John Julius Sviokla describes an interesting transportation infrastructure concept, and perhaps one to consider across Vermont’s Green Mountains and valleys? An elevated megabus/subway hybrid that slides over the traffic instead of going around it is the proposal in China, but here we’d need some variations — over cows, around curves, and oops, absolutely must work over trucks or it’s a non-starter.
I believe language matters and this is a great example of a title/headline that will draw in people who might otherwise never consider watching a video on sociology and economics. Ridley’s thesis is well organized and delivered. My favorite lines:
“What we’ve done in human society, through exchange and specialization, we’ve created the ability to do things we don’t even understand. It’s not the same with language. With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other.”
“What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating with each other. Not how clever the individuals are.”
Despite the focus on the centrality of communication and cooperation, with which I could not agree more, I must confess to disappointment with Ridley’s optimism that our collective mind and technology will continue to fuel human progress. Then again, that may be because the two of us understand the meaning of “human progress” in different ways.
Have yet to come across anything more comprehensive than this 87-slide report. The section on the future of mobile communications is particularly interesting.
Producer responsibility is still a relatively radical concept in the United States: generally, we expect consumers to take care of the products they buy at their end of life (which usually means throwing them away). While 19 states have laws on the books assigning responsibility to producers for electronic products, none have passed more comprehensive regulations… until yesterday.
According to the Product Policy Institute, yesterday’s signing of LD 1631 (”An Act to Provide Leadership Regarding the Responsible Recycling of Consumer Products”) by Maine Governor John Balducci represented the first broad-scale effort by a state to assign end-of-life responsibility for products to the companies that made them.
Some will certainly see this as onerous regulation on business, but the combined support of both political and business interests in Maine demonstrates that such laws can provide opportunity for companies to research and develop products that can be easily recycled or reused (perhaps with some refurbishing), and that have longer useful lives.
I’m interested to hear what you think. This probably won’t be the last law we’ll see like this… numerous legislators across the country have introduced similar bills.
Way to go Maine! Think of the positive impact such a law could have if implemented across the country. As a business owner who has been roundly criticized for working to bring such accountability to Vermont, I can imagine the traditional business lobby made life difficult for Maine legislators, so they are to be commended for thinking beyond today.
Like a savvy Madison Avenue advertising team, senators pushing climate-control legislation have decided to scrap the name “cap and trade” and rebrand their product as “pollution reduction targets.”
Green Business
A clunky and difficult term to define for laymen and some politicians, “cap and trade” had become dirty words on Capitol Hill in recent months.
Republicans called the plan nothing more than “cap and tax” and one influential senator took great pains last week to declare cap and trade “dead.”
Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent trying to draft a bipartisan bill, said, “We don’t use that term anymore.”
Instead Lieberman said, laughing: “We will have pollution reduction targets.”
But Lieberman did say it was still possible utilities may be subject to a cap and trade system. Senator Thomas Carper, who chairs a clean air panel in the Senate, told Reuters on Tuesday that cap and trade for utilities was the way to go.
Under cap and trade, or whatever it’s called, Washington would impose steadily declining limits on carbon pollution that companies could emit, in the hopes of battling global warming. The pollution permits they would be required to hold would be traded in a regulated financial market.
A bill passed by the House of Representatives last year would impose an economy-wide cap and trade program. That bill has been stuck in the Senate since last year.
Since then, other ideas have been discussed for controlling carbon emissions, including a carbon tax, “cap and dividend” and even “cap and trade with training wheels,” where an independent board would set a narrow price range for carbon for eight years to give markets experience in trading permits before going to a full-blown cap and trade.
(Reporting by Thomas Ferraro; Writing by Richard Cowan, Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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Hmm, evidence of the growing recognition of the power of words, or just one more example of political obfuscation? I’m good either way this time — if it works and we get something done to change behavior.
Word Bit Overflow 