Five years ago, Staples made it a corporate priority to cut its carbon dioxide emissions. The executives at the office supply giant decided, however, that whatever methods they chose-improving efficiency, changing operations, or buying low-carbon energy-the effort also had to make financial sense. At the time, no one could argue that buying solar panels was a good investment, as payback periods for recouping capital were typically measured not in years but in decades.

But a startup called SunEdison came along and made an offer Staples couldn’t refuse-employing a financial model that could give solar the edge it needs if it’s to provide a significant portion of the world’s energy. Under SunEdison’s plan, Staples would get solar panels on its retail rooftops at no upfront cost and without any monthly equipment fee. Instead, it would agree to pay SunEdison a preset rate for the power the panels generate over a period of 20 years. ‘The bottom line is that we’re able to purchase solar energy off our rooftops for less than electricity off the grid,’ says Mark Buckley, Staples’s vice president for environmental affairs.

Staples has now installed about 10 megawatts of solar capacity at more than three dozen sites-the equivalent of 2,000 […]

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The nation’s expenditures on health care in 2009 grew by 4 percent, the smallest increase in at least a half-century, according to new federal figures that suggest Americans stinted on medical services as they lost jobs and insurance in the recent recession.

Although health insurance premiums rose slightly faster than they did a year earlier, overall spending on private health insurance decelerated as the number of people with such coverage fell by 6.3 million. And the out-of-pocket amount Americans spent on health care barely increased, the figures show.

On the other hand, spending on Medicaid soared – by 9 percent, compared with less than 5 percent in 2008 – as more people qualified for the public insurance program for the poor.

Taken together, the figures, contained in a report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services, indicate that the severe recession that ended in mid-2009 left a quicker and deeper imprint on the health-care landscape than did other recent economic downturns.

‘Job losses caused many people to lose employer-sponsored health insurance and, in some cases, to forgo health-care services they could not afford,’ according to the report by economists and statisticians at HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Compiled annually […]

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If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become ‘very distorted.

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It’s not easy to workup a good feeling about the institution that destroyed your life, which may be why Mary Weiss initially seemed a little reluctant to meet me. ‘You can understand my hesitation to look other than with suspicion at anyone associated with the University of Minnesota,’ Mary wrote to me in an email. In 2003, Mary’s 26-year-old son, Dan, was enrolled against her wishes in a psychiatric drug study at the University of Minnesota, where I teach medical ethics. Less than six months later, Dan was dead. I’d learned about his death from a deeply unsettling newspaper series by St. Paul Pioneer Press reporters Jeremy Olson and Paul Tosto that suggested he was coerced into a pharmaceutical-industry study from which the university stood to profit, but which provided him with inadequate care. Over the next few months, I talked to several university colleagues and administrators, trying to learn what had happened. Many of them dismissed the story as slanted and incomplete. Yet the more I examined the medical and court records, the more I became convinced that the problem was worse than the Pioneer Press had reported. The danger lies not just in the particular circumstances that […]

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As a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere - think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods - has its limits.

So can China become a prodigious inventor? The answer, in truth, will play out over decades - and go a long way toward determining not only China’s future, but also the shape of the global economy.

Clues to the Chinese approach emerge from a recent government document containing goals for drastically increasing the nation’s production of patents. It offers a telling glimpse of how China intends to engineer a more innovative society.

The document, published in November by the State Intellectual Property Office of China, is called the ‘National Patent Development Strategy (2011-2020).

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