This is a full repost of a Media Matters article too good to pass up, especially since we continue to get inane comments here on CleanTechnica about it and I can only imagine how many people have been confused by the disinformers.
This came as a big, positive surprise to me — the German giant Siemens, which has built numerous nuclear power plants, has decided to completely ditch nuclear, meaning that it won’t be helping to build or service any more nuclear power plants.
Now for those on-the-goers who risk running out of the juice needed to be smart communicators, the Eton Mobius has been released, a solar charger and phone case designed for the popular iPhone 4.
Nobody likes to see $500 million in taxpayer funds lost. But as Congress investigates the loan guarantee given to the now-bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra, it’s important to put the failed loan into historical context.
The Solyndra investigation has brought loan guarantees out of the obscure world of political wonkery and into the living rooms of Americans around the country.
The problem is, many in the media are completely misrepresenting how the instrument works and who supports it. So we’ve put together a video primer on how loan guarantees work, posted below.
Okayama Graduate School of Science and Technology is one of many developing solar cells and batteries, but their research team, led by one Professor Naoshi Ikeda, has a unique approach. Instead of silicon, currently the standard component in solar cells, the Okayama team is using an iron oxide compound it calls “green ferrite,” or GF. Professor Ikeda has gone so far as to claim his product will produce 100x the amount of energy as a traditional silicon solar cell.
Cleantech is important for job creation as well now, but it’s the economic, health, and quality of life costs associated with CO2 and other pollution that is really driving this extremely fast-growing market. We didn’t realize for a long time, and we tried to deny it after that (and many still do), but the health and ecological costs of traditional fossil fuel energy and dirty tech are tremendous. What we think we save in ‘cheap energy’ is actually much less than what we pay for in reduced health and critical damage to important ecological systems and services.
On the southeast corner of the Denver Sustainability Park, George Nez and Doug Eichelberger stand before an unusual-looking structure they have designed and built. Its features: it costs nearly nothing to assemble other than sweat; it looks distinctive; it can be erected anywhere in the world; it is structurally strong, and it helps clean the land of trash.
Suzlon Energy will start manufacturing wind turbines in China for export to other countries. It is also planning to partner with Chinese companies to set up offshore wind projects.
In her famous book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, author and activist Naomi Klein quotes the Godfather of free market capitalism, Milton Friedman, whom she credits with mainstreaming the “shock doctrine.” Friedman stated:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Under a textbook “shock doctrine” scenario as it pertains to the ongoing and escalating Solyndra Corporation hoopla, two U.S. Senators, sponsor David Vitter (R-LA) and co-sponsor Ron Johnson (R-WI), have introduced U.S. Senate Bill 1556, the Federal Accounting of Renewable Energy Act of 2011 (FARE) [PDF], or “FARE” as a direct response to the Solyndra saga — “ideas that are lying around,” to quote Friedman.
