Unilever
Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
8/10/2015
In September, governments will set goals for eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, having first agreed on ways to mobilise the investments needed to succeed. Then, this December in Paris, nations will agree a potentially far-reaching climate change pact. This pact will stitch together various country-level action plans through 2025 or 2030. In parallel, companies will also announce new climate goals. These pledges will show that both the public and private sectors are doing more than ever before. Yet, collectively these pledges will fall short of what the world needs to keep global warming to less than 2° C, a threshold that scientists and governments have agreed is critical to avoid catastrophic consequences for hundreds of millions of people. To strengthen the Paris agreement global leaders should look to the world's forests.
At the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit in September 2014, over 175 countries, companies and organisations representing indigenous peoples, signed the New York Declaration on Forests - committing to cutting global natural forest loss in half by 2020, and ending it entirely by 2030, while also increasing forest restoration. A critical mass of tropical forest nations and global agricultural companies strongly endorsed these ambitious goals for the first time. And advanced economies committed to providing large-scale economic incentives to help make dramatic progress possible. Once implemented, according to the UN, achieving these goals will cut between 4.5 and 8.8 billion tons of carbon pollution per year by 2030 - about the same as ending all climate pollution from every car in the world. And doing so is more cost-effective than other climate solutions, with many benefits for the 1.6 billion people who depend on forests for their livelihoods.
Several developing countries are leading the way. Brazil has reduced forest loss in the Amazon by more than 75 percent, all while increasing agricultural productivity and rural incomes for the poor. These results came about through strengthening policies and implementing better governance, with leadership from within government, as well as the private sector and civil society....
...snip...
...But forest countries, local communities and companies cannot succeed alone. Now developed countries must fulfill their commitment to create economic incentives for action. Forest nations willing to do more than their fair share to solve the climate crisis should be rewarded through results-based payments. In Paris, developed nations should make good on their 2014 pledges to provide economic incentives by committing to financing 2 billion tons of emission reductions per year from tropical forests by 2020. ...
Read full article here~
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-polman/the-forest-path-to-an-amb_b_7964208.html
FYI, Unilever brands~
***Its nice to be able to say something good about one of the massive corporations monopolizing our (processed) food supply. I'm absolutely certain Unilever is not perfect, but at least the guy at the helm gives a damn!
ETA:: Just came across this ~
WWF and Unilever form partnership to protect one million trees
7/7/2015
....The partnership between the world’s leading conservation organisation and the global consumer goods company will raise awareness of the importance of forests to life on earth as well as the threats our forests face.
An area the size of England is lost to deforestation every year, while up to a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and forest degradation. With world leaders due to meet in Paris in December for UN climate talks, the campaign will engage consumers in the issues and give them practical ways to raise their voice and make a difference.
As part of the partnership, Unilever and WWF will help protect a million trees by supporting forest protection programmes in Brazil and Indonesia. These two countries have historically had the highest rates of deforestation in the world and have some of the largest areas of intact forest globally.
Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, said: “This partnership with Unilever is an opportunity to engage millions of consumers for forests and for the climate, inspiring positive change in people's everyday lives. WWF's relationship with Unilever goes back to the 1990s when we worked together to establish the Marine Stewardship Council.
...Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, said: “Stopping deforestation is an urgent priority in tackling climate change. Forests are second only to the oceans as the largest global store of carbon and support 80 percent of terrestrial biodiversity across the globe. “As a business it is crucial that we operate sustainably and take action to help consumers live sustainably. It’s a moral imperative and a business one - to be here for the long term....
http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/international-news/126240-wwf-and-unilever-in-partnership-to-protect-one-million-trees.html
7/7/2015
....The partnership between the world’s leading conservation organisation and the global consumer goods company will raise awareness of the importance of forests to life on earth as well as the threats our forests face.
An area the size of England is lost to deforestation every year, while up to a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and forest degradation. With world leaders due to meet in Paris in December for UN climate talks, the campaign will engage consumers in the issues and give them practical ways to raise their voice and make a difference.
As part of the partnership, Unilever and WWF will help protect a million trees by supporting forest protection programmes in Brazil and Indonesia. These two countries have historically had the highest rates of deforestation in the world and have some of the largest areas of intact forest globally.
Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, said: “This partnership with Unilever is an opportunity to engage millions of consumers for forests and for the climate, inspiring positive change in people's everyday lives. WWF's relationship with Unilever goes back to the 1990s when we worked together to establish the Marine Stewardship Council.
...Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, said: “Stopping deforestation is an urgent priority in tackling climate change. Forests are second only to the oceans as the largest global store of carbon and support 80 percent of terrestrial biodiversity across the globe. “As a business it is crucial that we operate sustainably and take action to help consumers live sustainably. It’s a moral imperative and a business one - to be here for the long term....
http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/international-news/126240-wwf-and-unilever-in-partnership-to-protect-one-million-trees.html
Good stuff!!
August 11, 2015
HUGE R & K!!!
Thank you mrmpa! What a great find!! If only FDR were here today. Who would that quote come from in this year 2015? Bernie, Liz, Sherrod??? They'd be the ones to not only say it, but MEAN it like FDR did.
That's just so cool. Bookmarking & stealing that image!! lol Did you buy it?
August 6, 2015
As Nabisco Ships 600 Jobs Out of Chicago to Mexico, Maybe It’s Time To Give Up Oreos
As Nabisco Ships 600 Jobs Out of Chicago to Mexico, Maybe It’s Time To Give Up Oreos
BY Marilyn Katz
In These Times
7/31/15
Is giving up Oreos a foolish and futile gesture? Of course, I know that other Chicago-born companies have made similar moves. I, like many Chicagoans felt a loss when Frango Mints were no longer hand made on the top floor of Marshall Field’s—and felt worse when Marshall Field’s ceased to exist at all. I was saddened when Klaus Suchard chose to take Brach candy production from Chicago, and in so doing ended Chicago’s title as candy capital of the world. I even regretted the loss of the city’s steel mills and stockyards, despite the cleaner air that their exodus brought.
But this seems different. Perhaps it was reading the May stories of Rosenfeld’s report to shareholders in which she touted the upward trajectory of the company’s profits through cutting back on procurement and customer service and her plans to make it even more profitable by a restructuring that would realize a gain of $1.5 billion for stockholders.
It might have been reading the very next day that Rosenfeld was now being feted as the first woman to join the “20 Club,” those Illinois CEOS who are paid more than $20 million a year. Rosenfeld was paid $21 million in 2014 alone.
Or perhaps, in a city beset by financial woes, it was contemplating the impact of 600 more unemployed people, who had, only weeks ago, represented a well-paid diverse workforce of Latinos, African Americans and whites whose skills and union had earned them a sustainable salary of as much as $26 an hour.
Or perhaps, after another weekend of shootings and deaths, it was thinking about the young people who we tell that in staying in school, staying out of trouble and following the rules there is a clear path to opportunity in our city—at the moment that 600 such opportunities in the city evaporated....
...There’s nothing new or even unusual about Irene Rosenfeld and the story of Nabisco and its Oreo cookies. But perhaps its very pervasiveness in our lives is just the thing to wake up the nation to the downward spiral we find ourselves in—a veritable race to the bottom, with a thin layer of the very rich, a hollowing out of the middle, and a growing underclass—relegated to selling merchandize produced for pennies on the dollar in other countries.
A friend to whom I spoke about Mondelez counseled that to mention Rosenfeld’s salary is a distraction. But it seems somehow wrong that we praise and reward a CEO for eliminating American jobs or for being paid an amount in one year that would take any worker in her plant 500 years to earn.
Come to think of it, if Rosenfeld could learn to live on $2 million a year, that $19 million could be used to save 600 jobs, and the company’s bottom line would still be the same....
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18259/oreos-union-busting
BY Marilyn Katz
In These Times
7/31/15
Is giving up Oreos a foolish and futile gesture? Of course, I know that other Chicago-born companies have made similar moves. I, like many Chicagoans felt a loss when Frango Mints were no longer hand made on the top floor of Marshall Field’s—and felt worse when Marshall Field’s ceased to exist at all. I was saddened when Klaus Suchard chose to take Brach candy production from Chicago, and in so doing ended Chicago’s title as candy capital of the world. I even regretted the loss of the city’s steel mills and stockyards, despite the cleaner air that their exodus brought.
But this seems different. Perhaps it was reading the May stories of Rosenfeld’s report to shareholders in which she touted the upward trajectory of the company’s profits through cutting back on procurement and customer service and her plans to make it even more profitable by a restructuring that would realize a gain of $1.5 billion for stockholders.
It might have been reading the very next day that Rosenfeld was now being feted as the first woman to join the “20 Club,” those Illinois CEOS who are paid more than $20 million a year. Rosenfeld was paid $21 million in 2014 alone.
Or perhaps, in a city beset by financial woes, it was contemplating the impact of 600 more unemployed people, who had, only weeks ago, represented a well-paid diverse workforce of Latinos, African Americans and whites whose skills and union had earned them a sustainable salary of as much as $26 an hour.
Or perhaps, after another weekend of shootings and deaths, it was thinking about the young people who we tell that in staying in school, staying out of trouble and following the rules there is a clear path to opportunity in our city—at the moment that 600 such opportunities in the city evaporated....
...There’s nothing new or even unusual about Irene Rosenfeld and the story of Nabisco and its Oreo cookies. But perhaps its very pervasiveness in our lives is just the thing to wake up the nation to the downward spiral we find ourselves in—a veritable race to the bottom, with a thin layer of the very rich, a hollowing out of the middle, and a growing underclass—relegated to selling merchandize produced for pennies on the dollar in other countries.
A friend to whom I spoke about Mondelez counseled that to mention Rosenfeld’s salary is a distraction. But it seems somehow wrong that we praise and reward a CEO for eliminating American jobs or for being paid an amount in one year that would take any worker in her plant 500 years to earn.
Come to think of it, if Rosenfeld could learn to live on $2 million a year, that $19 million could be used to save 600 jobs, and the company’s bottom line would still be the same....
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18259/oreos-union-busting
August 5, 2015
(David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times and now teaches at Syracuse University College of Law, is the editor of the anthology Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, now available in paperback.)
And FYI, our favorite "Democrat" has colluded with Rob Portman(R) to increase the fleecing of America by corporations...
56 Organizations Unite in Opposition to Schumer Corporate Tax Plan
http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/08/01/56-organizations-unite-in-opposition-to-schumer-corporate-tax-plan/
Here are the 56 Progressive Organizations fighting this (includes AFL-CIO, MoveOn, WFP, etc)~
http://www.americansfortaxfairness.org/files/ATF-letter-opposing-Schumer-Portman-proposal-56-signers-FINAL.pdf
How to Repeal the Tax Loophole That Allows Companies to Hide Their Profits in Offshore Accounts
How to Repeal the Tax Loophole That Allows Companies to Hide Their Profits in Offshore Accounts
by David Cay Johnston
Yesterday 11:14 am
The Nation
If we want to address the inequality crisis, we must prevent corporations from sitting on hoards of untaxed cash.
....big Snip...
...The awful truth is that the great industrial engine that once created rising prosperity for the vast majority has been converted into a mining operation. Instead of creating new wealth by making ever more useful widgets and services ever more efficiently, today’s economic titans mine the pockets of the many. Public policy—laws passed by Congress, regulatory agency rules, and lax oversight of business—makes this mining economy possible.
We see this in the private-equity, high-speed trading, and hedge-fund operators who combine scads of borrowed money, favorable accounting rules, and offshore companies that block taxes to report huge profits. They rarely create new enterprises or improve existing ones. Instead they strip companies of their assets and froth the stock exchanges so they can collect profitable bubbles. The biggest multinational corporations don’t even pay corporate income taxes. Rather they profit off them, something I exposed 13 years ago and that a three-volume study by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation later confirmed.
What makes this possible are a few seemingly innocuous words slipped into the 1986 Tax Reform Act that hardly anyone noticed at the time. Those words allow multinational corporations to evade the caps on how much cash and near-cash domestic companies can hold by simply moving their profits offshore. Since 1909 Congress has limited cash hoarding because it damages the economy. Just as the economy would collapse if everyone cashed their paychecks and stuffed greenbacks in their mattresses, so too is economic growth damaged when corporations hoard cash instead of reinvesting.
But under the 1986 law American companies pay royalties, rents, and fees to their offshore subsidiaries, using accounting alchemy to convert profits into expenses. As long as those profits are held in so-called deferral accounts with an offshore mailing address, no taxes are due.
You would get the same deal if Congress let you take a deduction for every dollar in your right pocket that you moved to your left pocket and kept there.
The next part, though, is even more perverse: the multinationals buy the Treasury bonds that the federal government sells because it didn’t collect those corporate taxes right away. The government then pays these multinationals interest on their deferred taxes.
Do this for long enough and the magic of compound interest will result in more money than the value of the taxes owed, which are eroded by inflation. In effect Uncle Sam loans these companies their taxes at 0 percent interest and then pays them interest on the loan. If you could get a bank to do that for you when you buy a house, after three decades with no payments you would have enough money to pay the bank the deferred purchase price and enjoy three to four times the house’s price in cash....
Read the rest, and how to fix it, and how that will benefit us, here~
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-to-repeal-the-tax-loophole-that-allows-companies-to-hide-their-profits-in-offshore-accounts/
by David Cay Johnston
Yesterday 11:14 am
The Nation
If we want to address the inequality crisis, we must prevent corporations from sitting on hoards of untaxed cash.
....big Snip...
...The awful truth is that the great industrial engine that once created rising prosperity for the vast majority has been converted into a mining operation. Instead of creating new wealth by making ever more useful widgets and services ever more efficiently, today’s economic titans mine the pockets of the many. Public policy—laws passed by Congress, regulatory agency rules, and lax oversight of business—makes this mining economy possible.
We see this in the private-equity, high-speed trading, and hedge-fund operators who combine scads of borrowed money, favorable accounting rules, and offshore companies that block taxes to report huge profits. They rarely create new enterprises or improve existing ones. Instead they strip companies of their assets and froth the stock exchanges so they can collect profitable bubbles. The biggest multinational corporations don’t even pay corporate income taxes. Rather they profit off them, something I exposed 13 years ago and that a three-volume study by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation later confirmed.
What makes this possible are a few seemingly innocuous words slipped into the 1986 Tax Reform Act that hardly anyone noticed at the time. Those words allow multinational corporations to evade the caps on how much cash and near-cash domestic companies can hold by simply moving their profits offshore. Since 1909 Congress has limited cash hoarding because it damages the economy. Just as the economy would collapse if everyone cashed their paychecks and stuffed greenbacks in their mattresses, so too is economic growth damaged when corporations hoard cash instead of reinvesting.
But under the 1986 law American companies pay royalties, rents, and fees to their offshore subsidiaries, using accounting alchemy to convert profits into expenses. As long as those profits are held in so-called deferral accounts with an offshore mailing address, no taxes are due.
You would get the same deal if Congress let you take a deduction for every dollar in your right pocket that you moved to your left pocket and kept there.
The next part, though, is even more perverse: the multinationals buy the Treasury bonds that the federal government sells because it didn’t collect those corporate taxes right away. The government then pays these multinationals interest on their deferred taxes.
Do this for long enough and the magic of compound interest will result in more money than the value of the taxes owed, which are eroded by inflation. In effect Uncle Sam loans these companies their taxes at 0 percent interest and then pays them interest on the loan. If you could get a bank to do that for you when you buy a house, after three decades with no payments you would have enough money to pay the bank the deferred purchase price and enjoy three to four times the house’s price in cash....
Read the rest, and how to fix it, and how that will benefit us, here~
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-to-repeal-the-tax-loophole-that-allows-companies-to-hide-their-profits-in-offshore-accounts/
(David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times and now teaches at Syracuse University College of Law, is the editor of the anthology Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, now available in paperback.)
And FYI, our favorite "Democrat" has colluded with Rob Portman(R) to increase the fleecing of America by corporations...
56 Organizations Unite in Opposition to Schumer Corporate Tax Plan
http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/08/01/56-organizations-unite-in-opposition-to-schumer-corporate-tax-plan/
Here are the 56 Progressive Organizations fighting this (includes AFL-CIO, MoveOn, WFP, etc)~
http://www.americansfortaxfairness.org/files/ATF-letter-opposing-Schumer-Portman-proposal-56-signers-FINAL.pdf
August 4, 2015
I'd never heard the purchase of our reps called "privatization of Washington" before, yet that's exactly what it is. And its killing our planet.
I join you in congratulating the president & thanking him for doing ostensibly the best that he can along with the EPA & their legal battles to help our planet.
DU Rec this post^^^JD!
You'll appreciate this article I came ax this am via Moyers & Co website~
Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?
Entire article is well worth reading....here's one snip~
Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”
Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.
Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.
I'd never heard the purchase of our reps called "privatization of Washington" before, yet that's exactly what it is. And its killing our planet.
I join you in congratulating the president & thanking him for doing ostensibly the best that he can along with the EPA & their legal battles to help our planet.
August 3, 2015
....& let's hope this is true~
Clean-energy debate pitted ambition against legal worries
Clean-energy debate pitted ambition against legal worries
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post
8/2/15
Four weeks before the official rollout, the news for President Obama’s signature regulation on climate change suddenly went from bad to abysmal.
Already, the Senate’s top Republican was urging a nationwide boycott of the carbon-cutting proposal known as the Clean Power Plan. Fourteen states had joined in a lawsuit seeking to block the rule even before it became final. Then came a blow from the Supreme Court: a surprise June 29 decision blocking the White House’s previous attempt at curbing pollution from coal-burning power plants.
....SNIP....
White House officials pressed ahead with the proposal, ultimately deciding on an altered version that will be formally adopted at a ceremony Monday. But while the revised rule expresses lofty aims, the details reflect real, practical concerns about the battles still to come: an expected onslaught of litigation and legislation designed to derail the bill....
Read the rest of this sad tale here~
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/internal-debate-over-clean-energy-plan-pitted-ambition-against-legal-worries/2015/08/02/9e0c1c94-3966-11e5-9c2d-ed991d848c48_story.html
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post
8/2/15
Four weeks before the official rollout, the news for President Obama’s signature regulation on climate change suddenly went from bad to abysmal.
Already, the Senate’s top Republican was urging a nationwide boycott of the carbon-cutting proposal known as the Clean Power Plan. Fourteen states had joined in a lawsuit seeking to block the rule even before it became final. Then came a blow from the Supreme Court: a surprise June 29 decision blocking the White House’s previous attempt at curbing pollution from coal-burning power plants.
....SNIP....
White House officials pressed ahead with the proposal, ultimately deciding on an altered version that will be formally adopted at a ceremony Monday. But while the revised rule expresses lofty aims, the details reflect real, practical concerns about the battles still to come: an expected onslaught of litigation and legislation designed to derail the bill....
Read the rest of this sad tale here~
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/internal-debate-over-clean-energy-plan-pitted-ambition-against-legal-worries/2015/08/02/9e0c1c94-3966-11e5-9c2d-ed991d848c48_story.html
....& let's hope this is true~
At the same time, the plan appears capable of achieving its goals of encouraging greater adoption of renewable energy as well as dramatic reductions in heat-trapping carbon pollution over the next 15 years, said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, an independent group that represents state regulators.
“EPA has struck the right balance,” Becker said. “The agency has strengthened its legal defense of the program without sacrificing environmental integrity.”
“EPA has struck the right balance,” Becker said. “The agency has strengthened its legal defense of the program without sacrificing environmental integrity.”
August 2, 2015
This sounds encouraging....?
New Solar Panel Technologies Will Drive Down Costs
New Solar Panel Technologies Will Drive Down Costs
7/28/15
New solar panel technologies are poised to drive down the cost of solar power even more. Recently, we reported on new technology that makes solar panels out of perovskite modules. In fact, Varun Sivaram, Samuel Stranks, and Henry Snaith have written an article for Scientific American about the wonders of perovskite solar cells, which have achieved stunning results in the laboratory. Sivaram says, “[M]any of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.”
...Snip...
A more comprehensive way to compare solar technology is the energy payback time (or energy return on investment, EROI), which also considers the energy that went into creating the product. Perovskites lag behind silicon in conversion efficiency, but they require much less energy to be made into a solar module. So perovskite modules pull ahead with a substantially shorter energy payback time — the shortest, in fact, among existing options for solar power.
One of the motivations for this study was the need to improve technology so that solar energy can be scaled up in a big way. “Soon, we’re going to need to produce an extremely high number of solar panels,” one of the authors of the study says. “We don’t have time for trial-and-error in finding the ideal design. We need a more rigorous approach, a method that systematically considers all variables.”
“Appreciating energy payback times is important if we want to move perovskites from the world of scientific curiosity to the world of relevant commercial technology,” says Seth Darling, an Argonne scientist and co-author on the paper...
Read more~
http://planetsave.com/2015/07/28/new-solar-panel-technologies-will-drive-down-costs/
7/28/15
New solar panel technologies are poised to drive down the cost of solar power even more. Recently, we reported on new technology that makes solar panels out of perovskite modules. In fact, Varun Sivaram, Samuel Stranks, and Henry Snaith have written an article for Scientific American about the wonders of perovskite solar cells, which have achieved stunning results in the laboratory. Sivaram says, “[M]any of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.”
...Snip...
A more comprehensive way to compare solar technology is the energy payback time (or energy return on investment, EROI), which also considers the energy that went into creating the product. Perovskites lag behind silicon in conversion efficiency, but they require much less energy to be made into a solar module. So perovskite modules pull ahead with a substantially shorter energy payback time — the shortest, in fact, among existing options for solar power.
One of the motivations for this study was the need to improve technology so that solar energy can be scaled up in a big way. “Soon, we’re going to need to produce an extremely high number of solar panels,” one of the authors of the study says. “We don’t have time for trial-and-error in finding the ideal design. We need a more rigorous approach, a method that systematically considers all variables.”
“Appreciating energy payback times is important if we want to move perovskites from the world of scientific curiosity to the world of relevant commercial technology,” says Seth Darling, an Argonne scientist and co-author on the paper...
Read more~
http://planetsave.com/2015/07/28/new-solar-panel-technologies-will-drive-down-costs/
This sounds encouraging....?
August 2, 2015
What do you think of this author's take, basically a rebuttal of a German study...and it seems
to rebut what you write here as well...
Renewables K.O.-ed by EROI?
08 Sep 2014 by Craig Morris Comments (10)
If it takes too much energy to make generators of renewable energy relative to what these units produce, the energy transition will not be possible. A new study by nuclear researchers finds that the need for storage and backup makes the EROI of renewables too low. Craig Morris investigates.
King of renewables: Hydro power is the most efficient power source in terms of energy payback. (Photo by Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI) is an expression of energy payback – how much energy we get out of the energy we put into a system. Overall, the safest thing you can say about EROI is that it is controversial and hard to calculate to everyone’s satisfaction, as this article in Scientific American explained last year.
Now, a new scientific paper by nuclear researchers in Germany is making the rounds, such as on this popular website among nuclear advocates arguing for nuclear as a way of combating climate change. A version was published by Elsevier and is available behind a paywall. For free, you can access the draft submitted (PDF). Below, my comments apply for both versions.
Much of the paper is devoted to explaining how the calculations for EROI were made. The main tweak revolves around the authors’ rejection of a common way of counting renewable energy – with “renewable” always written in quotation marks in the study. The debate is not new; ....
Here, “buffered” indicates the energy payback of a technology within a supply system, the assumption being that solar and wind (and apparently hydro) require storage and backup capacity, both of which further reduce the “unbuffered” EROI, which only measures, say, the energy put into and gotten from a solar panel.
This is where the argument begins to unravel, for the assumption is untrue. Germany has pumped hydropower storage capacity, but none of it was built for solar or wind. The largest such facility in Germany is in Goldisthal, where construction began in 1997....
Read more~
http://energytransition.de/2014/09/renewables-ko-by-eroi/
August 1, 2015
Thanks for the info....maybe I'll just ban myself. There are way too many heads the sand
& operatives here. This is not something I want to be a part of. I like how the OP article referred to some people as "non-republicans". I think I'm going to use that now, because I'm not a rethug, I'm an FDR Dem with morals. That won't fit anywhere, I won't fit anywhere, once she is nominated. Once the TPP passes. Once drilling in the Artic begins & dirty tar sands run through the drinking water source for millions of Americans ...The Democratic Party will have left me. It already pushed me half way out the door when they allowed Citibank to write their own legislation in the cromnibus & they refused to pass the 21st century Glass-Steagall bills, several times. Its going to fail this time too, with the help of "New Democrats" who vote as non-Democrats...
Its been real!
(Go Bernie Go!!!!)
August 1, 2015
Sorry, Hillary Clinton fans: her email errors are definitely newsworthy
Sorry, Hillary Clinton fans: her email errors are definitely newsworthy
The Guardian
8/1/15
The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and its supporters has spent the last week trying to paint the continuing scandal over Clinton’s private email server as a partisan persecution with no significance to the presidential race.
But anyone who cares about government transparency, overclassification and cybersecurity should care Clinton’s email scandal – including her strongest supporters.
Put aside the House’s Benghazi committee and Republican attempts to turn every Clinton misstep into a Great Benghazi Conspiracy. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons this remains a disturbing episode, and it’s a wonder Clinton’s camp isn’t more forthcoming with the media. Whether her supporters like it or not, this is a story, and it’s going to continue to be a story as emails continue to be released over the next year.
First, there’s Clinton herself. She repeatedly denied having classified information in her emails, yet now we find out there are likely “hundreds” of emails containing it (more on that later). One of her closest aides, Philippe Reines, excoriated Gawker months ago for claiming he was using a private email address to conduct state business during his tenure at the State Department, yet he apparently just turned over 20 boxes of emails containing just that. Does the public not deserve an explanation about these seemingly false statements?
Using private email for public business is also a tried-and-true tactic to evade public records requests, no matter what Clinton defenders might say. And it is beyond question that it worked, as Foia requests filed for these emails were stonewalled for years and only thanks to the attention are now just starting to trickle out. It may be part of the reason why Clinton’s State Department had a “dismal” record on transparency, which is certainly an issue a lot of non-Republicans care about....
Read more here~
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/01/hillary-clinton-email-errors-newsworthy
The Guardian
8/1/15
The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and its supporters has spent the last week trying to paint the continuing scandal over Clinton’s private email server as a partisan persecution with no significance to the presidential race.
But anyone who cares about government transparency, overclassification and cybersecurity should care Clinton’s email scandal – including her strongest supporters.
Put aside the House’s Benghazi committee and Republican attempts to turn every Clinton misstep into a Great Benghazi Conspiracy. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons this remains a disturbing episode, and it’s a wonder Clinton’s camp isn’t more forthcoming with the media. Whether her supporters like it or not, this is a story, and it’s going to continue to be a story as emails continue to be released over the next year.
First, there’s Clinton herself. She repeatedly denied having classified information in her emails, yet now we find out there are likely “hundreds” of emails containing it (more on that later). One of her closest aides, Philippe Reines, excoriated Gawker months ago for claiming he was using a private email address to conduct state business during his tenure at the State Department, yet he apparently just turned over 20 boxes of emails containing just that. Does the public not deserve an explanation about these seemingly false statements?
Using private email for public business is also a tried-and-true tactic to evade public records requests, no matter what Clinton defenders might say. And it is beyond question that it worked, as Foia requests filed for these emails were stonewalled for years and only thanks to the attention are now just starting to trickle out. It may be part of the reason why Clinton’s State Department had a “dismal” record on transparency, which is certainly an issue a lot of non-Republicans care about....
Read more here~
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/01/hillary-clinton-email-errors-newsworthy
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