Energy

The Obama Administration has recently been shining a spotlight on the need to eliminate barriers to telework and its growth. Now Congress has legislation before it that would abolish one of telework's greatest obstacles, the risk of double taxation Americans face if they telecommute across state lines. The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act (H.R. 2600)would remove the double tax risk.

H.R. 2600 can and should be enacted as a stand-alone measure. However, Washington is also currently developing or considering a variety of other legislative packages, any one of which would be significantly strengthened if the provisions of H.R. 2600 were added to it. These packages include energy/climate legislation (expected to be unveiled later this month), transportation legislation and small business legislation. Each of these packages, we have been told, would double as a jobs bill.  read more »

Greece and Los Angeles are up against a financial wall. Los Angeles had its bond rating cut on April 7. Greece managed to hold out until April 9. Greece has endured public employee strikes as it has attempted to reign in bloated public payrolls. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa drew the ire of the city's unions and city council opposition in proposing two-day a week furloughs for city employees.

A Bankrupt Los Angeles?  read more »

By Richard Reep

Well into the last decade, green design and smart growth operated as two separate and distinct reform movements. Both were widely celebrated in media, academic and planning circles, seeing themselves as noble causes albeit underdogs in the struggle against the mighty capitalistic enterprise of real estate development. Starting in 2009, the frozen credit market has kept private development moribund, and these two movements are somewhat moot as development takes a cease-fire.  read more »

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.

While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy.  read more »

Remember when President Obama declared that insulation was sexy? In the wake of the global economic downturn, a “green jobs” formulation has been launched, not just here, but in every major world capital. While the White House’s financial and rhetorical commitments to the creation of green jobs are significant, no administration has made these policies as central to their government as that of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Australia. The results there should provide a cautionary tale for President Obama, whose trip “Down Under” is currently scheduled for June.  read more »

Latching onto Kevin Rudd’s call for “a big Australia” and forecasts that our population will grow by 60 per cent to 35 million in 2050, urban planners are ramping up their war against suburbia. In paper after paper, academics across the country have been pushing the same line. Climate change, peak oil and the financial crisis mean we can’t go on driving and borrowing for low-density housing.  read more »

By Richard Reep

Florida’s era of hard times continues. Last week we held a "Jobs Summit " here in Orlando but heard little but self-congratulation by politicians like Governor Charlie Crist. He praised the Legislature’s budget cuts but had little to claim when it came to reviving the economy.  read more »

In this high-tech information age few look to the most basic industries as sources of national economic power. Yet no sector in America is better positioned for the future than agriculture--if we allow it to reach its potential.

Like manufacturers and homebuilders before them, farmers have found themselves in the crosshairs of urban aesthetes and green activists who hope to impose their own Utopian vision of agriculture. This vision includes shutting down large-scale scientifically run farms and replacing them with small organic homesteads and urban gardens.  read more »

Now we have the Copenhagen deniers. These are people who won't accept that the UN’s climate change process has been derailed. The highest emitting nations refuse to be bound by an enforceable treaty. Instead of bedding down a replacement for the near-defunct Kyoto Protocol, they asked for a rain check.  read more »

“Esau for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.” - Hebrews 12:16-17

Built from 1933-1936, the Bay Bridge linking San Francisco to Oakland was an engineering marvel of its day. A complex series of multiple spans, when it opened – six months ahead of the more famous Golden Gate Bridge – it was both the longest suspended bridge deck in the world and the longest cantilever bridge in the world. The western suspension bridge section, technically two bridges in one, had to settle for being only the second and third longest suspension bridges in the world.  read more »