Framing the Dialogue

Posts Tagged ‘return on investment’

Let The Sunshine In, Let The Sunshine In

PennLive ran a story this week with the following headline:

The sun shines on taxpayers: Measuring solar performance

You would expect a story with this headline to contain some good news for taxpayers and perhaps it does, but I am too jaded by the desire, no compulsion to give away my hard earned money to others. The story is about a solar project completed by the Lycoming County School District.

“The project is expected to reduce the district’s annual electricity use by 700,000 kilowatt-hours and act as a hedge against future escalation of the cost of electricity.”

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Update – Up In Your Business

A few months ago I wrote about how government likes to all up in your business. They just cannot help themselves. One of the examples was how the City of Pittsburgh through its Urban Redevelopment Authority used eminent domain to seize a local theatre in Pittsburgh. The Garden theatre had suffered from the decline of city theatres and the proliferation of suburban multi-screen venues. They somehow survived by catering to the XXX movie crowd. I obviously don’t know the details of their finances, but they stayed in business for decades screening those flicks. That is until the City of Pittsburgh decided that the area would be better suited to a retail development.

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Sun’s Free

One of the things that I hope to accomplish with FramingTheDialogue is to link news stories and try to show their connection and often contradictions.  It is surprising, but not unusual to find more than one article on a related topic in different sections of the newspaper.  The most recent were two articles about CFL/Incandescent light bulbs that I wrote about in Watt TF.  Recently the following three articles were available on the same day though I cannot remember whether they were available on the same media outlet. 

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United Against U.S. Nations

The United Nations was founded in 1945 against the backdrop of World War II and had lofty goals to ease international disputes, provide security, improve economic development and improve human rights.  There are few who would argue against these goals even today, but did the United Nations experiment deliver?  It delivered, but not really on any of those promises.  Here we are 65 years later and the world has many disputes, security seems to be worse, we are in a severe economic downturn, and the UN is attacking the United States for human rights violations.

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Tilting At Windmills

Blowback on windmills was the headline that caught my eye in the “letters” section of Pittsburgh’s Tribune Review.  The letter was from Sarah Howell, the vice president, public affairs, for the American Wind Energy Association.  Ms. Howell’s response to the original article titled The Windmill Sham was understandable given her position advocating windmills.

The original editorial piece was critical of the number of jobs created by government subsidies of the alternative energy industry.  The author made the mistake of siting actual data from the Spanish government showing that the actual cost of each new job was around $333,333.00.  Of course the response from the wind folks touted how many jobs were created because of government support/subsidy of the industry. 

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Environomics

kermit-the-frog“It’s not that easy being green…It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why?  Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful!  And I think it’s what I want to be.”

When Kermit the Frog famously sang these words, being green was not all that popular and that was the point of his song.  Fast forward a couple of decades and green is good.  Green is so good that television networks have green weeks, schools go green, cities go green, and lots and lots of money is steered toward green enterprises.  Investments in green infrastructure is necessary, it is explained, to drive development of the technology.  That is a reasonable position and one taken by most politicians.  Even the staunches fiscal conservative often bows to green energy.

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