Power Pal

I read a short article in the WSJ about how the utilities are backing a lawsuit to get auto companies to reduce emissions. Why would they do so? California has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the state significantly, I think 25% by 2020. So, where does the burden fall? If it doesn't fall on the auto companies, it would then fall on the utilities (like PG&E). That's why they're backing the lawsuit to shift the burden to the auto companies. Simple self-interest.

I read this article in USA Today a week ago, but thought it was appropriate to write about it today given that I just gorged myself during Thanksgiving dinner. The article is about how many children go hungry or are at risk of going hungry in the U.S. One of every four children in New Mexico and Texas and one of every five in a dozen other states live in households that struggle to provide enough food at some point during the year. California is in that latter category of one out of five. That's absolutely amazing to me. I suppose I know very little about the problem of poverty in America. Interesting, cause my last post was all about income mobility in America. But indeed, there are millions of Americans, 35 million in fact (about 12% of the population), that fall into that "food insecure" category. The report found that 13 million children are at risk. It was nice to find that 15 million low-income children get free school lunches and 7 million get free breakf...

I read two articles in the WSJ about income mobility in the U.S. One article was about how middle class blacks born in the 1960's are more likely to make less money than their parents than comparable whites. And the other article was about how incomes have changed over the past decade. In the latter study, they found that the poorest Americans increased their incomes the most while the richest declined the most. This actually reinforces similar studies from the 1970s and 1980s. The main take-away from the study is that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, rather than luck, accidents, or privileged birth. The American Dream remains intact. Good to know. No need to increase taxes on the rich. The former study about blacks is pretty interesting as well. It looked at children born in the late 1960's and how they have fared in the late 1990's and early 2000's. It certainly confirmed with what was found in the other study about how the poorest students ...

Read in a WSJ article that Al Gore is joining as a partner with Kleiner Perkins to focus on energy and climate change investments. He said he will donate his salary and all his earnings to the environmental group Alliance for Climate Protection. Although he didn't say whether he would commit his earnings from future Kleiner investments (where the real money comes in anyway). It's really interesting the type of career switching this guy has been able to do. Vice President, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, state senate, Nobel Peace Prize winner, activist. Admirable guy ... although I have to admit that I voted against him.

Finally getting around to commenting on this old WSJ article . Think back 15 or 20 years and the idea of buying tap water in a bottle (except for sparkling water) would have seemed pretty ridiculous. But that's exactly what most people do these days. To put just how ridiculous that is in perspective, I did a few back-of-hand calculations based on the following paragraph from the article: Coca-Cola Co., with a 36% share of the $106 billion-a-year U.S. nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverage business, says it plans to build a plant that will be able to recycle as many as two billion 20-ounce bottles a year. Atlanta-based Coke won't say exactly where the plant will be located or when it will open. The company already has invested $41 million to build recycling plants in Australia, Austria, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. But the move reflects a wider push by Coke to boost the amount of recycled material in its U.S. bottles to at least 10%, up from just under 5% in 2006. So, ...

I read a really interesting article in Knowledge@Wharton about what is called "The Resource Curse". It's an economic paradox in which countries that have substantial natural resource reserves, particularly in petroleum and natural gas, are actually worse off as a result compared to countries that do not have those reserves. The article primarily focuses on African nations that are major oil exporters or where recent oil reserves have been discovered. The cause of the paradox seems to be several fold (these are my conclusions from the article): Over-valued currency leads to decrease in exports - The export of oil greatly inflates the value of the country's currency, causing any other exported item to be uncompetitive in the global marketplace. Agriculture, manufacturing, or most other industries are at a severe disadvantage compared to neighboring countries. This has a substantial impact on the average, every-day African citizen. Single industry economy leads to atr...