2009 – Page 299 – Delaware Liberal

Gulf States Taking Lead on Clean Energy Investments

By cassandra_m February 8, 2009

The NYT did an article almost a month ago showing how the Gulf States are looking beyond their carbon riches to thoughts of becoming a clean energy exporter:

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Instead of insisting that their carbon resources will last forever, or even insisting that economies will always be dependent upon carbon, the oil-rich Gulf States are looking to hedge their wealth and market dominance by making huge investments in research and development in the major labs in many premiere western nations. And we know that the person who pays for the research typically owns the work product or at least the patents on resulting products; the country that exports the energy reaps the economic benefits.

On Boosting Congressional Financial Literacy

By cassandra_m February 8, 2009

Steven Pearlstein, a business columnist for the Washington Post writes a scathing column asking for a Personal Financial Trainer for every Representative and Senator in Congress. Pearlstein isn’t concerned about overheated rhetoric — he is pointing out the real deficiencies in knowledge here, deficiencies (no matter the policy differences) are actually pretty scary. He finds bipartisan abuses:

(In response to Senator Johanns trying to distinguish between spending and stimulus) Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

(Discussing Senator Nelson’s claim that $1.1B dollars isn’t effective stimulus)…Maybe the senator could use that opportunity to explain why a dollar spent by the government, or government contractor, to hire doctors, statisticians and software programmers is less stimulative than a dollar spent on hiring civil engineers and bulldozer operators and guys waving orange flags to build highways, which is what the senator says he prefers.

Pearlstein’s excellent rant ends up with what I’m guessing is the real target of the piece — Republicans. If only because they were able to suck up alot of the media space over the past few weeks, they’ve had many chances to show off their real ignorance: